DINOSAUR.GIF
Anna Zett
2014

DINOSAUR.GIF is a silent video essay dealing with modern magic in the digital era. Its visual content are animated screengrab-GIFs from US-American dinosaur films of the past 100 years. As they are scrolled down in a text editor, the ghostly theatre of early cinema meets the digital wilderness of contemporary social media. GIF by GIF a critique of the dinosaur spectacle unfolds, trying to grasp its entanglement with US-American imperial mythology. From the 1910s, when stop motion animation had its break-through, to the 1990s, when cgi-imaging irreversibly changed Hollywood cinema, these extinct animals display modern history as a spectacle of contradiction. It turns out that revealing and concealing are inseparably connected when the dinosaur, the spirit animal of technological progress, appears on screen.

read more in (german): Tiere Bilder Ökonomien, S. 295
»Dinotopia, Dinotasia. Animationen ungreifbarer Tierkörper im Kino des Fortschritts« von Anna Zett