The astonishing reach of art distributed through a GIPHY artist account. 2019 – 2020 and 2023 – ongoing. The text below is a rewrite of a post I published in 2020 on my former research blog The Appeal of the Unreal.

In spring 2019, I applied for a GIPHY artist account. GIPHY is “an American online database and search engine that allows users to search for and share animated GIF files”. Many of the GIFs shared on social media and messaging platforms are pulled from GIPHY. In order to add GIFs, you must have an artist account. Your application will be approved once you have uploaded 20 original GIFs that meet the guidelines.

A GIF (or .gif) is a short animated image, often made of just a few frames. It loops infinitely, and has no sound. A GIF sticker has a transparent background and is often used in messaging and on social media. These animations are lightweight and supported across browsers. They are also fairly easy and quick to create.

GIPHY artist accounts are used by designers, artists, brands, and ‘content creators’ to upload GIFs and stickers of their own design.

1. A mobile digital art studio: exploring a new way of working & connecting the 16th century to the present.

In 2019, I was working on a series of three monumental woven tapestries, a collaboration with the Textile Museum of Tilburg. The Three Motions of Loom are three machine-woven tapestries that take their cues from the manuscript of Wildevrouw by Belgian author Jeroen Olyslaegers. The novel is set in the cities of Amsterdam and Antwerp in the late 16th century, so my research focused on the visual culture of that time and region.

Soon in the process, I conceived of the work as a knot in the centre of a timeline that stretched back 450 years into the past and 450 years into the future. To emphasize our current time, I began to use contemporary visual elements such as emoji and computer icons in the tapestry designs, most notably the ‘hole’ emoji: 

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The ‘hole’ emoji is one of the few symbols in the entire emoji vocabulary that appears to add depth to the flat surface of a device screen. It suggests a portal, a way to escape or dive further into the screen. I noticed its potential while playing around with the Stories feature of the social media platform Instagram; Stories are posts that disappear after 24 hours, usually photos or screenshots to which users can add comments, including emoji and .gif stickers.

The function turned my mobile phone screen into a small canvas, a carrier for miniature animated collages that were inspired by my research into 16th-century art history, and in particular the genre of ‘emblems’, emblema or emblemata – which had a similar rebus-puzzle-like structure as my little montages.

Up until I applied for my own GIPHY artist account, I used .gif stickers that were readily available on the platform. However, despite the vast amount of visual elements present, I felt that some elements particular to my practice and the tapestry project were missing. I therefore decided to add them myself.

I reworked tests and unused fragments from my animated films into stickers and uploaded a first batch of twenty .gifs. At first, although I knew that uploading them meant that anyone could use them on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and others, I saw them primarily as an addition to my own series – I didn’t consider a wider audience. That changed when I noticed the view counts on GIPHY. The platform tracks both overall account views and individual sticker views. To my surprise, some stickers had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times in just a few weeks.

“A view is counted every time a GIF or sticker has been served through GIPHY’s services or technology. A single view is counted when a GIF is served, regardless of how many times it loops. A GIF view on GIPHY is a sign of relevance, share-ability, and popularity.” – from the Analytics Dashboard FAQs

Apart from the astounding potential reach of .gif animations, using the phone as a means for production – Fundamental Mechanics turned into a series of 72 ultrashort animated loops – was eye-opening. Before, my practice was firmly situated at my desktop computer, an iMac Pro, on which my studio software is installed: 3D programs, audio and video editing software, and so forth.

In contrast, Fundamental Mechanics were made while I was traveling on trains, waiting to meet someone at a terrace, or having coffee in my courtyard. After the series ended, I bought a new phone – for its lidar scanning possibilities, making it possible to quickly 3D scan objects ‘in the wild’ – and a tablet, helping me, for example, to compose soundtracks for my films. Over the last years, my digital studio has expanded into a ‘cyborgish’ network, making it possible to work on site in ways I did not before.

Additionally, using the light-weight gifs and a more collage-like approach for the Fundamental Mechanics series meant a departure from the detailed, realistic animation practice I had developed over the decades. Instead of having to render a scene for days, the .gifs facilitated a much more ad-hoc way of coming to an animated scene. This super fast mode of working is explicitly evident in my film Mistakes. The artist talk from 2020, which was made in just over one week, using ‘collage-like’ techniques and incorporating .gif animations and stickers from my account (and others).

2. GIF as an art form.

GIFs have been part of the internet since the late 1980s. They were an integral part of the first wave of web-art. While their popularity came and went – from glittering MySpace backgrounds to reaction .gifs – they are a constant online presence. But, and this is a recurring question when it comes to many digital experiments, is it art? How, or when, is it art?

I am certainly not the only artist to have a GIPHY artist account. My colleagues include Lorna Mills, Faith Holland, Edgar Fabián Frías and Sarah Zucker.

In the spring of 2020, GIPHY was bought by Meta – then still Facebook – the company that also owns Instagram. Unhappy with being an unwilling participant in yet another multinational tech operation, and facing the end of the Tapestries project, which was the original reason for joining, I decided to deactivate my account.

When I downloaded the datasheet for August 2019 to 21 May 2020, it turned out that I had added 79 stickers to the expanding GIPHY universe, accumulating a total of more than 195,100,000 views. Some were only viewed 2 times – perhaps because they were quickly deleted after I found errors – but the most popular reached 12,496,521 and 31,027,385 respectively.

Unicorn (1) accumulated over 31 million views when I suspended my account in 2020.

The .gif stickers are reaching an audience far beyond the scope of ’traditional’ visual art. However, the vast majority of people who use my stickers have no idea who made them, or are even aware that the images are made by real people and artists. From my perspective, I am providing a free service – which I was not prepared to continue under the guise of Meta.

After deactivating my account, I wrote the first draft of this text and published it on a research blog with the title 195,100,000 views. I kept the title despite the following developments:

In 2023, the final sale of GIPHY to Meta was blocked following an appeal by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. The platform was subsequently acquired by Shutterstock, a provider of stock footage and stock photography. I reactivated my account in December 2023.

At the time of this writing, in May 2026, the account has 82 .gif stickers with a combined view count of

534,600,000

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Further reading

• GIF specifications, w3.org, June 15, 1987.
• Heads or Tails: The Emergence of a New Cultural Series, from the Phenakisticope to the Cinematograph, Nicolas Dulac and André Gaudreault for Invisible Culture Issue 8:The Loop as a Temporal Form, 2004. Via rochester.edu.
• Why Are Micro Movies So Popular These Days? David Pogue for scientificamerican.com, May 1, 2013.
• The History of GIFs, Stephanie Buck for mashable.com, October 29, 2012.
• The GIF Turns 30: How an Ancient Format Changed the Internet, Klint Finley for wired.com, May 28, 2017.
• A Brief History of the GIF, From Early Internet Innovation to Ubiquitous Relic, Lorraine Boissoneault for smithsonianmag.com, June 2, 2017.
• The animated history of the GIF, the internet’s favorite format, Fernando Alfonso III for dailydot.com, June 15, 2017.