Abstraction
This essay addresses a series of animation experiments undertaken as part of a Medieval Ideas Creative Laboratory Bursary with the remit to produce animated gifs exploring Medieval collections located in Cambridge. The project speculates upon the meaning of the gif in an age of bountiful slop, questioning linear media trajectories and socio-technical discontinuities, inviting engagement with marginal intertextualities and a return to the visual and textual games, meta and sub texts of illuminated and other works, specifically the 14th century Macclesfield Psalter (c. 1320–30 ) and Uccello’s Battle of San Romano (c 1438 – 1440). The essay asks what cultural and technological marginality means in the 2020s and beyond, drawing upon a range of theorists including Thomas Nails’s revival of the Roman Poet, Lucretius, as a materialist, visceral alternative to Plato’s second order abstraction, which is arguably manifest and entangled in our lives via Machine Learning, specifically its now dominant subtype, Generative AI.
Is the animated gif destined to entropic extinction as it becomes corporatised, will the inevitable combination of gifs and generative AI neuter the gif or instigate its descent into proliferating Boschian Hellscapes? How can we ensure gifs and wider animated images retain their polysemic (carrying multiple meanings), discursive intertextuality and are not replaced with frictionlessness banality? The paper addresses these questions, questioning Wagener’s claim that the gif is post digital, offering an unprecedented complexity of semantic knots. Even a cursory glance at Medieval marginalia and their often contradictory context of religious texts and absurd subversive, power inverting images points to the enduring generativity of animated and animating images, suggesting the way to enact a renaissance of kinetic materialism in the interdiscursive margins.
Key words: Gifs, Marginalia, Macclesfield Psalter, Materialism, AI Slop
Frame 1
The gif. It seems so slight, so badly animated. So ugly and annoying. As a corporatised form it breaks the tenets of Shannon’s communication theory, neither reliably uncertain or interestingly improbable, it hovers at the compressed, fundamental limits of communication, at the ratty tattered end of animation’s long tail (Shannon, 1948).
Created in 1987 by CompuServe engineer Steve Wilhite, the GIF is an image file format that used lossless data compression. What set the GIF apart from other static image formats such as the JPEG or PNG was its additional support for looping sequences. The GIF can display frames on repeat within the same image file without being the size (or resolution) of a video. For the early web, the GIF was an ideal way of adding visual content and movement to a website at a time when bandwidth was limited and video and image-editing software were less advanced (Miltner et al, 2017).
But the gif may soon descend into its own entropic end; what it might drag down to the underworld with it is an urgent question. The corporatised gif of the mid 2020s loops and lollops at low res between information decay and a quick return, never quite disintegrating but always on repeat, bouncing back but never deep, never nuanced, never worth writing home about. Highfield et al remind us the gif is no spring chicken, it is in fact a nearly 40 year-old file format that:
enables the endless looping of image sequences: the animated Graphics Interchange Format (GIF). Whether it is isolating and sharing the “Hillary Shimmy”, texting a reaction GIF of NeNe Leakes from The Real Housewives of Atlanta or remixing Sean Spicer with a clip of Homer Simpson disappearing into bushes, the GIF is a remarkably dexterous, malleable, and versatile file format that is central to digital cultures and communication (Highfield et al, 2017).
The contemporary gif is now predominantly found lurking in the pre-made menus of smartphones, with branded identities and zero political edge or cognitive challenge. As a form the gif milks our emotional labour via casual cuteness, occasional horror, anthropomorphising laughs and dance crazes rendered with frogs and floppy eared bears. The corporate gif offered by WhatsApp or Teams is infantilising, easy to swallow but not satisfying. The gif is redundant before it even starts the job. It hula hoops through social media contagion but takes no responsibility for anything.
