Analogue Memory Machines: A techno-melancholic retrospective (original) (raw)
Related papers
2015
This article reflects on today’s ‘technostalgic’ trend in media culture by examining the various ways in which Super 8 film as a media technology from the past is re-appropriated and remediated in contemporary memory practices. By looking specifically at restorative and reflective forms of technostalgia manifest in the project Bye Bye Super 8 – In Loving Memory of Kodachrome (2011) and the digital smartphone app iSupr8 (2011), the author explores how in contemporary memory practices media technologies not only construct and mediate memories but have also become the objects of memory themselves. While analysing this double mnemonic process – accounting for both the memory construction by the media technology and the reminiscence of the media technology itself – it is argued that we currently witness a new kind of memory practice enforcing an attentive shift from technologies of memory to a memory of technologies.
The Problem of Nostalgia for Analogue Film
I am an artist belonging to an artist run film lab (Artist Film Workshop, Melbourne). I use 16mm analogue moving image film as a creative medium, firstly because it carries alchemical processes that feel magically collaborative in the darkroom and secondly because film has an archival quality, better mobility, and can encompass a series of ideas that my ephemeral installations (or theatre sets) can’t match. Mostly, 16mm or analogue film feels like a soulmate medium with its own voice and a collaborative tension like that of a romantic relationship - it requires a giving (and consideration) of time. When a medium evokes this kind of romanticism I believe it transcends all other explanations and laws of attraction for an artist. Likewise, observations and feelings toward 16mm or analogue film exist in the viewer - particularly the evocation or perception of nostalgia. In this paper, I want to address the problem of nostalgia for analogue film and the division between observational nostalgia and feeling nostalgic. Using the tool of comparison between works by Bill Morrison and Tacita Dean, I’m driven to ask what the phenomenon of nostalgia means for my artistic medium of 16mm celluloid and more broadly all formats of analogue film or ‘cinema’. Potentially, this might assist us to move on from a common interpretation of analogue film as nostalgic and recognise what that label really means in ‘contemporaneity’, seeing it as one that carries its own complex shadows.
The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia, 2024
This chapter explores the multifaceted concept of “analogue nostalgia,” which, in the broadest sense, refers to the retrospective appreciation or fetishisation of analogue media and their aesthetics after their perceived obsolescence. Mapping the changing applications and interpretations of the term, its historical contexts, and its relationship with digital technology, the concept’s evolution is traced through four fundamental discursive shifts. After unravelling the progression of criticism from a broader disfavour of electronic media to an aversion to the digital, the debut of the compact disc in the early 1980s is highlighted as a watershed moment. It introduced the analogue-digital divide to the greater public and elevated the nostalgic value of vinyl records, redefining their sonic imperfections as marks of authenticity. The term “analogue nostalgia” emerged as a technical term in film and media studies in the 2000s, with Laura Marks using it to describe the digital imitation of analogue media’s “medium-specific noise.” In recent years, there has been a renaissance in the use of analogue technologies like vinyl and film, giving rise to a broader understanding of the term. Today’s analogue nostalgia encompasses both this revival and its digital emulation. At the same time, many authors of popular advice literature on “digital detox” laud analogue media as a relief from digital oversaturation, which paradoxically reflects a newer form of nostalgia, reshaping the concept once more.
My reflections on the theme of memory and cinema were activated during the ten years or so of ongoing debate about memory and media in Germany. These discussions are remarkable in that the concept of individual memory is expanded to the dimension of collective memory, and that media are referred to as a kind of objectified memory. Plato's old question about the use of writing formed an important impetus for this approach to the issue. He answered the question negatively: thoughts recorded in writing break away from the author and thereby lose their vitality; they wander around fatherless and do not bring the reader true knowledge; for this, a living communication is needed. Plato favoured the oral tradition over the written, but it is well known that he himself, nevertheless, made use of writing and with it helped to bring Socrates', and hence his own, thoughts to an if somewhat dubious 'eternal life'. In contrast to a vitality that at some time or other experiences a real death, he preferred the apparent death of his thoughts in this material coffin and, with it, a consequent alienation and possible distortion. The background to this approach gives rise to many questions concerning the connection between the collective, and therefore media-memory and individual memories; e.g.
The Media-History of Memory. Mapping the Technological Regimes of Memory
Building upon the twin premises of the historicity and mediality of memory – individual and collective alike –, this study makes an analytic incursion in the history of memory in terms of the technological media of storing knowledge about the past, i.e. a media-history of memory. The paper aims, in the opening act, at shedding light on the inextricable relationship between memory and the bio-cultural technology available for reserving knowledge, and thus saving the past from oblivion. The study moves on to trace out the succession of the different “technological regimes of memory” emerged in human history, examining how the technology of memory influenced both the formal structure and the modus operandi of collective memory, that is to say, both its structural framework and its regime of functioning.
A Dialogue on Cassette Tapes and their Memories
A Peer-Reviewed Journal About, 2014
The interest for lost media practices and materials appears intrinsic to contemporary popular and maker culture — a post-digital culture that through vinyl, cassette tapes, print, chemical photography, etc. revisits a time before the digital revolution. How are we to perceive this re-investment in history and old technologies? It is obvious to regard this as nostalgia and a trendy taste for lo-fi. However, the aim of this article is to develop an understanding of how these practices also express a critique of contemporary digital culture. This critique feeds on two competing perspectives on the materiality of media technologies: historical materialism and speculative realism, and hence also two perspectives on artistic media practice as a form of research.