James May column - James wants your silly car clips - 2010

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I'm sure I can't be the first to have thought of it, but it was a film sequence I hadn't seen before. The world rotating madly around a fixed point, before everything dissolved into madness.

It lasted less than a second, but it was worth it. It's what you get if you mount a camera in the middle of a rear wheel on a rear-wheel-drive car and then pull away with a ‘chirrup' of wheelspin.

It took a while to arrive at this point. At first, I'd mounted it in the centre of the steering wheel, so the viewer could have a wheel's-eye view of my driving. Obviously, your telly or computer is fixed, so the result is me swaying from side to side on the screen - right when I turn left, and vice versa. Not especially revealing, but good to watch.

Meanwhile, the camera's makers would rather you mounted it on the front of your car, just under the bumper, or to the top of your motorcycle crash helmet, so that you can record a lap of the 'Ring. But that's boring.

Welcome to the world of doing silly things with small cameras, which I believe will become all the rage in the way electric lightbulbs once were.

My own is one much in favour in the TV business, the GoPro Hero HD. It's about the size of a decent lump of cheese, or approximately 58x40x30mm, and even when installed in its weatherproof casing is not much bigger than that. It can be configured in a variety of screen formats, records sound, and is high-definition. It can be set to a high frame rate, which means you can produce deliciously smooth slow-motion. It's completely self-contained, recharges from and downloads to your computer, and costs around £300.

'Welcome to the world of doing silly things with small cameras, which I believe will become all the rage'

It's a great bit of kit. It's supplied with a pile of modular mounting parts, including a cleverly curved one that means it can be plonked on your skid lid or the bodywork of a coach-built Bentley. The packaging it comes in shows it mounted to the front air dam of something like an Evo.

But, as with all these things, it needs your input for its true potential to be realised, and for hitherto unseen beauty in the world to be revealed to us. It's a fact of technological progress that any new format tends to be hijacked, usually by the young, and applied to ends not envisaged by its originators.

The cassette tape, for example, was designed to improve the quality of dictation and voice-recording machines. But yoofs recognised that it was much better for ripping off their mates' records instead, and that sort of led to the first Walkman.

SMS texting was originally conceived as a means for communications engineers to send things like complex pass codes to each other, but was quickly embraced by the streetwise as the means for transmitting the new argot, at which it turns out to be gr8, as we know.

So it will be with the GoPro, and a raft of similar small cameras out there. They are being promoted as convenient and easy to use, but I think they may be the route to a new art. I set mine running and shut it in the cutlery drawer, and in doing so made a short film of me selecting a bread-knife, but from the point of view of the knife and its community, rather than mine. This is Turner Prize-winning stuff. If Andy Warhol had owned a GoPro, he'd have made a film about a lap of the Nürburgring from inside the glovebox.

It's small, and it's light, so you can stick it pretty much anywhere. But actually, it's massive. You can now buy a tiny low-res device called a Flycam, which I think was devised to help the flyers of radio-controlled helicopters work out why they'd crashed. But sod that. If you sellotaped one to your index finger you could make a terrific short film about tuning the radio, or changing gear.

I'm interested in this. Little cameras allow us to view the world not as we see it, but as it would appear to other bits of the world, if they had eyes. I'm thinking of a film about the engine in my old 911, seen from the underside of the bootlid, lit by an inspection lamp rewired to stay on permanently. This is new. This is exciting.

Here's a web address: facebook.com/topgear. Make a very short film about your car or bike: an angle that's not been seen before, a way of thinking about driving that hasn't occurred to us yet.

There's no prize for the best or anything like that. This is art, and it is its own reward.

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