Vintage cameras hacked to use Instagram for Levi’s campaign

 

 

Levi's recently unveiled a project called Station to Station, part of the larger #makeourmark campaign, which brings together modern and vintage esthetics. As part of that, a number of old gadgets have been converted for the modern age, including taking old cameras, and retrofitting them to be able to post stills and video to Instagram.

The modifications were undertaken by San Francisco design company Fake Love, who took a 1939 Graflex still camera, 1953 Bolex B8 video camera, 1901 Underwood No. 5 typewriter, and 1953 Gibson E-125 guitar, and converted the cameras to post to Instagram, the typewriter to Twitter, and the guitar to SoundCloud. How exactly were these aging pieces of hardware modified to more modern demands? You can see a full background on this blogpost, but it was primarily done by loading each with a Raspberry Pi mini computer (and associated camera).

Loaded on a train for a cross country journey, each gadget had an RFID reader and WiFi chip. The RFID reader paired to bracelets that the artists involved wore, so that when each person handled a device, it would switch over to their social media account to post properly. Some of the devices were even further tweaked, like adding Nixie tubes to count the characters left in a Twitter post, or a small LCD showing how many seconds left in an Instagram video.

As for how the images came out? You can check them out at the makeourmark Instagram feed.

(via LaughingSquid)