This is the Image Fulgurator, half guerrilla-art stunt and half homemade-gadget awesomeness. Berlin based artist Julius von Bismarck uses his oddly named camera-mod to project images onto street furniture where they appear in the photos of strangers, but remain invisible to their eyes.

How? It’s simple. The device has a slave unit on top which is triggered when it sees a flash fire. This triggers his own flash, which fires through the back of the camera, through a film slide containing his slogan and then on and out through the lens at the front. This works because a camera is pretty much a projector in reverse. And because the light-graffiti is fired at the exact same moment the unsuspecting victim takes a picture, it ends up in their photograph and paranoid mind ramblings result. Neat.

Here’s a video of von Bismarck in action at fake Berlin tourist hot spot, Checkpoint Charlie (no relation):



Bismarck isn’t the first to use a camera that looks like a gun. The kind of thing that would see statesiders lobbed in Guantanamo has a history in Europe. Take the Enjalbert Photo Revolver de Poche, for instance, a French gun-cam from 1883 which recently sold for around $90,000.

Inside the barrel is the lens, and inside the magazine are 10 16×16 photographic plates. It seems gimmicky, and at the time the image quality from those tiny negatives would probably be terrible, but being able to fire off 10 shots between reloads would have been a novelty for those used to plate cameras.

Rare gun cam sells for £45,000 [Amateur Photographer]

Over in the United States, meanwhile, the Orange County Cops take the obvious step for a SWAT team. Instead of making a camera which looks like a gun, why not just clip a camera onto a real gun? The PistolCam is just that.

The video camera sits below the barrel and captures 30fps video for up to an hour. We covered this $700 accessory when it entered testing at the Newburgh Police Department, and I mentioned that it was nothing more than an amazing real-life game of Quake. I stand by that, although so far no footage has turned up on YouTube, which was my other prediction.

Pistol Cam shoots while you shoot [BBG]

Skipping back across the pond to Germany, we find this antidote to all the cameras. The IR.ASC is an infrared light mounted on a headband. Invisible to the eye, it whites out your head on security cameras, protecting your identity whether you are up to no good or just tired of being watched everywhere you go.

We imagine that if this were used in the same place as the Image Fulgurator, some kind of singularity would result, and the Universe would end in a matter/antimatter, don’t-cross-the-streams implosion.

CCTV Busting Infra-Red Headset Makes You Invisible [Gadget Lab]

Tomorrow I will be meeting up with von Bismarck for a chat about his Fulgurator and to see what other hardware hacks he has in mind. Until then, here’s a schematic of the device. The website says it is copyrighted, as any creative act should be, but that doesn’t stop you making your own.

Got any questions you want me to ask von Bismarck? Put them in the comments below!

Project page [Julius von Bismarck]