Domenico Barra "The Gifdrome"

 
 
 
This is a web based project -----> http://thegifdrome.tumblr.com/
 
I first came to put together this project after experiencing the huge spreading and sharing of images online, especially on platform such as Tumblr.
I run several pages on Tumblr so I spend at least 1 hour per day navigating among the many blogs and contents shared by users on the world famous social blog.
 
In the era of the internet to reblog is essentially to copy from one page to another. I reblog/copy an image/video from blog "A" and paste/post it on my blog/page "B".
We copy/reblog from many pages to our pages to build/shape/design our online identities. The presence of reblogged contents on one's Facebook is often larger than orginal contents posted by the profile's user/owner. That means that essentially there are many same/copied online identities growing day by day because very often online contents come from the same sources and becoming viral they are then present on thousands of pages and many blogs end up looking the same, a kind of social profile copy.
 
This is very common because contents inside a network such as Tumblr stay and move inside of Tumblr even if the original source maybe outside of Tumblr, Once the content has reached the network it stays there and spreads for ever unchanged on many blogs by users who follow eachothers.
What about if I wish to repost that same content because I like it and I see a possible narrative building upon and around it but I wish to make it more mine, that it is more me but without totally change its content? What if I just retouch its look and then place it inside the contest I wish and start a new chain of copied/reblogged materials?
Of course this is very easy nowadays, we just need a right click of the mouse and save image and after few softwares filters and tricks, we are done. We just need to upload the file on our page.
Basically we have made a copy of that same content but slightly altered its look.
 
This is the philosophy/method that make "The Gifdrome", a collection of saved/copied images from Tumblr and other sites which will return/go inside of Tumblr but personalized with the artisticB aestheticsB which better represent me and I am mostly known online, glitch art, and with this copied/remixed version I can start to put together the pieces of the story I want to tell and share. Pieces that will eventually get separeted and copied/reblogged as single indipendent bits on other blogs, mostly Tumblr's blogs but surely they will reach other platforms because the copy/reblog action is the essence of the internet experience, hyperlink copy
 
Of course, through the juxtaposition of pleasure and pain, beauty and horror images I aim also to tickle the lost sense for shock in human perception.
.