For Mills, the GIF format—just over 35 years old—is not a nostalgic throwback, but a site of innovation challenging boundaries of the two-dimensional frame. By repeating short bursts of imagery, she reveals the socio-technical tapestry we inhabit—a realm shaped by a rapid circulation of digital objects and the ephemeral status they assume once posted, shared, or remixed. Borrowing from Steyerl’s terse argument that the poor image 'transforms quality into accessibility', one could view Mills’ low-fidelity works as democratized visual statements. Their small file sizes and ready share-ability makes them nimble travelers across platforms, thereby reorienting how art can move through the digital sphere. This essay examines how Mills’ practice, viewed through Steyerl’s framework of ‘poor images,’ expands our understanding of landscape, repetition, and identity in her(self's) online spaces. By doing so, it also prompts a re-examination of seemingly unrefined corners of our own digital lives—while exploring how her own body of work, simultaneously imbues such spaces, with meaningful resonance.

Lo-Res Aesthetics: Embracing the 'Poor Image'
The GIF’s hallmark brevity and cyclical repetition have historically lent it a reputation as a lowbrow or rudimentary form, often pigeonholed as mere internet ephemera. Though, and as Hito Steyerl underlines, the so-called 'poor image' is not a failure but a 'copy in motion'—a form that has been compressed, shared, and degraded, yet paradoxically accumulates cultural value the more it is disseminated. Poor images, she writes, ‘are poor because they are not assigned any value within the class society of images.' Mills’ work resonates with this viewpoint, illustrating how a lower-fidelity aesthetic can carry deeper conceptual weight than might be evident at first glance. Rather than longing for crispness of a high-resolution works, Mills’ practice harnesses the intangible force that Steyerl alludes to as a certain onrush of digital distribution. 'Carbon-copied pamphlets.’

Within Mills’ transformative approach, the ‘poor image’ becomes anything but poor. Through her vision, practice, and consistent output it instead gains significant value.

Each GIF, stripped down to its essential frames, acquires an urgency—its grainy loops reveling in the imagery composing each. The core logic of the GIF thus dovetails with Steyerl’s conviction that these poor image '[mock] the promises of digital technology', undercutting the fetish for technical perfection. Thus, by reusing pre-existing imagery, random snippets from obscure corners of the internet, and altered frames—so as to degrade clarity with each iteration; Mills spotlights the ephemeral yet persistent nature of cultural artifacts in the digital realm. Rather than a polished final product, lo-res GIFs become indicators of how visual culture is perpetually remixed; refracted. In doing so, Mills’ work reveals a hidden architecture of digital life—one of a constant exchange and modification over the presumed permanences, or originality, of a high-res master file.

Arguably the most distinguishing characteristic of Mills’ work is the way in which her GIFs induce a sense of hypnotic displacement through fragmentation and repetition. Mills’ GIF work rejects linear storytelling, and instead her GIFs pull viewers to a cyclical rhythm, where, real resolution never arrives. Repetition reanimates moments that mirror perpetual re-uploading of digital culture, reinforcing poor images’ fluidity of dispersion. Instead, new frames keep flipping back to a work’s beginning, producing a mesmerizing stutter that also parallels Steyerl’s notion of the poor image’s circulatory life. We see the image continually reappearing, re-finagling; never anchored in a single authoritative form. In a more conceptual term, these loops serve as microcosms of the broader digital condition, reflecting the unending scroll of social media feeds, the constant barrage of re-uploaded memes, and the fleeting nature of collective online attention.

Repetition here isn’t mere formalism; it captures a deeper psychological and cultural truth: in digital spaces, we often remain suspended in recursive patterns—hitting refresh on the same threads, toggling between the three same apps, ingesting and re-ingesting these same images. Mills’ GIFs mirror this phenomenon, by prodding us to confront Heidegger’s existential implorations. This repetitive structure resonates with Steyerl’s framing of the poor image as resurrection via remix. The loops continuously resuscitate a captured moment, turning it into a site of endless being. By focusing on cyclical pulses, Mills disrupts aesthetic hierarchies, redirecting attention to the hidden, the grotesque, and the overlooked. In contrast to the linear arcs favored by cinematic traditions, her works seem to stay suspended in an oscillation resisting closure—an apt metaphor for a digital epoch where image surfaces vanish, and resurface, ad infinitum.

