The Camera Bag: the Giphoscope makes GIFs analog

 

 

It's hard to avoid the internet's current obsession with animated GIFs — and it's an obsession that's now spreading into the real world. Last month there was Gifpop, a Kickstarter for lenticular prints based on animated GIFs. Now there's Giphoscope, custom-built, hand-cranked analog GIF players, built on the concept of the Mutoscope.

These hand-cranked flipbooks are made by Italian designers Marco Calabrese and Alessandro Scali. Each one is a one-off art project, and has to be hand-designed and crafted to match the exact GIF or video file that you feel strongly enough about to make immortalized. As you might expect for such an involved endeavor, it's not cheap. Prices start at €299 (around $400), and takes a week to build.

Yes, it's kind of over the top and silly to spend hundreds of dollars preserving a piece of internet ephemera — but you know that someone out there is now scraping together their pennies to make one of their favorite Tom Hiddleston GIF. And frankly, it probably says something about the current internet obsession with GIFs that the Giphoscope even appeared in the first place.

(via Laughing Squid, PopSci)