With Reed + Rader's Cretaceous Returns show taking place in our gallery from Thursday, the Protein office has gone GIF-crazy. So we were pretty excited to see new site 15Folds launch, a cultural GIF experiment devised by Margot Bowman, Sean Frank and Jolyon Varley - three friends interested in using animated GIFs to explore to what extent collaborative art can flourish within the parameters of uniquely online media.

Created by digital agency Neverbland (responsible for What's for Lunch, Soho?), the site was inspired by the surrealist parlour game, Exquisite Corpse and movements such as correspondence art. Their resulting project is a website based on the concept of word and picture association but uses animated GIFs in their place.

Each month’s ‘thread’ begins with a GIF posted by 15Folds on a theme - this month, Superstition. 14 selected contributors then take it in turns to create and post an original GIF in 48hr windows until the end of the month. Each GIF must take inspiration from the GIF before, creating a collection of digital art that evolves and distorts like a game of Chinese Whispers.  The experiment isn’t only restricted to the selected contributors though, with visitors to the site also encouraged to respond to their favourite pieces with their own GIF creations.

It's an interesting concept that explores how digital art can flourish on an internet platform, and with Protein as the latest contributor there's no excuse not to check out the site. Get a ticket for our Digital Art forum to find out more about how the internet is shaking up the art world.