Ficto-Quizzical colleagues, Metaphortean Research has led to discoveries and conspiracies of novel GIF speciation events. Read on:

“These anomalous forms may almost be called living fossils; they have endured to the present day, from having inhabited a confined area, and from having thus been exposed to less severe competition.” - Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species

Crypto-Zoetropicalism, or the study of hidden animation, has revealed a great swathe of living fossils basking in the white light of the white box. Hidden in plain sight, the movements of these creatures are implicit, not explicit. Their bastion of crypsis relies on the exploded view, a con-sequence of the time-honored tradition. Unlike sequential art, an acknowledged ancestor of the moving image, these crypto-zoetropical candidates began to memetically drift by way of Cubism and Futurism, modern isms intermingling but divergent also from nascent cinematic apparatuses.

Like the slowly exterminated fresh-water forms that Darwin refers to above, this particular menagerie persists by formal stealth as much as memetic isolation. Sheltered from the heterogeneity, density and toxicity of life in the oceanic Interweb, their fossilization may well dissolve into extinction.

Putting audacity before caution, several of these “living fossils” have been hybridized with the GIF species. If biodiversity is too hopeful, memetic contamination too much of a brag, perhaps the old haunt of context collapse will suffice as a provisional place-holder for these kinetically modified organisms (KMOs).

Is there much to be learned in from these pulsing hybrids? Can these animalized isms maintain their prowess in the thick of everyday media life? Entertaining the simultaneity of one and three chairs, myriad soup cans and untitled stacks is perhaps a whimsical reminder that “an infinite number of contexts [are] collapsing upon one another.” (Wesch) –Network culture is indifferent towards an anomalous [read: obsolescing even now] strain of GIF speciation. Exclusivity is not synonymous with heroism in battle.