Memes and gifs, writes Wagener are ’postdigital utterances: they show how distinctions between human and technological, and between predigital and postdigital, have become blurred, messy, and subject to ‘bricolage’ ‘ (Wagener, 2020). But for all its ontological uncertainties the gif will never have its own theme park, museum or gift shop, for the modern branded gif is above all worthless. It accelerates our loss of attention, our collective cognitive decline (Kosmyna, 2025), therefore, in 2026, the gif’s logical partner is Generative AI, the kind epitomised by the notorious Coca Cola adverts of 2024-25. Remembering the AI Christmas Coca Cola advert fiasco, in which it took more than 70,000 prompts to produce a festive image of abject hideousness, is a much needed reminder in the face of ceaseless hype that Generative AI is too dumb to animate a coherent image, let alone a sequence without splurging a million gallons of water or finite fuel (Mouriquand, 2025).
Generative AI animation entails hands that slip into a mass of crabs, animals morphing into curtains; absurdity and pastiche overwhelming the hopes of the short cutters and self-deluded prompt engineers. A materialist ontology of images, on the other hand, as Nail reminds us, incorporates a:
fundamental connection between materialist physics and ethics. If ethics begins with a materialist philosophy, it will avoid the abstract immaterial traps of immortality, the good, and morality that lead to suffering: the hatred of the body, hatred of matter, and the hatred of motion. If people believe there are static moral duties, virtues, or values, other than what their bodies can do, then they will end up hating their own (and others’) immoral bodies.(Nail, 2018)
Pre AI gifs are simple, yet polysemic, ‘largely because they are isolated snippets of larger texts. This, combined with their endless, looping repetition, allows them to relay multiple levels of meaning in a single GIF. This symbolic complexity makes them an ideal tool for enhancing two core aspects of digital communication: the performance of affect and the demonstration of cultural knowledge’ (Miltner et al, 2017). As AI generated animations break rapidly it seems inevitable that gif and slop will be married, affect and cultural knowledge will live happily ever after for a few seconds until they violently collapse, only to get resurrected in the blink of an unknowing, unsophisticated eye. For the gif now lacks the postmodern irony or glitchy edge it had in 2016, and the slop gif is even worse. The slop gif is stupid and cheap. Few theorists would now touch the corporatised slop gif with a barge pole.
So let me tell you about my own gif and slop (banal AI generated content) experimental project and what it might teach us about cultural compression, a kinetic ontology of the image, regression to the mean, Lucretius’s rejection of platonic abstraction (Nail, 2018, McQuillan, 2018). Let me explain how the slop gif is a media cancer looking for a metastatic host, a Direct Message, WhatsApp thread, Teams meeting it can punctuate with twerking penguins. And how, with the truly amazing power of AI and its talent eradicating efficiency, gifs can be transformed into looping slop faster than the speed of human thought.
On the other hand (the one we did not use earlier), let us turn to the Macclesfield Psalter and wider medieval media, and propose that animated gifs can maintain and sustain the complexity and kinetic metastability in which ‘matter flows indeterminately, then folds up and cycles into metastable objects, and is then distributed with others into fields.” (Nail, p. 13, 2021), which corporations are wittingly or unwittingly flattening as they descend into entropic regression to the mean and eventual inertia, exemplified below via an image sequence created with the Bing Image Create Platform, using the MA-Image-2e model, ‘Vivid Storytelling’. The prompt used was to generate ‘a series of images of a rabbit working at a computer and looking bored, for an animated gif, no background, do not clip the laptop off the screen’. The application did not understand the prompt through several iterations, making the images unusable and certainly not fulfilling the platform’s stated promise to ‘Transform Ideas into Reality with AI Creations’ (Bing, 2026), it also repeatedly miscounted the frames adding erroneous figures not required in the prompt.
Selecting two promising looking frames I used the hailuoai.video AI platform to provide a start and an end frame which I then converted into the moving image GIF below.
Towards the end of the sequence, the rabbit grabs a fistful of coffee from the air, revealing that the algorithm has misunderstood the rabbit’s yawn as a preparation for drinking. I find these types of misunderstanding less irritating than the attempts to render ‘cuteness’, but do not think this would be useful in aiding me in creating non ironic animations, though there are of course other uses of these algorithms and other ways to render scenes with machine learning. I am using mass media approaches here, often described as ’democratising’ (Masi et al, 2025) despite their inefficient inconsistency and deskilling banality.
