Photo courtesy of Art Rise Savannah
Written by Shelby Loebker ”
The second annual Savannah GIF Festival will be held on Jan. 28 as part of the “PULSE: Arts and Technology” Festival at the Jepson Center for the Arts.
Art Rise Savannah, a local non-profit arts organization, is sponsoring the festival for its second year. Clinton Edminster, the executive director of Art Rise, explained how in the fall of 2014 the organization was approached by the Telfair Museum to create a “satellite event that could be incorporated thematically into the PULSE Festival.” This collaboration resulted in the 2015 GIF Festival, which featured over 900 GIF animations submitted by participants world-wide.
The success of the 2015 GIF Festival brought about its revival at the 2016 PULSE festival. This year’s GIF Festival will essentially follow the same format as the previous year. Participants submit original GIF animations online, the submissions are compiled into one video and the full video is screened at the festival.
Every submitted GIF that meets basic size requirements and content suitability guidelines will be played in the screening. Edminster said he hopes these loose guidelines will encourage artists to explore “what really is a GIF? If you create it and it ends in ‘.gif,’ we’ll show it,” he said.
Submissions to the festival will be separated into categories and showcased in a screening beginning at 6 p.m. on Jan. 28 at the Jepson Center. The video will be accompanied by live music from two local electronic music groups. Passes to the PULSE Festival include access to the GIF Festival and can be purchased online at the Telfair Museums website, or in person at the Jepson Center. The rest of the festival runs from Jan. 21 – 31.
Edminster said, “the goal of the festival is to get people excited about the new mediums that technology offers, especially in the shareability of GIFs.” He stressed the uniqueness of the event, explaining that is one of very few physical mass GIF expositions in the country, and called the GIF Festival “a once in a lifetime event.”
