Teresa Tam's Game Boy as Cultural Preservation

“TTES: The ROM Collection” is the first iteration of Teresa Tam's newly developing project.

It utilizes DIY and hacker tools to repurpose retro technology, and explore bootlegging as a form of cultural transference and memory preservation. The project debuts at the 11th PARTICLE+WAVE on Friday, February 20th at 6PM.

What draws you to using the Game Boy as a medium, and how does it connect to cultural preservation?

Using the Game Boy architecture and cultural sphere is cultural preservation. When it comes to art making, there's always a sense of using things for professional purposes. Part of the fun of being an artist is I can take unserious things into a serious medium. 

For example, you would play, share and swap games with your cousins and connect despite distance. It's nice to go back to a gaming console that I grew up with and I have a lot of fond memories around, which is, in itself, a part of cultural preservation. A lot of the games that I played were Japanese, and growing up in Calgary, this was one of the very few times where I got as close as I could to my Chinese heritage. It was important to make games that tapped into the nostalgia of the time when they were originally released. It's fun, but also, there are actual cultural and artistic reasons why I use it. 

For people whose technical skills stop at blowing into a cartridge, what does it actually mean to DIY a Game Boy for TTS ROM? 

You have to take it apart, unscrew the shell, snip, desolder and solder some things and add more wires. That's the easiest way of describing it. The Game Boy Advance was a very compact and well polished system. But, at the end of the day, it's just a circuit board. If you understand circuit boards, that's all there is to it. 

The Game Boy Hardware is very limited. How did you decide what gets sacrificed with such a tiny amount of space? 

I didn't get to decide what was sacrificed. The hardware basically tells me what has to be sacrificed and I just have to work with it and push the limits. The game engine has a maximum of eight bits. Even though I'm only given eight bits for depth of image, I like the challenge. I think about what information is necessary or redundant, and how human brains can fill in the gaps.

You talk about bootleg DVDs giving you partial access to culture through bad translations and missing context. Do you think misunderstanding is a failure or is it actually part of the experience? 

Personally, I try not to have it as purely failure. Because even if it is a failure, it's still part of the diasporic experience. When you're trying to unofficially understand a different culture and not in the same context, there's always going to be a misunderstanding. The misunderstanding could also be a space for resentment or a space where a lot of people feel a sense of not belonging. So I would say, it's a bit of both.

What do you think we lose when every piece of media becomes easily accessible and searchable? 

The reason why specific games were so important and significant isn't because it's a good game by today’s standards, but back then it had technological milestones that nothing else could have matched, or it changed the gaming industry in terms of how they distributed games. When anyone can access any media, we lose context and a sense of why it was important to begin with.

Pirated and bootleg media remains a key method for accessing content that's censored, underfunded, or restricted to local audiences. If your work were widely circulated without your permission, would that feel like a violation or a strange kind of success? 

Personally, I always find it to be a success rather than a violation. If someone copies me, it means that they feel like it's worth stealing or taking from. I never view my work as a particular aesthetic and I work intentionally that way. I always consider my work to be based on process and not on an end result.

So if someone ends up doing the same thing where they have a console in the shape of their head, even though they are copying, I personally wouldn't be mad about it, because I know that it won't look or feel the same. My process can’t be translated or stolen, as it’s not very linear or efficient. It’s intuitive. By the time someone steals, I've moved on to something else. So, the next iteration of this project would probably look actually quite different.

The ROM collection is the first iteration of a larger project. Was this always planned as a series, or did the project simply refuse to stop once you started? 

When I first started it, I just knew that there was more that could be done with it that I just didn't have time for and tap into for this festival. It would be a shame to not continue. It's my first time hacking a gaming console and making games in this way, and there is more potential for it.

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