Abstract
Mimi Thi Nguyen turns to fan-made animated GIFs fixating on the singular moment of Jung Kook’s button coming undone during a performance. Turning to the erotic possibilities of this looping instance of uncalculated flesh, in “Jung Kook’s Button, or the GIF that Keeps on Giving,” she examines the communal desire captured in this repetitious striptease to highlight the pleasure of the obsessive return and anticipation of the GIF. Without temporal unfolding—or full undressing—these animated GIFs specialize in selective movements that give life to desire through the anticipation of what is already to come again. That such desire is also communal, while asynchronous, is all the more striking. It is as such that these fan-generated temporal loops also express something significant about the forms of perpetual singularity found in the moment, the detail, the fragment –at which BTS excels in generating, endlessly—that demand the constancy of our attention.