GIF Player

An animated gif is a digital file format where multiple images are being looped after each other, creating a short and small sized movie clip. The file type was first introduced in 1987 as a first online movie, but soon lost its function with the increasing speed of internet and the possibility to upload longer and bigger movies. The document type however has gained back some of its popularity and is even entering the field of Art today. In 1832, Jozeph Plateau, a Belgian physicist invented the phenakistiscope. The first device which was able to show a moving image and which is considered to be the pre-runner of modern cinema. The only down part however was the fact that it could only show short movie clips in a loop. An animated gif is exactly that, and after some research on Plateau’s original design, Pieterjan Grandry succeeded to build a device capable of playing animated gifs, incorporating led lights, microchips and magnetic sensors. The Gif player is a wooden box, much like a turntable, with a dimmer to adjust the speed of the animation and a small looking hole in the front.

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I found this really interesting that people were still revisiting the now more or less defunct GIF, which seems to only have a life span on blogging sites such as tumblr. It's inspirational to see such simple things being given a new creative twist. I could imagine this kind of technique used on a much larger scale for cheap and effective advertising, for example on billboards, parts of the image could move, or even the moving photographs which became popular on the internet in which really slight things move, like a skirt blowing in the wind. I could see myself looking twice if I thought I saw a static billboard move out of the corner of my eye.