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"Welcome to our twenty-first Tumblr Tuesday, where every Tuesday we celebrate our love of Tumblr by interviewing the mastermind behind a new blog. Tumblr, a New York City based startup, is like the FFFFound for the rest of the world. It\u2019s as shareable and fast-paced as Twitter but populated with more in-depth text and rich images.\r\n\r\nFor this week's Tumblr Tuesday, we caught up with Andrew Emond\u00A0the creator of Mastergram, a site that runs famous and iconic images through Instagram filters.\u00A0We first covered the site in September, shortly before Time claimed it as a Tumblr of the Week. As it continues to generate interest and controversy, we decided to sit down with Emond to find out who he is and what his photographic experiment in distortion project is all about.\r\n\r\nCBM: Who is the master behind Mastergram?\r\n\r\nAndrew Emond:\u00A0I\u2019m a photographer and designer from Montreal, Canada. My most recent major photography project has involved making my way through the sewer systems of my city, which I keep a record of at Under Montreal.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCBM: What was the inspiration behind Mastergram?\r\n\r\nAE: It started out as one of those \u201Cwouldn\u2019t it be funny if\u2026\u201D kind of things. I wanted to poke fun at the technology and I was surprised when I saw that no one else had done it yet. I had never used Instagram before starting the site, although my wife used it a lot at home. Like some photographers, I had mixed feelings about the way the app was being used and the extent to which it was changing the look of photography. I wanted to make a bit of a statement about what the app was doing to images, for better or for worse. I went into this with some bias against Instagram, but the more I used it, the more I began to understand its appeal and see its potential as a creative tool.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCBM: Oftentimes, you're blending very old art with new technology? What inspires you about the intersection of old art and today's new technology?\r\n\r\nAE:\u00A0I don\u2019t think it really matters if the work is old or new. I\u2019m also converting photographs taken over the past decade, but many of the older ones just happen to be better known. I like the idea of new technology being used to reinterpret or reimagine existing work. In a related photographic experiment, I recently put up a site where I converted Robert Frank\u2019s \u201CThe Americans\u201D into sound. I love the idea of tools being used in ways that were unintended. It\u2019s an easy way to get people talking, and in the case of Mastergram, there\u2019s been a lot of debate about copyright and whether or not Instagram makes photos look good or bad.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCBM: What are other examples of art that you've seen that are similarly tweaked with new tech?\r\n\r\nAE:\u00A0I think the best place to look for similar sorts of tweaks is YouTube where there\u2019s an abundance of people doing things like re-cutting movie trailers or transforming pop songs into twenty minute opuses by slowing them down or applying autotune. Obviously some of these things are silly, but it\u2019s always interesting to see. Similarly, there are artists now creating work using thousands of snapshots posted to Flickr or Google Street View\u2019s imagery. We\u2019ve never been more inundated with digital photography, and I think it\u2019s fantastic to see people creating new work using this flood of data.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCBM: How many contributions have you received? Or do you tweak all the photos yourself?\r\n\r\nAE:\u00A0I\u2019ve done all the tweaks myself. I\u2019ve received requests from people for certain photos, but so far no contributions. I did have someone from Turkey offer to be my \u201Cassistant\u201D, but I assured them that it was far too simple a project for me to ever require that sort of help.\r\n\r\nCBM: What are the 5 best Mastergrams?\r\n\r\nAE:\u00A0I couldn\u2019t pick five. Sometimes the \u201Cbest\u201D ones are simply those that dramatically change the tone of the original. Of course some people might also see those as the worst because they\u2019ve debased an image that\u2019s often been held in high regard. My personal favourite is the famous photo of a bullet passing through an apple taken by Harold Edgerton, if only because the thought of such a picture being taken with an iPhone just seems so ridiculous to me.\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nCBM: What are other Tumblrs that we should know about?\r\n\r\nAE:\u00A0I\u2019m relatively new to the tumblrverse, to the point where I\u2019m not even sure if that\u2019s the term people use. Tumblrs I enjoy are photographer Alec Soth\u2019s Little Brown Button\u00A0and Proustitute. More closely related to Mastergram, Instagraham is always posting good material that makes use of the app.\r\n\r\nHope you enjoyed this! Also, check out our Tumblr Tuesday from weeks\u2019 past:\r\n\r\n\tClients From Hell features the horrors of the creative biz\r\n\tMeet the woman behind Silicon Valley Ryan Gosling\r\n\tMeet the man behind \u201CAnimals Being Dicks\u201D\r\n\tLoot-alikes matches London looters with their celebrity counterparts\r\n\tFoodspotting\u2019s Amy Cao picks her top 5 Tumblrs for foodies\r\n\tThe Fax Blog takes submissions by fax (only if you have the secret #)\r\n\tStocking is the new Planking\r\n\tF*ck You Yelper takes down one critic at a time\r\n\tHungover Owls\r\n\tPaper Tissue\r\n\tCAPTCHArt\r\n\tKim Jong-il Looking at Things\r\n\tMagical Game Time\r\n\tHot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street\r\n\tLiterally Unbelievable\r\n\tThe Fluffington Post\r\n\tDid You Get the Memo?\r\n\tDanger is Everywhere\r\n\tANIMALS TALKING IN ALL CAPS\r\n\tNerd Holiday\r\n\tReal Menswear\r\n\tThe Burning House\r\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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