The Digital Phantasmagoria of Lorna Mills

In an era dominated by the sleek polish of high-definition media, the oeuvre of Lorna Mills offers an alternative stance toward digital aesthetics. Her embrace of GIF loops—often pixelated, glitchy, defined by ragged motion that’s hypnotically repetitive—stands apart from the ever-rising tide of pristine 4K art. Even VR experiences. Rather than a mere playful dalliance in web kitsch, Mills’ art taps into the complex lineage of lo-res, or 'poor images', calling upon viewers to question received notions of quality and value in contemporary art. This inquiry is also central to Hito Steyerl’s essay, 'In Defense of the Poor Image', which articulates how, 'the poor image is an illicit fifth-generation bastard of an original'. Yet it remains a vital carrier of cultural memory and political possibility. Therefore, instead of just treating these images as mere throwaway amusements, Mills pushes them into the realm of serious aesthetic inquiry. The result is a body of work that feels frenetic while meditative; an apt reflection for a complex, networked time.

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 work 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.

Originally published on mirror.xyz, on 8 February 2025, by misterbezold.eth: mirror.xyz/misterbezold.eth/qhb4yCZ7YUDmDcuZQ-TTULvc0LVibfGX8XxMguRyrz0