My Capturer doesn’t take very good photos, but it does take interesting ones. These photos are full of artifacts that communicate something about the device’s creation, its limitations, and the circumstances of its time and place.

These artifacts are new and unique. If I want cool artifacts, I could just buy a retro film camera. But that, to me, is resigning oneself to nostalgia. It’s saying that the only way we can have cool artifacts is by looking to the past, not looking to the future. These artifacts come from limitations only reasonably found in homemade hodge-podge tech, so you won’t find “low quality” in exactly this way anywhere else.

These artifacts are also honest: they emerge genuinely as products of the very real quirks in the homemade tech, rather than simulations of authenticity.

For more about artifacts and how technology affects our aesthetic sensibilities, click here.

Why I Created this Invention

Mourning Memories

When I came back from my travels abroad, I was faced with a problem I had never encountered before. A weight descended on me: an amorphous sense that something was slipping away like sand falling between my fingers.

I had experienced all these grand, dramatic, and life-changing moments throughout my travels, and I’m sure I’ll never forget them. But what about the little things – the moments of simple beauty? The small quips, the inside jokes, the awkward delightful oddities of day-to-day life. What is the point of experiencing these little joys if they won’t be remembered?

I needed a way to capture these grains of sand.

Ugly Artifacts & The Blue Sheen

What is the aesthetic of the 2020s? It’s difficult to say, because aesthetics are usually defined in hindsight. Aesthetics of an era are typically a constellation of different things & how we remember them. Bell-bottom jeans defined the 70s, while dial-up tones remind us of the 90s and early 2000s. Especially important to these aesthetics are the ways in which these memories are recorded. Every recording method includes “artifacts” – ways a record is distorted by the technology that records it. On a typewriter, this might be physical smudges or letters missing due to a broken key. Film cameras contain lots of artifacts, created by distortions in film technology. The color-grading of old film (eg. Technicolor) would be an especially nostalgic example. Early VHS scan lines would be another example of an artifact. These artifacts – again, limitations and affordances of technology – play a pivotal role in defining the aesthetics of an era.

Consider the artifacts of our technology today – and how they will contribute to the aesthetics of our time looking back. We live in an era of hyperrealistic photography where photos have more detail than our day-to-day lived experience. With a smartphone photo, you can zoom in and scrutinize every pore of your skin, every blemish and imperfection, to a level that is “unrealistic” when compared to real life. While high resolution digital photography gives the illusion of a modernity having graduated from artifacts, it’s actually anything but. Artifacts today are still present, they’re just less obvious and therefore more insidious. Today’s smartphone lenses warp and distort people in ways that go consciously unnoticed but contribute to a strange, cold aesthetic. Today’s ubiquitous capacitive touch screens cool the warmth from images, placing a barely noticeable “blue sheen” over everything.

Is this how my era will be remembered? One where every blemish is scrutinized to pixel perfect precision? One where my experiences feel uncannily distorted in a way I can’t quite place? Will my life have its own blue-light digital malaise cast over it, denying me the warmth and romanticism of my own memories?

If you’re interested in this discussion of the coldly digitized aesthetics of the 2020s, you might also be interested in this.

An Issue of Honesty

Silicon Valley has responded to the above complaints in a very Silicon Valley-brand way: by correcting the problems of technology with, you guessed it, more technology. Digital filters, like the ones you see on Instagram, often attempt to impose or reconstruct artifacts of bygone photo-capturing technologies to artificially re-introduce a sense of warmth or nostalgia in an image. Some filters (see image right) even go so far as to re-introduce fabricated dead pixels or simulated scratches on simulated film. It’s a fascinating approach: a recognition that a technology has caused an artistic or philosophical problem, and attempting to solve that problem by simulating “worse” technology using even more sophisticated technology. Is that what progress in the digital age is? Progress looping back in on itself, recursively self-referencing to fill in the holes it creates?

