total recall: longing for connection in the (post)digital age i may be an unbeliever, but i am an...
TRANSCRIPT
Total Recall: longing for connection in the (post)digital age
I may be an unbeliever, but I am an unbeliever
who has a nostalgia for a belief.
(Pier Paolo Pasolini)
I don’t like nostalgia, unless it’s mine.
(Lou Reed)
‘We use the screen to find anything from a lover to a meal, but but we want no webcam or avatar. We want flesh and blood.' Illustration by Satoshi Kambayashi
Marina Abramovic with a visitor512 Days, Serpentine Gallery, LondonJune 2014
“In the digital age there is a real necessity for a live experience, for physical interaction.” Hans Ulrich Obrist Serpentine Director
“The future of the book is the blurb” (Marshall McLuhan)
BYE BYE BOOK!
“Pervy for paper”
Deep emotional attachment to the codex. (Cory Doctorow)
“that books endure suggests we endure,Our inner tale not writ in the water of e-ink”
(John Updike)
“Some publishers may be able to take advantage of the prestige and aesthetic motivations for a preference for physicial media but long term, physical formats are only going to be a sideshow to their digital successors.”
C. Sutcliffe “What publishers can learn from the vynil comeback” (2015)http://tinyurl.com/nm68ffo
It’s all about conversation
I used to say that Twitter is the perfect form for poetry. It is the poetry of society in the modern age. In engaging social media and the forms of communication it makes possible, again and again we find ourselves deeply moved with emotion. By anger, joy, even feelings that are new and indescribable. This is poetic. It makes today a unique time. (Ai Weiwei On Poetry, 2015)http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/250654
Naturally Born Vintage
March 21st, 2006
Naturally Born Vintage February, 14th 2005
The internet’s most lovingly curated museum of vintage photographic oddities
http://www.retronaut.com/
The Internet: a nostalgia machine trapping us in the past?
At the moment, our culture suffers from acute nostalgia, a retrophilia industrially produced for mass consumption.
A sense of nostalgia makes us part more easily with our cash.
Belongings become easily conflated with belonging.
The pre-packaged usable past as a marketing device
Longing is female (Google Image Search)
http://www.the.me/lomography-leave-the-digital-grind-behind/
Live offline but share online
1. Leave the Digital Grind Behind2. The Return of Luck, Coincidence, Contingency, Chance, Fortune and Surprise3. Expect the Unexpected and the Excitement of Experiment4. Lomography will bring back Overtones, Nuances, Smells, Shades. Dirt & Dust5. Film & Paper Ensure Originality, Authenticity & Eternity6. Look Twice7. Let Loose with Lomography8. The Avent-Garde is Analogue9. A Bazillion Fresh Analogue Tunes Await Us10.The Analogue Future is the Home of a Whole Lot of Love, Joy, Fun, Sex &
…Paradise!http://microsites.lomography.com/prophecies/the-10-prophecies
http://www.londonanalogue.comhttps://twitter.com/Londonanaloguehttp://www.facebook.com/londonanalogue
Vinyl record
Photos by F..von Prondzynski
Taken with iPhone6 camera, edited with Photoshop
Analogue phone
Post-digital hybridity
12 Reasons Why Timehop Is Guaranteed To Make You Feel Depressed
http://www.buzzfeed.com/scottybryan/back-to-the-future#.be9PYrwBx
“Nostalgia is not pain free, there is a reason we call it bittersweet. Done right nostalgia can be poignant and useful, but the line between that and painful is extremely subjective, not the sort of thing algorithms excel at discerning”
Mary Beth Oliver, Media Effects Research Lab, Penn State http://www.theverge.com/2015/4/2/8315897/facebook-on-this-day-nostalgia-app-bringing-back-painful-memories
NostalgiaIn counterpoint to our fascination with cyberspace and the virtual global village, there is a global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world. Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals. The term “virtual reality” was in fact coined by Henri Bergson, not Bill Gates. Originally it referred to the virtual realities of human imagination and conscience that couldn't be mimicked by technology.
(Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and its Discontents”, 2001)
Modern nostalgia is paradoxical in the sense that the universality of its longing can make us more empathetic towards fellow humans, and yet the moment we try to repair that longing with a particular belonging—or the apprehension of loss with a rediscovery of identity and especially of a national community and unique and pure homeland—we often part ways with others and put an end to mutual understanding. (Ibid.)
Modern nostalgia is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an “enchanted world” with clear borders and values. It could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, for a home that is both physical and spiritual, for the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history. The nostalgic is looking for a spiritual addressee. Encountering silence, he looks for memorable signs, desperately misreading them.
(Ibid.)
By the narrative process of nostalgic reconstruction the present is denied and the past takes on an authenticity of being, an authenticity which, ironically, it can achieve only through narrative. ...Nostalgia creates a longing that of necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience. …This point of desire which the nostalgic seeks is in fact the absence that is the very generating machine of desire. …Nostagia is the desire for desire….Desire …is nostalgia’s reason for existence.
(Susan Stewart, On Longing, 1993 pp.23-145)
http://timfain.com/Default/portals-official-trailer.html
http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2014/05/23/eno-%E2%80%A2-hyde-ios-app/#more-57115
Post-digital, a term that sucks but is useful
‘post-digital’, more than just a sloppy descriptor for a contemporary (and possibly nostalgic) cultural trend.
The post-digital condition is a post-apocalyptic one: the state of affairs after the initial upheaval caused by the computerisation and global digital networking of communication, technical infrastructures, markets and geopolitics.
(Florian Cramer “What is ‘Post-digital’?”)
http://www.aprja.net/?p=1318
Realtechnik
What I call realtechnik suggests that we step back and reassess when we hear triumphalist or apocalyptic narratives about how to live with technology. Realtechnik is skeptical about linear progress. It encourages humility, a state of mind in which we are most open to facing problems and reconsidering decisions. It helps us to acknowledge costs and recognize the things we hold inviolate.
(Sherry Turkle, Alone Together, 2011, p.294)
