alt Hacker NewsI don't fully understand the obsession with making less-capable devices and talking about them as though being less capable is a feature by itself.
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You don’t deserve the downvotes for what is a wholly reasonable and not unusual question.
Art really demands constraints, simplicity is clarifying, ephemerality is provocative, and designing your own creative tools invites metacognition. Doing all of this with a highly capable computing device is fascinating, IMO: it’s hypothetical, alternative future stuff. This device is an art experiment, isn’t it?
I have a (still modestly expensive) full frame digital camera that I bought specifically for the purpose of using alternative lens techniques: a home-made tilt shift bellows, wide angle pinhole, vintage lenses, enlarger lenses, and my own simple adaptations of binocular eyepieces and simple achromats, which have an “early photography” vibe, not least because to design them I ended up reading about Daguerre, Chevalier and Wollaston. They have changed my perspective on photography.
There is IMO very little in the way of artistic inspiration to be found at the cutting edge unless you are going to at least partly subvert cutting edge tools to do things they weren’t designed for. So it follows that creative technology is likely to be something of a dialogue with transformation and limitation.
One positive aspect of a camera like this is that it forces you to slow down. Because you can’t take 10 frames per second hoping to get some keepers, you become more intentional when shooting. I took a photography class where we were asked to cover the LCDs with cardboard, so that you couldn’t get an immediate feedback and slow down a bit. Another trick is to format memory cards so that they can only store a few exposures. Going slow sometimes is a good thing.
Cameras are both gadgets and instruments of artistic impression, if you only measure them quantitatively you miss a lot.
These cameras can be fun the same way a toy piano might be fun to a virtuoso pianist. Something different.
It seems to be playing on Nostalgia, judging by these paragraphs like this one:
>The dithered photos look somewhere between a newspaper halftone and an old video game. The processing is part of the fun: you watch the colors come in one by one, like a digital polaroid.
Frankly, it does seem like a very fun gimmick, but also highly impractical. But my adoration of this little thing might just come from a general longing of the low-tech, simple devices of the past.
Something doesn’t have to be for everyone.
There is a good amount of articles of how we worked towards one device for everything, and more are rediscovering single use devices.
One use case is it helps kids understand how things work, including using dvds, etc.
A low fidelity photo allows the imagination to fill in the picture. Insistent kids can relate to lower fidelity as their own writing and drawing evolves.
Restriction is a widely used technique in both art, and life. Consider black and white paintings, or generally paintings which only use shades of a single color? Why are they not using all the colors when they exist?
What about people who do challenging athletic endeavors with limitations? The ice guy climbed up to the base camp of Everest in just his shorts and slippers. Why not wear more?
What about minimalism as a way of life? Why not buy more if you have money?
This is just how humans are.