In the Spring of 2019, I applied for an artist account on GIPHY. GIPHY “is an American online database and search engine that allows users to search for and share animated GIF files.” (Wikipedia). A significant portion of .gifs shared on social media and messaging platforms are pulled from GIPHY. To add .gifs, you must have an artist account. An application will be approved after uploading 20 original .gifs that meet the guidelines.

A GIF, or .gif, is a short, looping animated image without sound, while a GIF sticker is a version with a transparent background, often used in messaging and social media. The animations are lightweight, supported across browsers, and are fairly easy and quick to make.

A GIPHY artist account is used by designers, artists, brands and content creators to upload .gifs and stickers of their own design.

In 2019, I was working on a series of three monumental woven tapestries, a collaboration with the Textile Museum of Tilburg. The Three Motions of Loom are three machine-woven tapestries that take their cues from the manuscript of Wildevrouw by Belgian author Jeroen Olyslaegers. The novel is set in the cities of Amsterdam and Antwerp in the late 16th century, so my research focused on the visual culture of that time and region.

Soon in the process, I conceived of the work as a knot in the centre of a timeline that stretched back 450 years into the past and 450 years into the future. To emphasize our current time, I began to use contemporary visual elements such as emoji and computer icons in the tapestry designs, most notably the ‘hole’ emoji: 🕳️

The ‘hole’ emoji is one of the few small symbols in the entire emoji vocabulary that can add some perspective to the flat surface of a device screen. It suggests a portal, a way to escape or dive further into the screen. I noticed its potential while playing around with the Stories feature of the social media platform Instagram; Stories are posts that disappear after 24 hours, usually photos or screenshots to which users can add comments, including emoji and .gif stickers.

The function turned my mobile phone screen into a small canvas, a carrier for miniature animated collages that were increasingly inspired by my research into 16th-century art history, and in particular the genre of ‘emblems’, emblema or emblemata – which had a similar rebus-puzzle-like structure to my little montages.

Up to my GIPHY application, I used .gif stickers that were readily available from the platform. However, despite the enormous amount of visual elements, I began to feel that the series would benefit from graphics that were part of my practice and the tapestries I was working on.

I reworked tests and unused fragments from my animated films into stickers and uploaded a first batch of twenty .gifs. At first, although I knew that uploading them meant that anyone could use them on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and others, I saw them primarily as an addition to my own series – I didn’t consider a wider audience. That changed when I noticed the view counts on GIPHY. The platform tracks both overall account views and individual sticker views. To my surprise, some stickers had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times in just a few weeks.

“A view is counted every time a GIF or sticker has been served through GIPHY’s services or technology. A single view is counted when a GIF is served, regardless of how many times it loops. A GIF view on GIPHY is a sign of relevance, share-ability, and popularity.” – from the Analytics Dashboard FAQs

Fundamental Mechanics 2, the first animated instance from the series, using the manhole emoji and a Giphy sticker by Loackme. 2019.

Detail from The Three Motions of Loom. Auxiliary Stop Motion: Brake. 2019.

I am certainly not the only contemporary artist to have a GIPHY artist account. My colleagues include Lorna Mills, Faith Holland, Edgar Fabián Frías and Sarah Zucker.

In the spring of 2020, GIPHY was bought by Meta – then still Facebook – the company that also owns Instagram. Unhappy with being an unwilling participant in yet another multinational tech operation, and facing the end of the Tapestries project, which was the original reason for joining, I decided to deactivate my account.

When I downloaded the datasheet for August 2019 to 21 May 2020, it turned out that I had added 79 stickers to the expanding GIPHY universe, accumulating a total of more than 195,100,000 views. Some were only viewed 2 times – perhaps because they were quickly deleted after I found errors – but the most popular reached 12,496,521 and 31,027,385 respectively.

Unicorn (1) accumulated over 31 million views when I suspended my account in 2020.

The .gif stickers are reaching an audience far beyond the scope of ’traditional’ visual art. However, the vast majority of people who use my stickers have no idea who made them, or are even aware that the images are made by real people and artists. From my perspective, I am providing a free service – which I was not prepared to continue under the guise of Meta.

After deactivating my account, I wrote the first draft of this text and published it on a research blog with the title 195,100,000 views. I kept the title despite the following developments:

In 2023, the final sale of GIPHY to Meta was blocked following an appeal by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority. The platform was subsequently acquired by Shutterstock, a provider of stock footage and stock photography. I reactivated my account in December 2023.

At the time of this writing, in March 2025, the account has 95 .gif stickers with a combined view count of

344,200,000

with ‘egg’ (see below) the most popular at over 37 million views.

To find and use my work in social media applications, use search tags such as ‘denkbaar’, ‘acrwrs’, ‘alexandracrouwers’.

The internet is (still) made by people (too).

Above: a Fundamental Mechanics using a combination of emoji, and .gif stickers from my own account and others.