Art Rise Savannah is looking for the world’s top GIF animations to be featured in one of the largest exhibitions of this particular filetype in the world.

Submission Deadline: January 20th, 2016 at 6PM
NO FEE – Submit as many GIFs as you can muster.go to http://giffest.xyz/
or http://artrisesavannah.org/gif

A special opening screening will be held at Telfair Museums Jepson Center on January 28th with live music by three local musicians. Telfair Museums, one of the oldest art institutions in the South, will be hosting their annual PULSE: Arts and Technology Festival throughout the week.

Following last year’s smashing success of over 960 GIF animations from over 150 countries screened at a maximum capacity show, this year’s GIF Festival is expected to be bigger, better, and giffier than ever.

The GIF Festival will feature a special inaugural screening for the second year in a row at the Telfair Museums Jepson Center for the Arts on January 28th during the PULSE Festival. The PULSE Festival is a city-wide celebration of art and technology coordinated by Telfair Museums. More information on PULSE can be found at telfair.org/pulse.

The 2nd Annual Savannah GIF Festival will feature multiple categories as well as live music to accompany the silent animations during the inaugural screening. During the first GIF Festival in January of 2015, Savannah musicians Sunglow, Garret Kemp, and unknown, played live electronic sets as hundreds of GIFs flashed behind them in the crowded theatre. The musical artists for next year’s screening are still being finalized and will be announced at the start of the year.

Artists interested in having their animations featured in the upcoming festival can find our submission page at giffest.xyz. Submissions are completely free and there is no limit to the number of animations that can be submitted. Also on our website is a video preview of last years festival.

GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, is the filename for the small animations that have taken over the internet as the go-to filetype for cat memes, small video clips, trippy animations and more. Developed by Steve Wilhite in 1987 while working at CompuServe, a GIF is a bitmap image that supports a palette of 256 different colors and multiple frames. Their small size and flexibility have kept them popular with internet artists for over 30 years. When asked by the New York Times how to correctly pronounce the world GIF, Wilhite responded that it was ‘jiff’ like the peanut butter, and not ‘gif’, however the debate still rages on today.

Media? – Please contact Clinton Edminster at [email protected]