Frame 2
In spite of the descent of the corporatised gif into abject cultural homogeneity my hypothesis is upbeat: Medieval marginalia affirms the likelihood of enduring semantic and material knots of complex intertextual networks. I disagree with Wagener that only the post digital (albeit entangled with the pre digital) embodies such complexity and invite us here to explore the possibilities marginalia activate and to go even further back to Lucretius’s materialism (and before that to all animating and animated images) as affirmation of a materialist philosophy, as a counter to the hatred of the body, hatred of matter, and the hatred of motion Nail invokes via Lucretius (2018). My experiments started and ended with the Macclesfield Psalter, currently held in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
A psalter is a book of psalms, which seems straightforward, but as Jones states, the Macclesfield Psalter evokes a ‘confused devotion, in which even a terrifying personification of death is juxtaposed with a man falling off his horse, and a nude pisses into a bowl held by a character whose head is connected to his arse’. Jones frames the Psalter as a form of Social Imaginary in which
the attraction of the Macclesfield Psalter lies in its ordinariness rather than uniqueness. For all the brilliance of its artist, who had mastered the exquisite, sensitively shadowed delineation of the nude human body, and who showed boundless creativity in weaving words into images and images into letters, it is as a fragment of a mental world that this manuscript is so seductive. This, in the end, is the appeal of medieval art – the imagination of an entire society channelled through the conventions of craft (Jones, 2005)
As Jones describes it, the Macclesfield Psalter evokes an animated movie: ‘abundant in the bizarre and grotesque monsters, the comic incident and everyday scenes that medieval artists loved to insert in books. The Christian social order stood on its head in these ludicrous follies that set off the beautiful letters. You see details of leaves, grazing herds, hogs and birds, a ploughman and the unlikely friendship between rabbit and hound’ (Jonathan Jones, 2005).
Such psalmic parallelism creates what are called thought rhymes, for example synonymous lines which reinforce the same image or idea as in Psalm 19:2:
Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge
But also antithetical parallel verses which evoke tension and contradiction, synthetic lines building on each other, climatic lines leading to a conclusion, emphatic verses, repeating words with similar meanings, such as heart and soul and eclectic lines, entangling heterogeneous imagery (Bratcher, 2018, Siegel 1985). Parallelism provides a juxtaposed presentation of narratives designed to subvert, critique, interject or reinforce ideas but also to establish memories. In relation to memes Wagener calls this interdiscursivity:
an infinite space which allows speakers to rely on different layers of discourse and discursive utterances, which are all intertwined and layered in various forms. For instance, when we speak, we do refer to various discourses that have been existing before us or that are linked to actual matters, and that constitute social reality (Howarth 2000). Memes are interdiscursive per se: they may combine various references and concatenate them in order to compress layers of interdiscourse into a new form of discourse. That new form of discourse should be considered through a systemic view (Wagener 2019).
Wagener’s semantic knots, ‘represent the main meaningful meeting points within discourses, are entirely dedicated to the postdigital universe and its intertwined blurring of online and offline interactions as well as predigital and postdigital phenomena, while being also based on pop-culture, shared references, and the common need to express feelings and ideas. Such semantic knots (Wagener 2018: 45) operate as meeting points that allow meaning to emerge for individuals’ (Wagener, 2020). Such knots ‘ gather a variety of clues that are collectively put together by individuals in order to decipher, understand, and propagate messages. Thanks to memes and GIFs’ high level of intertextuality, such semantic knots may gather an incredible amount of meaningful clues: text, interdiscursive operations, pictures that can be remixed, and, in the case of GIFs, dynamic videographic elements that can replace simple pictures’ (Wagener, 2020).
