"The Giphoscope is a breathtaking piece of design and craftsmanship."

The Verge

OKKULT Motion Pictures & The Giphoscope

The GIF as visual gesture and tactile object

Okkult Motion Pictures was born in 2012 as an artistic and curatorial project exploring the animated GIF as a standalone art form.
Not just digital content, but a brief, cyclical, hypnotic image — a visual gesture that condenses time, memory, cinema, and visual culture.
In 2013, from this same vision, the Giphoscope took shape: the world’s first analog GIF player. A mechanical, hand-crafted object designed to give form to the ephemeral.

GIFs and media archaeology

Okkult begins with an intuition: the GIF is more than a format — it’s a contemporary cultural artifact.
Through the Excerpts series — GIFs created from public domain films and archival footage — the project activates a form of media archaeology, giving new life to forgotten fragments and turning them into minimal, layered narratives suspended between nostalgia and digital aesthetics.

From loop to object

The Giphoscope is a natural extension of this vision.
Inspired by the Mutoscope and pre-cinematic devices, it transforms the GIF into a hand-operated sculpture, a mechanism that slows down perception and reintroduces physical presence into digital experience.
Each Giphoscope is a unique piece, built around a specific GIF — a hybrid of memory, machine, and gesture.

A countercurrent gesture

In an era dominated by speed and dematerialization, Okkult and the Giphoscope propose an alternative path: to restore time and weight to images.
Through slowness, repetition, and materiality, these works invite us to look differently at what we’re used to scrolling past.

Collecting the digital

The Giphoscope is also a collectible object. Each piece is handcrafted in Italy and documented through a dedicated photographic set.
This is not nostalgia — it’s transformation: the GIF is not preserved, it is reimagined.