Digital Nostalgia
Cory Arcangel, Super Mario Clouds (2002)
I find it particularly intriguing that artists who choose to confront the role of technology in society (either as a subject or as a medium) often take a retrogressive stance. This type of work predominantly takes two forms: repurposing (to make something new out of old) or retro/nostalgia (to look towards the past from the present).
On the one hand, work that repurposes older technologies to make them appear new or to arrive at new functionality exists. These include artists working from an environmental perspective, working with circuit bending, game hacking, and creating digital/analog hybrids. Such works serve as a bridge linking our past with our technological present. These formats also comment on the rapid obsolescence of technologies.
Furthermore, a decidedly lo-fi, lo-tech approach is observed in artists working in the fields of 8-bit art, gif art, html and Ascii art as well. A notable example, Cory Arcangel’s Super Mario Clouds strips bare the popular video game, removing all gameplay and interactivity from it. Instead, he takes the clouds that float in the background and excises from their context within the game to create a serene digital projection that playfully and purposefully connects with the collective memory of the millions of people who played this game.
In a commercial sense too, this nostalgia for a pre-digital aesthetic has become an essential marketing tool for such popular and ubiquitous technologies like Hipstamatic on the iPhone among others. Such commercially successful technologies allow users to move forward to new technologies without shedding the appeal created by artifacts from an earlier age.
It is ultimately this drive to connect technology with a sense of collective memory through nostalgia that fascinates me. For most purposes, technology is a driving force in creating social and economic change, and it is associated with the notion of progress. However, in the face of such rapid change, nostalgia seems to be employed as a way to reconcile the rate of change with our (false?) sense of loss.
Research questions:
* What role does nostalgia exert on shaping technology?
* How do artists, scientists, technologists, and culture in general reconcile the drive for progress and change with nostalgia?
* What do these early attempts at representing our collective memory of technology say about the way in which technology is remembered?
Many questions remain to be answered and I hope to use some of the background provided by philosophers and scholars like Heidegger’s “The Question Concerning Technology,” Stephanie Coontz’s The Way We Never Were, Svetlana Boym’s The Future of Nostalgia, Linda Hutcheon’s “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern,” and Baudrillard’s “Hystericizing the Millennium” to inform this research.
