"As the past is formed not after the present but simultaneously with it, therefore time must divide itself up into present and past in each of its individual moment ... By combining two one-minute videos .... projected one after the other in an endless loop, Rosemarie Trockel opposes the two forms of slowness which constitute the poles ... the representation of slowness by technically extending the moment, and the emergence of a consciousness of duration in the very process of perception" (77). Gaensheimer talks here about the strange way that time is perceived in film, and how it can be manipulated. The looping of films allows the viewer to be stuck in a present at the same time as they are stuck in the past. They have seen it, but they are seeing it still.
That looping mechanism is important to our understanding of time. And it is even more vital to our understanding of Electracy, I think, because time oftentimes doesn't seem like an element when we're thinking about the internet. Also, this kind of looping nature is inherent in the gif image type, where the the group of images that make up the seconds-long film loop constantly. There is time embedded into the gif when there is a sentence that runs through it that denotes the start and the end of the gif. And of course, it is obvious in most looping videos where the start and the end is.
A challenge, then, would be to make the gif in such a way that it would endlessly loop so that we really would not know where the start and the end is, so that the anticipation of a past/future/present can be eliminated. This is something that I think is really inherent in Electracy, and so this is what will make up this part of the instruction.
Instruction: Make an actual infinite looping gif. Remember, you must find a way that will subvert the idea of time. That means that this gif has to defy ontological expectations of some kind of an end.
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