» Frank Ocean Can Fly - NYTimes.com

Artists don’t usually give satisfying answers to the question of how or why they do what they do, and maybe that’s for the best. Sometimes songs mean more to us when we don’t totally grasp the lyrics. Ocean is acutely aware of this. He knows that, as much as anything, he is selling an idea. “That’s why image is so important,” he said. “That’s why you’ve got to practice brevity when you do interviews like this. I could try to make myself likable to you so you could write a piece that keeps my image in good standing, because I’m still selling this, or I could just say, ‘My art speaks for itself.’ ” He practices brevity in most things. He curates and updates his image on Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr deftly and consistently, but he never overshares. “As a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences,” he said in the GQ interview. “But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.” To me, he said, “I don’t know if it’s a shield or whatever, but I want to deflect as much as I can onto my work.”

Ocean’s Tumblr is interesting — I love how he’ll post screenshots of his writing instead of actually posting the writing. (As I’ve said before, pictures of writing often spread around the internet faster than writing itself.)

I like this idea of using Tumblr as something more cryptic than outright confession or revelation. Michael Stipe on his:

It’s not confessional at all. I just like to tunnel. Initially the idea was to present a version of myself that might not be the person that people think they know. So it’s a little bit of a play on my being a public figure for as long as I have been…. It might be a bit of an introduction to the way I visually interpret the world. I work visually, and this is essentially an electronic scrapbook, that’s what tumblr’s good for. You know, it’s like a stamp collection, but everyone’s allowed to cull from each other’s collection.

It reminds me of the old Radiohead websites — they were really great at just giving you these little pieces, and you felt like a detective, trying to piece together some picture of what they were working on…

Maybe Robin Sloan said it best: “Work in public. Reveal nothing.”

Taking the animated .gif seriously

I was delighted when @EdwardTufte, the data visualization guru, posted on Twitter about the merits of animated GIFs over video when doing analytic work.

Jonah Weiner in his piece on the “glorious GIF renaissance,” wrote that while animated GIFs might seem like nostalgic, throwback, internet junk food, “they perform distinct functions that other formats can’t.”

One thing the GIF does well is “the money shot,” or “the payoff,” or the “Did you see that?” moment:

There is an appealing economy to these GIFs. They get to the point instantaneously, and at the exact moment when one feels the impulse to rewind and watch the climax again, the loop restarts right where it should. In the two minutes it might take me to load a viral video and watch it in full, I can watch the money shots of 15 different viral videos. Yes, we’re talking about decadent levels of impatience, inanity, and time-wasting here, but GIFs allow us to waste less time online—or, rather, to waste it more efficiently.

Weiner also writes that GIFs are great at “reliving and exulting in shared experiences, where zero setup is needed because a familiarity with context is assumed on the part of viewers.” 

Tufte pointed to this batch of amazing baseball pitches as a perfect use of the medium. (A baseball pitch also contains the two elements above that Weiner wrote about: “the money shot” and a “familiarity with context.”) It got me thinking about ways in which we could use animated GIFs as not just time-wasters, but as explanations or illuminations… (UPDATE: @adamgoucher sent me this fantastic post of animated GIFs showing the physics of World Series baseball swings.)

I was also reminded of this batch of James Brown dance moves where the .gif-maker sampled pieces of a youtube video, added annotations (“funky chicken,” and “The Boogaloo”), and put them into a photoset, providing a fabulous entertainment, yes, but also suddenly giving us a “Small multiples” information display that Tufte is so fond of:

“Small multiples resemble the frames of a movie: a series of graphics, showing the same combination of variables, indexed by changes in another variable.” (pg. 170, The Visual Display of Qualitative Information)

Tufte has said over and over: “To make comparisons, it’s better to have information adjacent in space than stacked in time.” You can stretch this a bit and fit it to the internet, and certainly the Tumblr dashboard. (Witness this animated GIF of a Clayton Cubitt video getting almost 3x as many likes as the original.) Seems like for maximum effect, it’s often better to have information in space period.

UPDATE: my friend @bonitasarita sent me this PBS Off Book video: Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium:

GIFs are one of the oldest image formats used on the web. Throughout their history, they have served a huge variety of purposes, from functional to entertainment. Now, 25 years after the first GIF was created, they are experiencing an explosion of interest and innovation that is pushing them into the terrain of art. In this episode of Off Book, we chart their history, explore the hotbed of GIF creativity on Tumblr, and talk to two teams of GIF artists who are evolving the form into powerful new visual experiences.

Edward Hopper’s artist’s ledgers

I reblogged a photoset of images incorrectly labeled as “Edward Hopper’s sketchbook,” but the images actually weren’t sketchbook images at all, but a meticulous business record of paintings that Hopper produced and sent out for sale.

You see, Hopper’s wife recorded each painting he made in little books she got from the five and dime store. She asked him to do a drawing of the painting (which he did beautifully) and then she wrote the details of the painting below it, including the circumstances of the paintings — where they were when he made it, who were the models, etc. (Above, you can see the record for “A Woman In The Sun,” with the final painting below.)

The ledgers aren’t a document of discovery, but a record of production — in a way, the ledgers are a kind of visual logbook of the kind I describe in Steal.

This is another example of why posting images without context and attribution strips them of their meaning — if you see these images in a photoset labeled “Edward Hopper’s sketchbook,” you might think, “Wow, look how perfect his sketches were before he painted,” and you would completely miss the real story, which is way more interesting. (Always, always, always dig deeper when you see images w/o attribution!)