Expanding the 2D Frame in Landscapes
Central to Mills’ contribution is her use of extensive frames that transform seemingly still landscapes into lively, continuously evolving environments. While GIFs are limited by their brief time span, Mills sees possibility within these constraints, creating works that effectively challenge the static boundaries of the two-dimensional canvas. The recurring frames animate landscapes, so that they feel like forever—thus inviting us to traverse them. Repeatedly. Never settling, on a singular vantage point. This technique also calls attention to spatiotemporal fluidity inherent in digital art. While some might relegate GIFs within the confines of their mind, as being little more than ephemeral curiosities; Mills manages to demonstrate how these quickly-looping animations are potent vehicles for exploration of identity, collective memory, and digital landscapes.

By orchestrating a sequence of meticulously curated frames, Mills cleverly captures illusions of depth and motion. Each work can suggest the passage of time, the shifting of perspective, or the cyclical rhythm of natural processes—even as it occurs within a constrained pixel[ated] grid. Such illusions resonate with Steyerl’s declaration that poor images’ are ‘defined by velocity, intensity, and spread.’ Here, the 'promise' is a high-def, seamless visual environment, though Mills subverts it. In her hands, the low-res image doesn’t aim for photorealism or cinematic gloss; rather, it offers a more elemental sense of movement highlighting a constructed, labor-intensive nature of digital creation. Mills’ approach challenges the viewer’s habitual reading of landscapes, inviting us to think of her GIFs’ frames, as new vantage points; moments in which larger compositions, shift.

On a Merleau-Pontian level, these looping GIF landscapes push us to rethink how we perceive space and narrative in an era when screens mediate so much of our sensory experience. In this digital realm, stasis and movement can coexist in the same work, emphasizing the tension between ephemeral illusions and the underlying code. If we return to Steyerl’s perspective, the iterated, degraded frames become a metaphor for the traveled pathways of digital circulation. With each additional loop, or replay, Mills’ landscapes underscore both the endless potential of the 2D plane and its perpetual reliance on reassembly—a nod to the remix culture of online spaces where elements are reconfigured in perpetual flux. The resulting fractal-like repetition can produce a sense of infinite depth, as though the GIF might even be tunneling endlessly into itself.

Embracing Imperfect Digital Tapestries
By expanding the so-called 'poor image' into an dedicated GIF-based practice, Lorna Mills deepens our understanding of how art can function in a networked age. Far from being an indulgent fixation on technical deficiencies, her low-resolution GIFs embody a democratic ethos—they’re accessible, easily read, and delightfully unconstrained by formal expectations of ‘traditional media’. As Steyerl argues, ‘Poor images are dragged around the globe as commodities or their effigies, as gifts or as bounty…. [just as they confront us with unasked for qualities, of the seemingly] rare, the obvious, and the unbelievable… if we can still manage to decipher it.’ Mills’ artwork channels this fine tension, and she transforms it into a conscious exploration of visual repetition, glitch-laden textures, and multiplicities of online identity. By methodically chaining frames, she creates an illusion of expanded depth and prolonged motion, something akin to a cinematic panorama, but housed in a fraction of the bandwidth. A true phantasmagoria.

The fragmentation and looping in her GIFs, thus confront us with deeper philosophical questions about our presence, motion, and authorship in our digital spaces. But rather than imposing a linear arc or aiming for the polished veneer of high-res illusions, Mills’ approach urges us to contemplate the layered nature of web3 digital culture—where immediacy, composability, and endless remixing form the core of our shared aesthetic life. By extending the 2D frame into expansive, evolving landscapes, she recasts what was once perceived as a simple, even trivial format into a medium capable of profound conceptual and artistic expression. The effect is then, an inversion of the typical 'static' sense of a two-dimensional image. Instead, these amazing worlds bristle with frenetic rustling energy; constantly unraveling and reassembling themselves, as never ‘ending’.

Ultimately, Mills’ work and Steyerl’s essay converge on a crucial insight: so-called 'poor images' and low-res GIFs are not at all inferior stand-ins for 'higher' forms of any digital production. Instead, they offer to discerning and casual audiences (and to collectors), alternative spaces of creativity and commentary; revealing the underlying structures of online circulation, our existential state of digital representation, and the new collective process, of image-making. Within this expanded view, embracing the imperfect, glitchy tapestry of digital life becomes an act of both aesthetic innovation and cultural critique—a way to engage with the virtual realm on its own frenetic, loopy terms. Mills’ GIFs, in their perpetual motion—and their disarming raggedness—affirm that the raw edges of digital art hold the potential for expanding our understanding of both art and ourselves, by opening new terrains for visual thought and experimentation in this networked age.

