If you are in Paris, you may have spotted a cluster of colorful helium balloons up in the skies of the City of Light. And if you looked closer, you may have noticed a miniature house floating along under them, but what you would not know was that this house, modeled after the house in Disney Pixar’s UP!, was installed with a miniature computer and was hacking Instagram as it flew across the French capital. Upstagram was created by the folks at innovation lab Hackerloop, who wanted to try and use Instagram in a way that extended beyond its usual parameters. To use Instagram, users must be registered to the official Android or iOS app, but Hackerloop set themselves the challenge of posting pictures to the app, without ever actually using the app. Instead they installed the house with Raspberry Pi, a computer the size of a credit card, with a microcamera and used custom-built software to thwart Instagram. Valentin Squirelo, Hackerloop co-founder, wrote on the site: “It’s not about hacking Instagram, it’s about using it to build something that we were convinced would be awesome! Creativity is also about pushing existing tools further, in a way they weren’t initially designed for.”