But this kind of gif is arguably under threat from corporate gatekeeping and dominance but also from the dead end of AI model regress, such that Instagram does not allow the gif format without it going through the obtuse wall of the mystifying Giphy platform. WhatsApp provides its own anodyne gifs, which, in theory, can be replaced by those created by others, but who now creates original edgy gifs in sufficient numbers to impact our doom scrolling? The semantic possibilities and small signifying networks passed between individuals Wagener described in 2020 are short circuited by prepacked and limited ranges of gifs. However, this dreary triviality may be imminently undermined by the marriage of the gif with AI slop, necessitating a reorganisation, in which ‘when the communication modes of a system change, it has to reorganize itself entirely in order to reach a new stability’ (Wagener, 2020) reminiscent of Thomas Nail’s ontology of metastable, kinetic images (Nail, 2018).
Frame 3
Nail reminds us that we often think of images as mental representations, arising somewhere within ‘our brain (in our minds) which is a copy or resemblance of the world outside. I think that’s not right, there’s definitely something going on but that’s a very narrow way of thinking about what an image is. An image is a real thing, it is something that happens in our eyes and in our brains, that is related to the external world, but that is a tip of an enormous iceberg. That’s the part that we see on the surface. Below the surface of the water is this enormous process of the rest of the world, of the enormous processes that we don’t actually see which are part of the fabric of the world and forms and media that we use, and it’s very active. What we have in our brains is not a copy of the world, it is the world itself just by other means. It is a continuation of the world inside of us just. It’s not a question of resemblance but interactivity, of performativity (Gonzarek, 2019).
This evokes the complex materialist, interdiscursive and kinetic relationships with readers, objects and ideas found in the Psalter’s hyper materialism, which draws us into a world we interact with by reading and looking and sensing, chiming with Nail’s observation that ‘although we often experience vision as a passive thing that sort of happens to us, but that’s actually very active both in our bodies (in our eyes the way they seek out, move and follow and respond to the world). One of the main takeaways was to think about much larger context what an image is but also what the world does‘ (Gonzarek, 2019), Nail states:
‘Lucretius was perhaps the first in the Western tradition to forcefully argue for a completely materialist, immanent and naturalistic ethics based on moving well with and as nature. If we want to survive and live well on this planet, Lucretius taught us, our best chance is not to struggle against nature but to embrace it and facilitate its movement.’ ( Nail, 2020)
Nail concurs with Deleuze, that the reversal of Platonism necessitates ‘showing the true chaos repressed within Platonism itself in the form of the simulacrum or pure dissimilitude, or difference, which is the condition for the division between model and copy’ (Nail, p. 18, 2018). The chaos repressed within Platonism is manifest time and time again in AI generated text and images though it is easy to forget this as we are bombarded by opposite corporate narratives, promising us an efficiency and reliability where there is in fact no such possibility in a world of finite resources and irreducible complexity.
Like AI and cryptocurrency the gif has had its ups and downs, including a resurgence in 2016 aided by ‘the nostalgic proclivity of Internet culture groups for the banalities of the early web: dial-up modems, cheesy Web 1.0 design, and 8-bit pixelation. Even though GIFs are capable of supporting higher image quality, the low-quality GIFs of the early web form part of the “Internet Ugly” aesthetic beloved by early users of the Internet’ (Highfield et al, 2017). Combined with generative AI however, the era of cute ugly gifs may be supplanted by something more sinister, as we face model collapse, extremist propaganda and the convergence of power to those who seek monopolistic media control, we will see also a tendency towards slop derived from slop, meaning the worst possible detritus of probability based social media production and semantic implosion.
In 2018 Researchers at the MIT media lab trained a model they named ‘Norman’ on ‘image captions from an infamous subreddit (its name is redacted due to its graphic content)’ (MIT Lab, 2018). The Norman model would interpret innocuous ink blots as acts of brutality and murder, in fact anything the Norman model processed would be interpreted as having a video nasty intensity of violent horror. There is little documentation of the project, which seemed designed to reinforce the construct of ‘data bias’, deliberately using extreme data as if it was a niche form of representation and not, arguably the violence which constitutes the ideological and material basis of extractive AI industries (whose violent impact on the environment, workers and communities living near data centres and lithium mines is now well known, see Valdivia, 2024).