These artifacts are dishonest. They are imposed artificially, they do not come as natural results of technological limitations.

An Issue of Trust

Modern technology is dishonest, but even more importantly, it’s untrustworthy. Nearly every digital product today feels like another tendril of a data-hungry monster, another grossly dishonorable incursion on privacy. Every “feature” they shove down our throats feels more and more like the sales pitch of a Trojan horse – “put a microphone in your kitchen, it’s good for you! Put a camera on your fridge, it’s convenient!”

Voice recording is a crucial part of the creative process for me. Yet even with my De-Googled smartphone locked down with GrapheneOS and a 256 bit AES encrypted hard drive, can I really trust to confide in my voice notes my most intimate thoughts? Sometimes, I’ll be on a roll espousing a very personal idea into my voice recording app, when suddenly, my creative output is thwarted by a speed bump. An intrusive thought, where I look down at the glowing pane of glass in my hand, and I ask myself, “am I alone right now?”

Construction

Each one of my inventions has to be my first something. That way, I learn the most even when covering well-trodden ground.

This device is, to date, the smallest and most portable device I’ve ever built.

As with all of my inventions, I began with a hubris that was swiftly crushed. “This device will be so easy!” I thought. After all, the circuitry and programming was quite uncomplicated.

But beyond what can easily be itemized, described, and pinned down, there’s a third more abstract consideration I had failed to take into account: craftsmanship.

Craftsmanship is that unspoken third thing that I often overlook. Sure, I can get all the components of something working in isolation, but bringing them together with elegance is more difficult to predict.

TLDR: Fitting all of that hardware in an Altoids can is really hard.

Originally, I was going to use my go-to tried-and-true power method: the humble 9-volt battery. It became apparent this was a laughably stupid idea when I placed the battery in the Altoids tin and realized it took up nearly all the vertical space.

With a sigh, I realized I’d have to use a Lithium Ion battery. But there was a catch. I’ve been tinkering since I was about 14 years old. At several points throughout my life, I’ve attempted to use a lithium-ion battery. Should be pretty straightforward, right? Well, be it by misfortune or human error (it was definitely human error), every time I have attempted to use a lithium battery it has exploded or caught fire within a few seconds of me soldering it in. Every time. Without fail.

I fear lithium ion batteries. So many memories of detonated inventions flashed before my eyes as this realization dawned on me. But, I’m proud to say, this was the first time I’ve implemented a lithium ion successfully. No, scratch that, this was the first time I’ve implemented a lithium ion battery without it literally exploding in my face.

There is a fairness inherent to tinkering; an agreement between you and the machine. If you break something, fair enough, it was your fault. If you burn out a component because you were working too quickly, or arrogantly blow out a capacitor due to over confidence, fair enough, ’tis the tricks of the Tinkering Spirits. If something doesn’t work, it’s not because the thing is at fault, it’s because you weren’t smart or persistent enough to figure it out. There is humility to this type of creation: you and you alone decide if you’ve succeeded or failed. The judge is reality itself.

One thing that frustrated me about this project was recurring issues that broke this sacred and timeless contract. Getting the camera module (pictured above) to work was incredibly difficult, not due to my own folly or shortcoming, but actually due to poorly made components themselves. I ended up having to buy several of these cameras, because sometimes they were duds-on-arrival. I went through several rather expensive cameras; some of which I burned out due to my own error, others came broken, and still others broke with nominal usage. A lengthy extension to the project timeline based on factors outside of my control.

(Then again, there was that one time I lined 5V logic into a 3.3V data circuit. But the documentation was in Chineese! So I only take half the blame, damn you Tinkering Spirits!)

I am glad to say now, though, that I have arrived at a design that is stable and consistent. (And, durable – this thing has survived several raves.)

(Above) The early prototyping of the Capturer’s main circuit. This is where it all began.

Remember fellow tinkerers, the bugs want you to give up. You have only failed once you’ve stopped trying.

-Wes