who are you running from?

My initial idea for Project 4 was to create a video that documented my highly personal experience of living using only a Game Boy Camera. The reasons behind this were threefold; as a way to express both my personal understanding of experience, to address some intriguing concepts I have been struggling with throughout the semester, and to work formally in a medium that I have had highly personal contact with in my youth. As the work progressed however, I found that more and more I was drawn to the purely methodical approach I had to take to “develop” these photographs, and was struggling with trying to work with the formal traits that the way the Game Boy Camera processes light would produce on its own. This conflict effectively added another dimension to the final video, Who Are You Running From?, changing it into something independent of my control.

An object from my youth, I could argue that the Game Boy, and in particular the Game Boy Camera, had a tremendous effect on the way I currently view new media and art in general. My parents didn’t own a TV until I was 16, let alone a gaming console, so the way I worked around this discrepancy between a want for technology and the inability to access it was through handheld gaming. The Game Boy was my first contact with this, and I was immensely intrigued by the way the device would read information of cartridge cards through the touching of metal contacts and subsequently transfer this information into shaded pixels on the screen. The Game Boy Camera would take this a step further by processing light into information stored on the cartridge itself and then running the variable information to and from the Game Boy itself: it was essentially two computers acting as one. I could easily translate this to the workings of a computer later in life. I took all this information into account when I began attempting this project, as well as the effect that this nostalgia would have on the work itself. The conflict between using such an emotionally-engrained machine in order to make art was also present in the way I was effectively using my youth to shape my contemporary work as well as life, creating a Bergsonian relationship between my product and means of production.

The way in which the Game Boy Camera processing light into an ordered bitmap of shaded pixels was an equally important part of the process of Who Are You Running From? . The image that the viewer’s mind forms from the arrangements of these bits is at direct odds with both the way in which the Game Boy Color forms them as well as the manner in which the bits interact with each other. I could change the way in which images interacted with each other through the lo-fi pictures the Game Boy Camera produced, which was very interesting. The blade of a fan in front of a popcorn ceiling could instantly transform into the shadow on an asphalt street. The low resolution of the images (128 x 112 pixels) also allows me to convey a concept I have been struggling with throughout the semester: Confrontation with the Absurd. The viewer can’t escape the way in which the images are broken down into blocks of shading and eventually these images begin to lose their form and meaning, the basic building blocks of the images become all that the viewer can focus on. The dancing pixels do not depict an engrossing world where the viewer is pulled into a seamless moving landscape, but instead form an obstacle the viewer has to overcome; Sure, there is a form of pictorial representation in the video that forms a narrative, but essentially it’s just 13776 blocks of color turning on and off, and that’s just fine.

The separation between my video and my actual involvement was tremendous. The sequence of development was an important part of how I approached the video, and of the way it culminated. To end up with the finished video, I had to go through an enormous process of encoding, a much more obvious path of development than that of a normal camera. First, the Game Boy Camera would pick up patterns in light and transfer it into code. That code would be processed and turned into a bitmap by the Game Boy, then transferred back into the Game Boy Camera after I clicked “save”. I would then transfer that data into a Mega Memory Card, which would then be transmitted into a Game Boy flash cart. The code would then be sent to my pc, and transferred into a .sav file readable by Windows. Then another program would read that file and turn the information back into a bitmap, which I could save. I could then finally transfer the picture into Premiere for post editing. The final video is composed of approximately 1000 stills. This entire process was important to my project, because the level of removal made the final video less about the images themselves, and more about the acquisition of them. The collecting of these images was a way to remove shape the way the video was essentially going to be received, as a collection of experiential information.

            Editing the stills on the Game Boy was difficult and rewarding. I tried to approach the project as a game in a sense. I constructed a set of rules, which informed the way in which I could move about freely between them. The two main rules were that all media I used for the final video had to come from the Game Boy Camera, and all editing of that media had to be done on the Game Boy Camera. For the audio, I used Trippy H, a midi synthesizer built into the “play” section of the Game Boy Camera menu. I tried to match the tone of the audio to the visual tone of the work to further emphasize the mood. I also tried to use audio in the same way the visuals were being used, as bits of a whole, to convey and create an experience. In terms of visuals, I used the brightness/contrast meter available while taking the pictures and a handful of eye stamps in the editing menu of the device. The eye stamps began as a way for me to further distance the viewer from the personal experiences being portrayed as well provide a grounding point within the map of pixels. They developed, however, into a sort of way to distance myself from the work, as well as set the tone for an ultimately unnerving video. They mask identity and take a way a sort of realism from the work, like someone awkwardly laughing when confronted with an intensely discomforting situation.

            The piece I ended up with was far different than what I originally envisioned, but in a way created an experience independent of those it is composed of. It addressed several of the issues that I’ve struggled with throughout the semester, both in a personal manner and through the ways it can be received by the viewer. I found working with the Game Boy Camera an immensely rewarding process, and I will be using the knowledge I gained through this project toward future works with this medium.