Yet we are not mere spectators to these orchestrations. We awaken, as it were, to find ourselves in an online labyrinth with rules partially inherited from generations of coders, forum moderators, and digital pioneers. As if thrust onto a stage mid-performance, we must decide which persona to inhabit; whether flamboyant or subdued, whimsical or solemn. In so doing, we brush against existential questions of authenticity: Are we unveiling heretofore concealed aspects of our own character, or merely donning flamboyant masks for fleeting amusements? The notion of ‘broken mirrors’ emerges here, hinting that each digital guise might reflect a fractured, yet illuminating facet of selfhood—and another avenue for exploration rather than simply a tool for escapism.

Unchosen Inheritance: Encountering Not Our Known
This inheritance of digital frameworks parallels an age-old anthropological observation: that individuals enter a cultural context saturated with preexisting mores, rites, and hierarchical power structures. Online, these frameworks manifest as chat protocols, consensus algorithms, blockchains, or reputational assets of inherent or designated value—or both; few of which we have helped to directly design, even as nearly all of them seemingly work to condition our digital behavior. The anthropologist who once studied ‘hidden grammars’ in local communities would likely find echoes of such structures in the lines of code now shaping how pixels are displayed, confirmed, reinterpreted, and shared. In doing so, they are also affirming Esther Pasztory’s statement that, ‘The presence of the past in the present acts as a great force of stability and continuity.’

Despite the utopian promise that decentralized ecosystems liberate humans from top-down governance, deep-seated asymmetries persist. Certain personalities, adept at rhetorical flourish or glamour creation, wield magnified influence, just as traditional social hierarchies are reproduced—albeit cloaked in new guises. Simultaneously, the radical freedom of these environments beckons us to mold and reshape our identities. What was once a monolithic offline persona might now fragment into multiple digital representations, each engaging different subcultures and artistic milieux. Enmeshed in these emergent systems, we discover that the puzzle of belonging remains persistent. One might yearn for the fluidity to escape entrenched social scripts while confronting the reality that each new virtual domain imposes its own, very thinly veiled constraints.

Atavistic Ethics: Freedom & Responsibility in DecentralizationIn this shifting terrain, ethical imperatives cannot be dismissed as merely theoretical, for even intangible acts carry weight in shaping communal values and psychological well-being. Drawing on a fusion of Kantian deontology and existential responsibility, we might argue that moral significance endures wherever rational agents meet and exert mutual influence. A pointed remark in a forum can corrode trust, just as an act of sincere generosity—perhaps transferring a sought-after digital asset, or assisting a novice—can fortify a sense of collective solidarity. Yet in each line of code, we also see how ancient social instincts reemerge in new forms, shaping digital identities while perhaps reinforcing inherited hierarchies. Beneath these fleeting transactions resides the divide between intangible data flows, and the enduring gravity of eternity itself.

Such moral complexity becomes more pronounced in decentralized platforms, where gatekeepers nominally vanish, replaced by protocols that allocate decision-making power among many. If freedom, as existentialists suggest, entails being ‘condemned’ to choose, then the weight of choice itself intensifies under conditions of near-limitless possibility. One cannot appeal to a central authority to arbitrate moral dilemmas; the network’s ethos emerges from the sum total of individual interactions. Thus, whether we coordinate large-scale endeavors in a decentralized autonomous organization or showcase borderline transgressive art, moral burdens fall squarely on each participant to consider the ramifications of their actions, or not—both intended, and of unforeseen.

Moreover, this domain challenges the classical notion of authenticity as a seamless alignment between the inner self, and outward persona. In immersive digital contexts, one might embody diverse avatars in quick succession. Some forms of role-play may reveal latent creative impulses, while others risk reinforcing harmful tropes. The critical question then, pivots on intentionality: Are these personas grounded in genuine self-exploration, or do they function as ethically irresponsible escapes? Balancing the interplay of freedom and accountability, each digital actor confronts the tension between trying on new masks and upholding a conscientious moral stance—all within landscapes where ephemeral interactions crystallize into lasting communal memory.

