Lorna Mills is a Canadian net art and new media artist known for animated GIF collages built from found internet footage — pornography outtakes and other online detritus— cut into jagged, silhouetted shapes,and layered into choppy, rhythmic compositions.,She has exhibited internationally since the early 1990s, moving from analogue Super 8 film, painting, and Ilfochrome printinginto digital animation and GIFs.,
Mills was born in Yorkton, Saskatchewan, and studied Digital Media Studies at the University of Toronto's Information Technology Design Center in 1993 and 1994. She is self-taught in programming and video editing. In 1990 she was a founding member of Toronto's artist-run Red Head Gallery.She began working as a children's game programmer in 1994 and started making digital animations around the same time, moving into GIF-based work by 2003.,,
To build a piece, Mills cuts subjects out of found GIFs frame by frame, leaving rough, stair-stepped edgesfrom their original backgrounds rather than smoothing them away, then layers the fragments into mosaic collages using Adobe Flash Professional.She is drawn to what she calls “the most idiotic images, when it's mocking itself”, and describes her editing process as “ravingly formal” despite the resulting chaos.
In 2014 and 2015 Mills curated Ways of Something, a four-episode remake of John Berger's 1972 documentary Ways of Seeing built from one-minute contributions by more than 100 web-based artists.Two of its episodes screened in 2014 as part of “Chatrooms I” at San Francisco's Gray Area Art and Technology Theatre.In 2015 her work appeared in the group exhibition “Digital Conditions” at Kunstverein Hannover, alongside artists including Hito Steyerl and Jon Rafman.The Whitney Museum collected and showed the work in its 2016 exhibition “Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016”.
In March 2016 her animated GIF Mountain/Light Time was shown nightly on 45 electronic billboards in Times Square as part of the Midnight Moment program.,TRANSFER gallery in Brooklyn, which represents her alongside DAM Gallery in Berlin, presented “The Great Code” in 2018, her third solo show there, drawing on fifteen years of work in her studio.,In 2024 she released Ministers Baby pt. 3 through Fakewhale, a Sign Language GIF responding to the overturning of Roe v. Wade.In November 2024 objkt.com presented an exhibition of her work in the Digital Sector at Paris Photo, a section curated by Nina Roehrs.
