This weekend, I saw Interstellar, and I saw Beyonce’s new video for “7/11.” One of them I couldn’t stop thinking about. So here’s my piece for Slate about why I find a little more hope in Beyonce’s hand-held, participatory digital aesthetic than I do in Christopher Nolan’s big-screen throwback.
“‘7/11’ is already made of GIFs; it Vines itself. When she claps on the balcony or twerks on the chair in the bathroom, the looped image comes built into the texture of the video. ‘7/11’ is a series of pre-manipulated moments, moves and visual non sequiturs that you immediately want to see again in part because you’ve already seen them rewound and repeated before your eyes. If you’ve watched ‘7/11’ once, you’ve watched it at least twice.”
Phillip Maciak 