Infinite Frontiers: Labyrinths of Code & Pixellated Integrity
Ultimately, the distinction between ‘online’ and ‘offline’ wanes when we acknowledge how profoundly virtual exchanges shape our sense of identity, communal ties, and new ethical obligations. Indeed, structural anthropologists’ discoveries about the primacy of kinship bonds and local mythologies parallel the ways digital inhabitants craft collective narratives and identities that transcend physical embodiment. However, what was once relegated to a village’s oral traditions now finds expression in live streams, viral memes, and participatory media events. Although intangible, these phenomena exert a tangible effect on our emotional lives; forging alliances, fueling discord, and inspiring creativity.

One might term these pixelated landscapes ‘infinite frontiers’ because they evoke a horizon that recedes the moment we approach it, propelled by ceaseless innovation and user-driven improvisation. Yet each frontier contains its own labyrinth of codes, unspoken customs, and its moral quagmires—conditions that echo the foundational human dilemma of navigating environments we did not fully choose. In such spaces, thoroughly analyzing how digital norms evolve—a task blending anthropological acuity, existential insight, and ethical deliberation—becomes more indispensable than ever.

In the final analysis, the illusions and freedoms we encounter in virtual domains do not negate the fundamental responsibility at the heart of human experience. We remain creatures endowed with the capacity to reflect, empathize, and modify the architecture and the spaces that we seek to inhabit. Just as countless generations have confronted inherited cultural scripts, so we now confront inherited digital protocols. Our challenge is thus to render these labyrinths more equitable, ethical, and expressive—an endeavor requiring that we acknowledge both the exhilarating promise of infinite multiplicity and the unremitting obligation to engage that promise with seriousness and care. We do find ourselves in broken mirrors, indeed; but perhaps in the fractures gleam the seeds of a deeper self-knowledge, communal trust, and a robust sense of shared humanity.

Web3 has indeed expanded my soul, bringing me closer to the Tao. Regardless of what types of shoes I wear, in the metaverse, or IRL—web3 has helped make me, more me.

Quite simply, the world seems to have new dimensions that I didn’t previously have access to—and it has rewired the ways I navigate, and think of myself, in the world.

In web3, even as it is very much focused on the individual—rights, assets, ability to participate in DAOs, traverse metaverses, etc; it also creates conditions within which the entire notion of one’s self can be unshackled, from all of one’s predispositions.

Never will I ever forget the feeling—quite literally—of having purchased my first NFT, which was actually free, as it only cost the nominal gas fee to transfer it to myself. It is a pixelated image of the Rembrandt self-portrait hanging in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It was created by my, now acquaintance, Scott Baker.

The way that I had nearly always thought of the internet up until then, immediately shifted. No longer did I only think of the internet as being an amalgam of podcasts, Twitter and search engines, online shopping—whoops—and constant video feeds.

Suddenly the internet felt less like a landscape of media, and things to buy, out there, in the actual physical world, beyond my body. Suddenly, portions of my soul that are somehow in this body of mine yet not of it—felt as if they no longer needed to flee.

The human brain’s right hemisphere relates to and experiences everything in the now; present: ‘right here, right now’. It is also, my connection to the universe, and all that is beyond my body. Every human’s left hemisphere pulls out the details of details, and it finds further details about those details; it’s concerned with the past and the future. All of this, according to the brain scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor. The occasional longing to leave one’s body comes from the reality that all humans are energy inside of a body.

It’s the reason, I now know when I sit on a sun-drenched terrace during autumn, and suddenly a tree leaf fluttering in the wind catches my eye… I follow it; it’s graceful and melodic, as it meanders through the air, swirling up, down, and back around. That is also my brain’s right hemisphere, wishing to merge my soul, with the leaf’s movement.

In that moment of actually feeling like I am fluttering in the wind, just like the leaf that caught my eye, silently inviting me to follow and flow with it: I am close, with the Tao.

Using both hemisphere’s of one’s brain, in a whole and balanced way—and each of a human brain’s hemispheres, has both a thinking and emotional portion—is the secret.

As she has previously stated and is often quoted as saying in her TED Talk: ‘We have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world.’

When we use these two halves, equally, by mastering our internal world, humans truly can accomplish anything that they put their mind to—leading to, a whole-brained life.

How do I bring this ‘whole’ version of myself, into the metaverse—the internet in 3D?