Ceaseless intertextual flux: re-animating images and words from Medieval margins to the animated gif

Addressing a series of animation experiments undertaken as part of a Medieval Ideas Creative Laboratory Bursary, this paper speculates upon the meaning of the gif in an age of AI driven reductionism. Medieval marginalia, the essay argues, can support an urgently needed political possibility for the gif, via questioning linear media trajectories and discontinuities, inviting engagement with intertextuality, materiality and a return to the rhyming thought, games, meta and sub texts of illuminated and other works, specifically the playful marginalia and parallelism of the 14th century Macclesfield Psalter (c. 1320–30). The essay draws upon a range of theorists and ideas including Thomas Nails’s revival of the Roman Poet Lucretius, as a materialist, visceral alternative to Plato’s second order abstraction. The paper asks, what is the future of the animated gif if we do (or do not) resist the platitudes of AI Slop?