01.2 Tribute: Digital Camera

@cyclops_x32

Old New Media Tribute

Edith Järv 

Tom Kouwenhoven

Jurre van Rijswijck

Concept

The year is 1975. The first digital camera, or the ''low cost optical data digitiser'', makes its debut on the cover of Popular Electronics magazine. It was a device built by hobbyists Terry Walker, Harry Garland and Roger Melen, which was then picked up by Cromemco and made into a consumer product called Cyclops. It was the first of its kind and allowed the users to save digital images to a disk. It had a built-in microcomputer and had a resolution of 32x32 pixels (or 0.001 megapixels).

However, not everyone agreed that this was a useful discovery. Kodak, who dominated the photography industry at the time, developed their own digital camera in the same year but did not see any potential in it. After all, why would anyone want to look at photos on a TV screen anyway?

Fast forward to 2019 where Instagram has reached 1 billion active users, all of them using their digital cameras to upload an average of 100 million photos on to the platform every single day. These numbers aren't even that surprising as image-based social media has become the norm and as cameras become more accessible, more content will get produced.

With this project, we were interested in exploring how to connect the two - what would Instagram look like if the digital camera had not been developed any further? As a special tribute to the now-bankrupt Kodak, who refused to adopt this technology for years, we decided to use their user-generated Instagram content to rework on it and make it look like it was taken with the first consumer camera - the Cyclops. After all, Cromemco saw potential in something that would later cause a paradigm shift and help shape the social media addiction that we are all battling with today. 

Motivation

The choice to honor the digital camera is mainly based on the pictures the cyclops is able to produce. The 0.001 megapixel sensor with the incapability of visualizing color results in images that are hard to identify. Even though there is a lack of quality in these pictures, we found it important to honor the Cyclops as an old medium by creating a narrative throughout an Instagram feed. Currently, Instagram is a new medium with the main focus on "the digital image". 

Kodak is a proclaimed name within the analog camera industry. However, Kodak missed out on their chance to be a name of relevance in the market of digital photography, thus we decided to mock Kodak by stealing their Instagram content. We are doing this by re-imagining what the Kodak feed looked like when the scenes were captured with the Cyclops. We deliver upon our hommage to the Cromemco Cyclops.

Implementation

The initial idea was to downscale the downloaded images to 32*32 pixels. The Instagram algorithm does accept such small sized uploads but upscales it, resulting in blurred images. That problem was bypassed by pixelating the images to 32x32 ''blocks'' while maintaining the original size. This allowed us to upload all content as if it was photographed with the cyclops.  

After processing the images, we uploaded them in the same order as Kodaks feed. The resulting account can be found here: https://www.instagram.com/cyclops_x32/

The comparison can be seen in the GIF below: