Analogue Nostalgia
Svetlana Boym defines nostalgia as ‘ a longing for home that no longer exists or has never existed’ and as a ‘sentiment of loss and displacement’ (Boym 2001). Reynolds informs that the physician Johannes Hofer introduced the concept of nostalgia in the 17th Century, to describe homesickness and desire to return to the native land of soldiers on military duties. Since then, nostalgia becomes a collective yearning for the past, and as he notes, nostalgia express itself as the resurrection and restoring things how they used to be and it emanates from dissatisfaction with the present (Reynolds 2011: xxvi). Consequently, in the context of this dissertation, the collective emotion that results from perceived loss of unique characteristics …show more content…
Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media’ by Laura U.Marks where she suggested that this phenomenon is not about the refusal of digital but it rather refers to the ‘digital remediation of analogue aesthetic within the digital’ (Marks 2002, Schrey 2014). Therefore the analogue nostalgia demonstrates the desire for originality, or for aura in Benjamin terms, the spirit of analogue and signs of decay resulting from the feeling of irreversible loss of these factors in the digital age. However, the explanation of the feeling of loss in terms of the spirit of traditional photography might be not quite satisfactory. The main reason is that the imitation of the styles from the past is not practiced only by people who have experienced and lived through the relevant periods but is largely followed by the younger generation, which barely or not at all experienced and remembers a time of analogue photography before the digital age. Therefore, the above assumption automatically raises the question of whether it is possible to be nostalgic for the times and the objects, which have not been experienced? It turns out that such a phenomenon as much as possible may take place, and consciously stylized, mostly by digital native users, for vintage look …show more content…
This is due to the connotations that vintage aesthetic evoke, namely factors such as originality or uniqueness attributed to the analogue medium. Undeniably the digital technology employed these hallmarks, which refers to analogue characteristics that existed in the past and on this basis allows for the creation of pseudo-vintage images that evokes precisely the same emotional associations as the originals. (Bartholeyns 2014). In this view the analogue nostalgia expressed as a deliberate aesthetic practice through the pull towards imperfections characteristic for analogue medium indicates not only a paradoxical attempt of preserving physical decay that refers to the paradigm shift discussed in earlier part, but also reflect the metamorphosis of present into past which give rise to a new kind of nostalgia. A nostalgia based not on experience lived but on imagined past and mythologized effects that become familiar due to the constant, digital reproduction of it. Consequently, the conscious simulations of all gamuts of imperfections associated with the traditional photography ‘do not simulate the look of photographs as they were in the past’, as Bull suggested, but rather: ‘ they simulate the look of aged photographs as they appear to us
Svetlana Boym defines nostalgia as ‘ a longing for home that no longer exists or has never existed’ and as a ‘sentiment of loss and displacement’ (Boym 2001). Reynolds informs that the physician Johannes Hofer introduced the concept of nostalgia in the 17th Century, to describe homesickness and desire to return to the native land of soldiers on military duties. Since then, nostalgia becomes a collective yearning for the past, and as he notes, nostalgia express itself as the resurrection and restoring things how they used to be and it emanates from dissatisfaction with the present (Reynolds 2011: xxvi). Consequently, in the context of this dissertation, the collective emotion that results from perceived loss of unique characteristics …show more content…
Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media’ by Laura U.Marks where she suggested that this phenomenon is not about the refusal of digital but it rather refers to the ‘digital remediation of analogue aesthetic within the digital’ (Marks 2002, Schrey 2014). Therefore the analogue nostalgia demonstrates the desire for originality, or for aura in Benjamin terms, the spirit of analogue and signs of decay resulting from the feeling of irreversible loss of these factors in the digital age. However, the explanation of the feeling of loss in terms of the spirit of traditional photography might be not quite satisfactory. The main reason is that the imitation of the styles from the past is not practiced only by people who have experienced and lived through the relevant periods but is largely followed by the younger generation, which barely or not at all experienced and remembers a time of analogue photography before the digital age. Therefore, the above assumption automatically raises the question of whether it is possible to be nostalgic for the times and the objects, which have not been experienced? It turns out that such a phenomenon as much as possible may take place, and consciously stylized, mostly by digital native users, for vintage look …show more content…
This is due to the connotations that vintage aesthetic evoke, namely factors such as originality or uniqueness attributed to the analogue medium. Undeniably the digital technology employed these hallmarks, which refers to analogue characteristics that existed in the past and on this basis allows for the creation of pseudo-vintage images that evokes precisely the same emotional associations as the originals. (Bartholeyns 2014). In this view the analogue nostalgia expressed as a deliberate aesthetic practice through the pull towards imperfections characteristic for analogue medium indicates not only a paradoxical attempt of preserving physical decay that refers to the paradigm shift discussed in earlier part, but also reflect the metamorphosis of present into past which give rise to a new kind of nostalgia. A nostalgia based not on experience lived but on imagined past and mythologized effects that become familiar due to the constant, digital reproduction of it. Consequently, the conscious simulations of all gamuts of imperfections associated with the traditional photography ‘do not simulate the look of photographs as they were in the past’, as Bull suggested, but rather: ‘ they simulate the look of aged photographs as they appear to us