Last thursday the opening of ‘The animated Gif exhibition’ took place in Antwerp. It was a nice evening with lots of people, short conversations, a band, finger food and drinks, some speeches and a lot of gifs. Crap = Good presented the ‘Animated gif player’, a device, like its name suggests, capable of playing .gif file formats.

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.

On the exposition all of the submissions where beamed on a wall, and the 20 best ones you have voted for got printed on round discs, ready to be played by the gif player. All the images, of the machine and the opening at read more!

And if you want to make one yourself, you can find a complete DIY guide right here  :)

[flickrset id="72157628124544256" thumbnail="thumbnail" photos="" overlay="true" size="large"]

Categorised in: Art, Editorial, Exhibition, Product

This post was written by Pieterjan Grandry