ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses cases in which existing cultural material–narratives, films, characters,–is broken up and recombined in animated Graphics Interchange Format‘s (GIFs), thus generating a cultural practice we have called 'recombinant appropriation.' Whereas the term 'adaptation' originally pertained to the transcoding of literary texts into the audiovisual medium of film, the terms 'remix' and 'mashup' tend to be used in the context of an everyday aesthetics. Applying Hartley's ideas to digital media, we could argue that to conspicuously consume and produce memes in social media is already transgressive: It is a non-functional activity that does not directly involve a commodified cultural exchange. GIFs may be seen as sharable, compact, reduced, simple, or, even more normatively, atrophied narratives–but the term 'atrophied cinema,' suggesting a cinema that is wasted away, would be inadequate. Animated GIFs operate in a post-cinematic, post-TV world, and more likely in the context of shared contents and files encountered via social media on smartphones.
