Yeah, it's a kind of sleight-of-hand or a magic trick- who would spend hours scrubbing the Times Square cameras to match up with Instagram posts? An artist making something like this would.

Magic tricks often operate in the same way, you have some meticulous preparation that can produce a specific result, one time, under specific conditions. If you obfuscate the preparation and people don't realize how specific the conditions are, then it looks like something more profound happened than really did.