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Design

Take Polaroid Pictures of Your Online Life

Adrià Navarro’s Polaroid Cacher repurposes a Polaroid camera into a desktop printer.

One thing that digital technology has effectively made obsolete but still clings to is the Polaroid camera. Having a digital camera on your phone (and replicating the aesthetic of a Polaroid with Instagram) meant that this beloved camera went the way of a lot of dead media—it lives on through its nostalgic currency, never completely vanishing from our hearts.

Adrià Navarro and DI Shin have created a digital experiment, the Polaroid Cacher, using this analogue device, which captures the fleeting nature of our online experiences with a physical memento. All that time spent on Facebook and Twitter or waiting for YouTube videos to load—all those moments will be lost in time like teardrops in the rain, to quote a fictional android. But no more!

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Recording those precious digital moments like you would a sub-standard night out, Navarro’s device is essentially a printer housed in an old polaroid case, which uses a browser plugin to allow you to take a quick snap of your screen whenever you want. This then gets wirelessly printed out so you get a printed physical record of your virtual activities, so you can look back at them and laugh with your hologrammed friends when you’re old and half cyborg.

Navarro explains the reasoning behind it.

We believe that our daily online activity—conversations, discoveries, games—is as meaningful as our activity in the physical world and, as such, should be preserved the same way we try to capture every important moment in our life. Especially because most of these experiences will be soon forgotten, lost under layers of information, databases and outdated services.

[via The New Aesthetic]

@stewart23rd