Behold, GIFs in the Real World with the Giphoscope

You’re looking at the Scorpion Dagger Giphoscope from Officina K, what the creators are describing as “a minimalistic, unconventional, retrofuturistic analog GIF player.”

Working from the basic principles of Edison’s kinetescope (and the old-time “spinning bird on a string” optical illusion), Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali’s Giphoscope makes the digital analog for some reason, but it’s specifically inspired by 1894’s Mutoscope, designed by inventor Herman Casler who mechanized the flipbook for the Victorian era.

A prospective Giphoscope customer would need to send in their .gif to the folks at Officina K, which would then be cut and sized to fit the device for all of your dramatic beaver amusement.

I suppose the equivalent in another medium would be an mp3 to vinyl setup. Oh, that’s a thing that exists, too.

What Officina K (the gif creators at OKKULT Motion Pictures) have done here is given permanence to something more or less fleeting. Of course, once something is online, it’s effectively there forever. But a meme, an image, one of these little momentary flickers is quickly discarded as we move on to the next thing. Whether or not a gif is something worthy of permanence, I don’t know, but here’s something to preserve it.