Living Photographs or Silent Films? The Flipbook as a Critical Object Between Tactility and Virtuality

In this essay, I focus on the complex dynamic between animation and muteness as an inherent quality of the flipbook. In fact, many artists such as Gilbert & George, John Baldessari, and, more recently, Tim Ulrich, Sigrun Köhler, and Tony Oursler, explore the flipbook’s incapacity to accompany moving images with sound. Assuming this, I argue that since the 1960s a shift can be observed from the flipbook’s use as a way to defy common ideas about artistic media to a means of exploring social, political, and psychological issues with regard to the act of communication and the transmission of information. Ending with a closer look at Rabih Mroué’s multimedia installation The Pixelated Revolution, I suggest that, with the rise of digital culture and the Internet as a social network, the flipbook is anything but an obsolete medium or nostalgic art form. It is rather used as an appropriated means to reflect some crucial issues of contemporary media culture, such as the distinction between physical experience and the immateriality of digital images, or the balance between intimacy and distance.