These glitchy Game Boy Camera shots are little masterpieces

digitaltrends.com:

Over the course of the pandemic, people have flocked to their creature comforts, and sometimes, that means retro games. Similarly, some have taken the opportunity to create new things for retro gaming platforms or using peripherals. That includes the Game Boy Camera.

The piece of tech, a 0.001-megapixel camera that attaches to a Game Boy by slotting into it like any regular game, has had a resurgence as of late. Pictures people have taken with the peripheral appear frequently across Twitter or other social feeds.

Zoë F. Wolfe is one such artist, although they’re not specifically a Game Boy artist. Instead, they’ve taken the medium and transformed it using a mix of their own hobbies, including glitch art. The resulting pieces of work are unlike anything else produced using a Game Boy Camera; highly edited pieces of art that combine the peripheral’s low fidelity with strange, and sometimes macabre imagery.

Wolfe, like so many others during the pandemic, got back into retro games over the course of their own lockdown. “I was having a good depression period, watching a lot of gaming YouTube,” Wolfe tells Digital Trends. They eventually got their own Game Boy and quickly found an interest in Game Boy modding, all because they wanted to play Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission.

The walls of Wolfe’s studio are lined with art, although one is dominated by a shelf of Game Boy consoles, all sporting after-market mods. Some have new IPS backlit screens, others sport custom shells. Wolfe’s Game Boy Advance that’s used specifically for filming has two crucial mods: an overclock that lets it film at higher frame rates and a built-in HDMI output. However, it’s one of the least visually striking of their numerous handheld consoles.