Frame 4
So, now, eight years after the MIT lab’s experiment with ‘Norman’, what happens when we undertake an even more risky experiment, marrying slop with gif ? The algorithm I used to conduct my first Norman type experiments started with my attempts at hand drawing Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. Within a few seconds of inputting my drawing into an image to video application it was animated into a crassly violent, splattering brawl, each frame exuded video game levels of aggression, above and beyond the idea of ‘biased’ data sets. Much like wider game culture, it manifested a childish fantasy of conflict, like Zuckerberg challenging Musk to a cage fight, fantasies ungrounded by lived experience of actual violent labour or physical discomfort. On the other hand, Uccello’s original painting does not animate violence in this way and is instead still, materially grounded, presenting us with a moment of intelligent reflection within a very carefully constructed formal space. Uccello does not invoke a need for ‘more masculine energy’ as Zuckerberg does, but the gif generated with a still to moving image algorithm seems to fulfil that intention, contrived and ontologically questionable as it is. This and other AI animations seem deadeningly bereft of vitality, lifeless for all their movement, limited compared to the images in the medieval marginalia and Uccello’s Battle of San Romano I researched and drew for this project.
My drawing of Uccello’s Battle of San Romano processed by an AI image to video application becomes a gun laden modern military scene, replete with paramilitary weapons and uniforms, revealing the dominant patterns of representation such systems draw upon. Impett notes how poor AI systems are at representing pre photographic and pre Fordist culture. ‘imagine trying to adapt these algorithms for early modern European painting; it becomes clear that the categories of objects being detected (e.g. Polaroid Camera, iPod, Model T), and indeed the very notion of object detection, are bound up with a (post-) Fordist image world in which pictures are largely made up of industrially manufactured consumer goods, rather than, say, Albertian istorie (narrative painting)’ (Impett, 12, 2024).
The cultural complexity of gifs arises from their intertextual interdiscursivity. ‘Memes and GIFs are complex elements of meaning, so understanding them requires systemic studies and discursive theories. Due to their use of multiple semiotic utterances (language, image, video), memes and GIFs are intertextual and interdiscursive (Garric and Longhi 2013). They are intertextual, because they implicitly borrow from other texts and references while displaying a new message’ (Wagener, 2020). They are also, according to Wagener, interdiscursive, ‘because they implicitly combine various language conventions (discourses, styles, and genres) in order to convey a new message in creative ways (Jorgensen and Phillips 2002). Memes and GIFs can be involved in interactional power relationships (Flammia and Saunders 2007), inasmuch as they can be used by political and economic organizations to convey meaning through original and creative content. They are thus subject to negotiation, manipulation, and instability, just like any other system of signs’ (Wagener, 2020).
As an intertextual and discursive starting point to my Medieval gifs artist’s bursary I started to create an animated gif atlas of medieval and modern depictions of smartness (and its visual antithesis), asking via these images how our senses and ‘smartness’ are depicted in medieval imagery and what are the significant differences or similarities to our contemporary systems of visual representation. During this research I became aware of the idea of Parallelism and its subtypes, such as antithetical parallelism. My work began to investigate the ways in which multiple narratives and technologies were deployed in the Macclesfield Psalter, the main focus of my research. The animations I write about here aim to address tensions, concurrences, anomalies, orthodoxies and novelties in the way we visually conceive of intelligence and the wider world, between the Middle Ages and now in the 2020s, including medieval churls, scholars and fighting snails as well as contemporary images but also kinetic processes of human and artificial forms of intelligence.
