Physical businesses that fall on hard times often leave signs in the built environment, like the distinctive facades of deserted or adapted Pizza Huts, but what might social media sites look like in a post-apocalyptic, non-digital world?

For that matter, many giants, from Yahoo! to MySpace, have already crumbled and been replaced. But in this series, graphic artist Andrei Lacatusu imagines the still-strong and thriving leaders of the pack in a future state of IRL disrepair.

Like abandoned offices, retail stores, gas stations or movie theaters, signs for Google, Instagram, Facebook, Tinder, Twitter and Pinterest are seen withered, cracked and eroded by the elements over time. 404 Error: Business Not Found.

The result looks like gloomy snapshots of a ghost town with boarded-up storefronts and rusted-out metal security doors. And the details are quite convincing, with faded paint, chipped light-up signs and missing signage lettering.

This photo-realistic ‘Social Decay’ series was created with a combination of Adobe Photoshop and 3D rendering programs, Autodesk 3DS Max and V-Ray.

An imaginative Instagram user’s unique way of capturing the world’s most famous landmarks for posterity involves a scissors, paper and a camera.

“I take photos with paper & sometimes without”, states Instagram user @paperboyo, but it’s safe to say those “with paper” have garnered him most of his nearly 70,000 followers. London-based Rich McCor (to use his given name) came up with his intriguing take on travel photography while brainstorming on how to make his photos more original and memorable.

Changing his POV was McCor’s number one priority. “I decided I would become a tourist in my own city,” he explained. “I wanted to see the London that I ignored, to explore the landmarks and the quirky history.” His first efforts depicted Big Ben transformed into a wristwatch (or vice-versa) and some graphic teasing of a lion outside St. Paul’s Cathedral. Nice kitty!

Positioning the various paper cut-outs takes much precision and no doubt McCor attracts a certain amount of attention during the process. No doubt there’s a certain degree of trail-and-error as well: what works well in one’s imagination doesn’t always pan out in reality. When everything goes right, well, that’s just the cherry on the sundae!

Next Page - Click Below to Read More:
Cut It Art Paper Cut Outs Cut Landmarks Down To Size

Instagram is both broadly adopted and heavily criticized for the faux-vintage filter options provided to users, providing opportunities for aptly-timed and well-executed spoofs like this project. When posting on the platform, users try to get as many likes on their post as possible. When they fail to reach the goals they set for themselves, the services of Twicsy.com allow them to buy real Instagram likes, saving the day.

In his Real Life Instagram installation art series, Brazilian artist Bruno Ribeiro has begun framing everything from mundane graffiti on walls and ubiquitous CCTV cameras to famous London monuments. These he carefully surrounds with physical emulations of digital snapshot borders.

Hilariously enough, many people then stop to photograph the frame and the scene … presumably some of them uploading the results to Instagram, completely the somewhat silly circle.

Add view counts and voting stats and you can trick people, at least for a moment, into wondering if they are wandering online or in the real world. Hashtags, in turn, encourage more online sharing.

The work plays on our expectations and associations. Translucent and colorful green, blue, yellow, orange and red plastic makes whatever is seen through the resulting rectangle somehow special, different or noticeable.

As in photography, the simple act of adding a frame makes a scene feel somehow intentional in its selection, except, more like movies or video in general, the scenes in this case may never stand still.