[SEM2] Site Week 4 02/05/2022
What’s analogue nostalgia?
Why analogue?
What are the connections and differences between analogue and digital media?
Why certain aspects that were once considered as disadvantages or problems of analogue media are now appreciated enthusiastically?
What causes this retrospective revaluation of analogue media’s malfunctions and the specific noises they create?
It has become a commonplace to describe the last decades as a period of unprecedented and ever-accelerating media technological transition and of increasingly mediated life environments. Yesterday’s appraised new gadgets turn into today’s decrepit devices and tomorrow’s waste constantly. Even media formats with a strong tradition like paper books or cinema are now perceived to be outdated and seem to be outpaced by their emerging digital successors. However, with younger generations start to looking back to analogue technologies, retro-cultures bizarrely become a natural part of the digital-culture landscape as high-definition screen technology (recent modern movies still shot on celluloid filmstrip, Instagram photographers using film cameras, and many of the most successful contemporary installation artists display a deep affection for outdated analogue media). These retrospective celebrations of the analogue range from defiant denunciations of digital production tools (as practiced most famously by artists like Tacita Dean) to the fetishized commodification of the analogue object (analogue audio cassette as an icon on commercial products). It seems to be a golden age of nostalgia for these allegedly “dead media” continue to haunt a popular culture obsessed with its own past.
Social media platforms are flood with monotonous digital images, so some people start using nostalgic filters to add special effects onto their photos to make them look analogue even when all the described analogue artifacts were added digitally in the post-production process. YouTubers and designers start selling bundles of raw analogue glitches or footages to recreate the messed up, scratched up, tattered, disheveled look that you usually get from using old analogue technologies. Interestingly, this analog nostalgia seems especially prevalent among works by students who started learning media production when it was fully digital. According to Dominik Schrey, analog nostalgia is both a phenomenon and a visual effect in digital media. In his article “Analogue Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Digital Remediation,” he summarizes the term “nostalgia” as a desire of longing an unreachable place or a time. Because this desire is temporal so it stays unsatisfied, which might results in a “substitute home,” an attempt to fulfill that desire. It could also lead to a “cycle” when the substitution reminds the actual desired thing and recalls the original feeling of desire. Thus, digital imitation of analog qualities which I previously mentioned is an expression of analog nostalgia in digital media. So basically, analog nostalgia is suggesting that the reason we simulate analog aesthetics in hope of calming our desire for real analog media. Then, why don’t I actually return to analog media?
In Rombes’s Cinema in the Digital Age, analogue nostalgia expresses a “desire for indexicality” and “a retrospective fondness for the problems of decay and generational loss that analog video posed.” The phenomenon is not about the refusal of digital technologies, but exclusively about the digital remediation of analogue aesthetics within the digital. It’s a strategy of “re-enchanting an object through aesthetic de-familiarization as it is characterized by deliberate imperfection.” There is a clear tendency in digital media that begins to reassert imperfection, flaws, an aura of human mistakes to counterbalance the logic of perfection that pervades the digital. Mistakes must be our answer to the machines of perfection that we ourselves have invented. Human mistakes in the process of analogue photography can add unique qualities and effects to the picture which includes grain, shifts in color, chromatic aberration, and other details that add more nuances to a photo. Those nuances are generally perceived positively thanks to its not-so-clinical look which digital photography is often criticized for. It’s obvious to me that analogue photography has the aura due to the singularity of each photograph that’s physically engraved in the emulsion of the film unlike mass-produced digital photographs which Walter Benjamin was actually referring to.
The materiality of analogue media also contributes to the aura that film photography carries due to its various use of film stocks, lighting, color system, printing methods, and etc. Unlike digital media which doesn’t have a physical presence, Analogue media have an organic quality. They age. They show distinct signs of decay the older they get. Photographic film rolls lose their light-sensitivity, vinyl records and celluloid films expedites its self-liquidation. This deteriorating process leads to the traces of usage when they are replayed, rewound, or rescanned. When these signs of use are digitally simulated, we abolish analogue media’s natural process of aging which inevitably leads to death or complete dysfunction. Analogue nostalgia simulates a process of aging that has not happened yet, and never will happen (at least, not in the form that is simulated). The purpose of this digitally simulated analogue decay seems pointless as it simulates exactly the life or ‘soul’ that the digital was always accused of lacking.
Authenticity is separated into two categories indexical authenticity and iconic authenticity. Photographic authenticity in general is a factor of reality and originality of the object. Hereby indexical authenticity means the actual originality of an object which usually cannot be recognized by consumers who therefore need the indexical authenticity to be verified as authentic by experts who examine the object. For instance, the original painting of the Mona Lisa can be examined and determined as the original from Renaissance painted by Leonardo da Vince. On the contrary, if someone would show me a replication of the painting and I couldn’t tell the difference, this is then called the iconic authenticity. Iconic authenticity refers to the clearly perceivable properties of the object. Since that replica is so precise that I as an average consumer can’t tell the difference has iconic authenticity instead of indexical authenticity since it’s not the original. According to Matthew Biro’s article “From Analogue to Digital Photography: Bernd and Hilla Becher and Andreas Gursky,” he further examines the authenticity in analogue and digital photography. Analogue photography appears to possess more indexical authenticity than digital photography does. He states that film photography often has a connotation to the terms truth and objectivity whereas digital photography is more connected to untruth and subjectivism. Biro argues that due to the materiality and the overall more physical process of analogue photography, film photographs receive more qualities of indexical authenticity than digital photographs. The physical imprint of analogue photos on the film give it a sense of realness and a more perceptible presence in reality. On the contrary digital photographs are dependent on the electronic device that displays them and thus can vanish in the nothingness of data anytime. Similarly, analogue and digital photography differ in the degree of existence while analogue photographs physically exist on a film, digital photographs are merely the possibility to look at a picture and are only an unrealized photo saved as a code on a hard drive.
Personally, the more analogue photographs I shoot, the more I start to realize is that my digital photography is more about the process of matching and adjusting the photo to the ideal I have imagined whereas analogue photography is simply picturing the subject or motive. Therefore, I believe my analogue photographs can be considered more authentic than his digital photographs. That is why I chose to shoot this project entirely in film for this new project.
Thus, presenting analogue photographs through or with digital media (I haven’t decided the formality of the exhibition), this new project tends to comprehensively examines and investigates specific motifs (analog nostalgia, fragmentary aesthetics, “the aura,” materiality, authenticity of experience and etc.) relating to “the analogue” and “the digital.”
Some sources that I read
From Analogue to Digital Photography
New Developments in Print:Tv:Film- photography- The Future Is Here- Enter 3D Photography
Analogue Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Digital Remediation
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