Frame 5
Towards the end of this project I began to wonder if the medieval marginalia of the Macclesfield Psalter are similar to gifs, in terms of cultural compression and memetic movement across texts and time. Medieval illuminated manuscripts groan with ornaments, with gold and precious blue pigments, and like modern gifs some of it is utterly offensive, racist, puerile, funny or just weird. Gifs, according to Wagener ‘compress and reduce immediate meaningful references in order to be easily replicated, shared, and understood, thus engaging into a compressed approach of discourse (Torfing 2005), culture and language—an ultimate polysemic compressed form of meaning. This particular discursive emergence uses its own reduced system of signs and references (Cannizzaro 2016), based on a heavily interdiscursive nature—hence the strong mixture of cultural references.’ (Wagener, 2020)
Like marginalia, slop gifs (gifs generated by machine learning via Stable Diffusion architectures) cannot easily be separated from language, even image to image interfaces draw upon language embeddings such as CLIP, meaning they are inherently intertextual at a technical as well as a cultural level. The gif image at Figure 10 was created to explore cultural intertextuality via Stop Motion animation and the Psalm 37:16, ‘Better is the little of the righteous than the abundance of many who are wicked’, it features righteous poor rabbits, horses and dogs and wickedly abundant human aggressors. This is my understanding of antithetical parallelism in the Macclesfield Psalter, a contrast of ideas. It interests me that Large Language Models seem to have a tendency towards the robotic repetition of this type of antithetical parallelism, in the form of ‘not X but Y’. I have even seen complaints about it on social media:
‘The two biggest culprits that make AI generated copy hard to read is the over reliance on two key writing styles:
Anaphora: where each sentence starts with the same word in a rhyming pattern.
Antithetical Parallelism: it’s not X, it’s Y.
ChatGPT is the worst for this but most AI does it.
(Gordon, n.d).
Gordon suggests deploying an explicit negative prompt not to generate antithetical text parallels as a solution, but I am not convinced this would work judging by my previous experiments with lipograms – LLMS do not follow such rules well, instead they forget the rules you give them and revert to probability. Unlike LLMs, The Macclesfield Psalter embodies memory over probability, indeed much of the imagery is highly improbable. Mary Carruthers writes:
Manuscript decoration is part of the painture of language, one of the gates to memory, and the form it takes often has to do with what is useful not only to understand a text but to retain and recall it too (Carruthers, 281, 1990).
Such complex threads of commentary and cognitive intervention have made me rethink my own assumptions about Medieval texts and images as simple, dogmatic or one dimensional. The Macclesfield Psalter was produced in East Anglia around 1330, when East Anglia ‘was one of the foremost artistic centres of Europe. The margins are populated with charming, often bizarre illustrations, combining religious imagery and depictions of everyday life with bawdy humour and grotesque creations. In this fantasy world, men are attacked by giant snails and enormous fish, while rabbits joust, play the organ or ride dogs’ (BBC Online, 2014). The Psalter invites multiple entry points and ideas, providing intertextual animated images which are marginal and potentially subversive.
Frame 6
In many of the gifs I created for the project I have tried to enact the inversion of power structures and meta-fictional margins and memory devices the Macclesfield Psalter marginalia deploy. Evoking the rhyming thought of parallelism found in the Psalter has been an illuminating visual and animation challenge, but also the echoing motives, metaphors, zoomorphism and animism/personification of objects with thoughts, which has a perhaps surprising resonance with posthumanism. While not all gifs are memes or memetic, the framing by Zanette et al has been useful, they identify key themes by:
investigating memes as material artifacts that have agency in themselves. Second, studying memes under the lens of rhetorical theory, considering their function (Miller, 1984) and their interaction with the Internet as a medium (Lanham, 1993, 2006). Finally, looking at memes as performative objects (Harju & Huovinen, 2015; Thompson & Üstüner, 2015) that have a linguistic function and also reflect tensions that defy/reify power structures found within the prevalent consumer collectivities online (Zanette et al 2018).
Materiality, rhetorical theory of function, mediation, linguistic function and performativity, seem like useful ways to understand the gif. This also chimes with Nail’s ontology of the image and of what we see in the Macclesfield Psalter, to merely say it is ‘interactive’ is to underestimate the apparent intention to enact a cognitive function, to change the thought processes and therefore the materiality of readers or watchers themselves (if one is a materialist and not a dualist, that is).
