INSTAGRAM takes a perfect, crisp image from a smartphone and runs it through filters that crop it into a square and artificially wilt the photo to look as if it were taken with a 1970s snapshot camera. The process is entirely digital. A new app, called InstaCRT, goes a step further, marrying an app and truly analog technology.Written by Swedish programmers, it takes an old-school approach. Take a picture or select an image from the photo library, and the program transmits the image via the internet to the developers' office in Stockholm. The image is loaded and projected on a one-inch square grayscale cathode-ray tube (CRT) display extracted from an old VHS camera. A digital SLR camera focused on the CRT snaps the picture, which is then uploaded to a secret URL passed back to the app. The image is stored in the photo library in its converted form. The photo might have scan lines or odd lighting. It is, after all, a real picture, and thus imperfect. (The developers note that they keep a copy of every picture taken for debugging purposes, but promise never to distribute any of them.)It is a great play on the faux-faded look popularised by Instagram, which tries to evoke in the viewer a sense of distant nostalgia for something that just happened. By turning to a physical process, the developers successfully highlight the crazy artifice of the many snapshot apps, ...
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