|
There's
a lot to be said for simplicity,
as anybody who has had to rebuild a 2.7-litre Maserati V6 will testify.
People like simplicity. In Western society, complexity is usually associated
with deviousness, with evil, dishonest intent, and with duplicity. A complex
piece of engineering inspires equal amount of awe and resentment; the
next time you go to a fancy dress party, go as the plot of The Usual
Suspects, and see how many friends you make.
None, you'll make no friends. But if you went as, say, a tortoise, you'd
be popular. People like tortoises because they have no guile; a tortoise
has never accepted money in exchange for favourable treatment at the hands
of a local planning authority.
Instead, a tortoise is solid, honest, and trustworthy. You could put your
life savings inside the shell of a tortoise, and it would never steal
the money and use it to buy a fast car, even though tortoises, of all
nature's creatures, could do with fast cars.
There are lots of simple things on the internet. Objectivists, for example,
or people on IRC. They're all very simple. But in a bad way. I didn't
say that simplicity was always a good thing. It depends on your
point of view (a concept alien to Objectivists, incidentally).
That's enough introduction. Comrades, I bring you the Game Boy Camera.
A lot of people on the internet are interested in novel ways of reproducing
reality, whether digitally, chemically, or in some other method that ends
in -ally.
-
Way back in the 1980s, the cult camcorder to have
was the Fisher-Price PXL 2000, a toy which used cassette tapes to record
ghostly, fragile reflections.
The PXL 2000 illustrates the life-cycle of a toy camera. On release, it
was misunderstood and sold poorly. A product of the intense excitement
surrounding video in the mid-80s, it was too expensive and esoteric for
parents to consider buying for their children, and not marketed in such
a way that it would appeal to hobbyists
.
"The street finds its own use for things", to quote William
Gibson, and although the PXL was busily losing Fisher-Price millions of
dollars, it was firing the imagination of underground film-makers. The
grainy, blurry footage that the PXL produced was quickly dubbed 'Pixelvision',
and a cult was born. The fact that second-hand PXLs were selling for $50
was a help, too.
Nowadays, a PXL-2000 with a video output goes for about $300, which will
buy you a cheap 8mm camcorder or, more pertinently, a budget webcam. PXLs
are beyond the reach of dabblers and hobbyists, which is a shame. All
things must pass.
-
In the world of still pictures, the current PXL
equivalents are the Lomo Kompact Automat and the Holga 120S. The Lomo
is a Russian-made 35mm camera with a unique lens which, along with its
clever light meter and automatic exposure, takes hyper-real pictures with
vivid colours in all lighting conditions. Lomos sell for about £150,
however, and aren't really toy cameras, they're much too competent for
that.
Conversely, the Holga 120S is a cheap, mass-produced plastic camera from
the People's Republic of China, one which, unusually, uses medium-format
film. Available on the internet for around $20, the Holga's trademarks
include images with frayed edges, unexpected light leaks, underexposure,
and all kinds of chaotic accidents bought about by fully-manual focussing
and winding controls.
Both Holga and Lomo have a solid fan-base (the Lomo was extremely trendy
in the mid-90s, but is no longer the novelty it was, whilst the Holga
seems to be on the rise). The world of novelty digital cameras has thrown
up few stars, as digital cameras are currently in the 'too modern to have
a following' phase of cult-dom. One electronic gadget has managed to acquire
a modest following, however - the Game Boy Camera.
Introduced in 1996, Nintendo's Game Boy Camera is just one in a string
of odd peripherals for the best-selling hand-held console. The years since
have seen the Game Boy transformed into an electronic organiser, a musical
sequencer, an e-mail communicator and, most unlikely of all, a sonar device
for fishermen.
Released concurrently with the Sinclair Spectrum-esque Game Boy Printer,
the camera was aimed squarely at children - the cartridge includes a couple
of games, and some sample images featuring the stars of Nintendo's most
popular cartridges (including Pokemon, which had not yet reached
British shores).
Subsequently, the GBC has acquired a modest minority following, although
it has not yet exploded into a full-blown cult. The images it produces
are grainy, contrasty, and extremely primitive - furthermore, they look
best in miniature.
|
|
|