In my self portrait as a Macclesfield Psalter rabbit (the apparent protagonist of the marginalia) the head is a latex mask I took photos of myself wearing, the cartoon like version is a self portrait with the mask processed via an AI filter application. Both sets of images draw upon the Macclesfield Psalter and the idea of artificial memory, here in the form of a mobile phone. To be clear, I am not using Generative AI as a ‘tool’ or because I think it is better at drawing or thinking than I am (I don’t), rather it is present in some of this work as an opportunity to interrogate the ideologies of vision and memory present between and within the 14th to the 21st Centuries as a form of parallelism and antithetical parallelism.
Impett and Offert suggest the need for new methods of investigating ‘basic questions from the fields of art history and urbanism’ taking ‘into account the epistemic entanglement of a model and its applications’ in recognition that ‘the visual ideologies of research datasets and training datasets become entangled’ (Impett & Offert, 2023). While working with these Medieval images and texts I have been confronted by the broader ideological nature of visual culture and the assumptions embedded in this moment of Generative AI saturation. AI technology is almost always presented as the peak of technological advancement and sophistication, but the Macclesfield Psalter and other such ‘multimedia’ texts challenge this assumption, in particular the sophisticated meta-texts of the marginalia, which address critical, operational and religious discourse while also augmenting the psalms, instigating heightened mechanisms of memory and intertextual games. Questions of industrialisation and complex supply chains for art production are also raised by these illuminated manuscripts, contradicting our common conception of linear narratives of progress and extraction, particularly in terms of mediation. The gif is of course, ironically, even when mediated via machine learning, a highly reductive form, low on computational complexity rather than offering the escalated technological layering and multiple resources required to produce the Macclesfield Psalter.
Materially the Psalter is implicated in complex hierarchies of power and production, with speculation that there were at least two artists and an assistant, the Macclesfield Master and an Anointing Master involved in production of the text and illuminations. But we must also acknowledge the complex supply chains for paper, pigments, inks, gold and minerals. Such extractive organisation led Lewis Mumford to locate the origins of industrialisation and the abstraction, quantification and wider ideological shifts necessary for industrial scale production in the Middle Ages (Mumford, 1963) rather than originating in the 18th and 19th Centuries. The Psalter is on the brink of a change which arguably takes us to the present moment, in which, as McQuillan reminds us ‘Data science is not simply a method but an organising idea’ (McQuillan, 2017). McQuillan states:
Data science is powerful, because it is an apparatus in the sense that Foucault sets out: a specific set of material and conceptual techniques that coerce by means of observation, ‘an apparatus in which the techniques that make it possible to see induce the effects of power, and in which, conversely, the means of coercion make those on whom they are applied clearly visible’ (Foucault 1988). Data science is an apparatus engaged in the production of subjectivity. While its claims to ontological authority are unsound, a retreat to purely discursive critique loses the power of performativity and drops the material aspect of the philosophy. We need a way to work with the materiality
of data science with a different effect. We seek to mobilise the specific constraints and opportunities in a way that extends participation and agency instead of reinforcing dualism and hegemony (McQuillan, 2017).
The Macclesfield Psalter offers us in its complex absurdity and contradiction a counter to the industrialising neo platonic ideologies it was networked with; this counter invites, as McQuillan, Nail and many others suggest, not least Barad (2007) a way to work with materiality, intertextuality, agency and participation. Looking forward, the next stage of this project is to invite others to interdiscursive enactment workshops with stop motion animation, tableaux vivant and pixilation or human animation. My goal is that we might enact and further explore the potential for subversion, animation and complex kinetic discourse which I have learnt about from the Macclesfield Psalter in an age of fast and shallow machinic Neoplatonism.
Frame 1
So here we return to the end and the beginning. The gif. It seems so slight, so badly animated. So ugly and annoying. As a corporatised form it breaks the tenets of Shannon’s communication theory, neither reliably uncertain or interestingly improbable, it hovers at the compressed, fundamental limits of communication, at the ratty tattered end of animation’s looping long tail.
References
Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press Books.
