Instagif is a Polaroid camera that ‘prints’ GIFs instead of pictures
We all know how popular GIFs are and how they have shaped the way we capture images.
Going back to the Futurist movement of the early 20th century and the works of Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla, GIFs or moving images have always had a role to play.
Although the art works in terms of style were two dimensional as they were painted on a canvas but in terms of subject matter, they depicted certain features of a more dynamic subject matter rather than a static one.
Of course, film making redefined dynamism and still images in terms of the essence of how we perceive them. GIFs reinvented the hybrid bond between photography and videography.
Polaroid cameras, however, don’t create any linkages between still images and moving images but do have an important role in reintroducing the mass audience to tangible images rather than digital works.
Its task of immediately printing a static image gives the user a more intimate touch to the image. Printing dynamic images on the other hand always seemed a task too far fetched with no real equipment helping us achieve that. This is of course until we discovered what a young Redditor named Abhishek Singh was up to.
If you were wondering what it would be like to hold a GIF in your hand, you’re not alone. Singh has created a version of a Polaroid camera that instead of printing still images “prints” GIFs.
Inspired primarily by the Polaroid OneStep camera, Singh’s “Instagif” — as he calls it — ejects a Polaroid-sized LCD that plays back a just-recorded GIF.
Moreover, it’s even programmed to slowly fade in the way a Polaroid photo would. Singh built the camera from scratch and it took him the course of four weeks.
He modeled and 3D printed the camera himself using a Raspberry Pi in both the camera and the cartridge.
In the end, this GIF that you could hold in your hand isn’t exactly the most advanced technological development we’ve seen and as one Reddit thread sums it up — “it is incredibly silly and entirely pointless, yet a Great project that made me smile”– it certainly is one of those things you sit and enjoy.
Of course, there is no readily available camera that does this yet but if you follow Singh’s precise instructions you may be able to create this yourself.