As GIF creators - OKKULT Motion Pictures is our brainchild - we know it's very easy to show/share an animated GIF on the web, but it's hard to find an offline GIF player to exhibit and sell a GIF as a single, unique artwork.
We have conceived, designed and handcrafted the Giphoscope with the objective of proposing to artists/galleries/
museums/collectors a minimalistic, unconventional, retrofuturistic analog GIF player, entirely tailor made andhandmade in Italy. Thanks to Giphoscope, animated GIF becomes a tangible and exclusive artwork.
The Giphoscope is inspired by the Mutoscope, an early motion picture device, patented by Herman Casler on November 21, 1894.
The Mutoscope worked on the same principle as the "flip book". The individual image frames were conventional black-and-white, silver-based photographic prints on tough, flexible opaque cards. Rather than being bound into a booklet, the cards were attached to a circular core. A reel typically held about 850 cards, giving a viewing time of about a minute (from Wikipedia).
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.