BBC Online (2014) ‘The Macclesfield Psalter, a History of the World/ objects’ BBC Online .https://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/objects/_ab31pVtQzClDL56jMuROQ
Brachter, Dennis (2018) ‘Parallelism in Hebrew Writing’, crivoice.org, available at: https://www.crivoice.org/parallel.html
Carruthers, Mary (1990) The Book of Memory: a study of memory in medieval culture, Cambridge University Press.
Facsimile Finder (2026) Macclesfield Psalter,https://www.facsimilefinder.com/facsimiles/macclesfield-psalter-facsimile
Fitzwilliam Museum (2026)FolioThe Macclesfield Psalter Discovery.
Gonzarek, B.A. (2019) ‘The Nature of Digital Image, A Conversation with Thomas Nail’ (transcript), philosophyofmovement.com, available at: https://philosophy-of-movement.com/2019/11/04/the-nature-of-digital-image-a-conversation-with-thomas-nail-transcript/
Gordon, Stu (n.d) Facebook post,https://www.facebook.com/groups/evolutionunleashedai/posts/26545093385111728/#
Miltner, K. M., & Highfield, T. (2017) ‘Never Gonna GIF You Up: Analyzing the Cultural Significance of the Animated Gif’, Social Media+ Society, 3,1-11.
https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305117725223
Impett, Leo (2024) ‘Digital Art History as Critical AI’, The Art Bulletin, 106(2), 11–14.https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2024.2296270
Impett, Leo, and Offert, Fabian (2023) There is a Digital Art History,https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07464
Jones, Jonathan (2005) ‘The birth of British art’, Guardian Online: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2005/jul/28/heritage.art?CMP=share_btn_url
MIT Media Lab (2018) ‘Norman’, MIT Media Lab https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/norman/people/
Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Xian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes (2025) ‘Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task’,https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872
Li, Siyi & Pessoa Serafim, Flavia. (2025) ‘Revolutionizing Cinema. How AI is Democratizing Production and Deepening Creative Content’. Connessioni remote Artivismo_Teatro_Tecnologia. 10.54103/connessioni/28718.
McQuillan, D.(2017) ‘Data Science as Machinic Neoplatonism’. Philos. Technol. 31, 253–272 (2018) https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-017-0273-3
Mouriquand, David (2025)”Real magic’? Coca-Cola’s AI-generated Christmas ad sparks widespread backlash (again)’, https://www.euronews.com/
Mumford, Lewis (1963) [1934] Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
Nail, Thomas (2018) Lucretius I, An Ontology of Motion. Edinburgh University Press.
Nail, Thomas (2019)Theory of the Image, Oxford University Press.
Nail, Thomas (2020) ‘Philosophy Professor’s New Book Lucretius II: The Ethics of Motion’, liberalarts.du.edu.
Nail, Thomas (2021) Theory of the Object. Edinburgh University Press.
Shannon, C.E. (1948) ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’. Bell System Technical Journal, 27, 379-423.
Uccello, Paolo (1438-1440) Niccolò Mauruzi da Tolentino at the Battle of San Romano, left panel (probably c. 1438–1440). Tempera with walnut oil and linseed oil on poplar, 182 × 320 cm. National Gallery, London
Valdivia, A. (2024). ‘The supply chain capitalism of AI: a call to (re)think algorithmic harms and resistance through environmental lens’. Information, Communication & Society, 1–17.https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2420021?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Wagener, Albin (2020) ‘The Postdigital Emergence of Memes and GIFs:
Meaning, Discourse, and Hypernarrative Creativity’, Postdigital Science and Education
https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00160-1
Yanardag, Pinar, Manuel Cebrian, & Iyad Rahwan (2018) ‘NORMAN: World’s first psychopath AI’, MIT Media Lab.
Zanette, Maria & Blikstein, Izidoro & Visconti, Luca. (2019) ‘INTERTEXTUAL VIRALITY AND VERNACULAR REPERTOIRES: INTERNET MEMES AS OBJECTS CONNECTING DIFFERENT ONLINE WORLDS’. Revista de Administração de Empresas. 59. 157-169. 10.1590/s0034-759020190302.
short stories etc 