Tenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

Nostalgia: Personal and/or collective idolatry of a false history; melancholic rumination over lost (phantasmatic) object(s) of desire; kitschy arrays of memorabilia emblematizing the glories of bygone days. Across multiple theorizations of nostalgia, images act as primary conduits for the transmission of nostalgic sentiment and nostalgic tropes. As excerpts or imprints of the past, as irregular fragments of pastness, images reflect and refract, but also cut, like shards of a broken mirror. Their simultaneous capacity to tantalize, absorb, but also injure, reveals the subtending presence of nostalgia in images and image-making. Significantly, irruptions of nostalgia occur regardless of personal memory or direct experience. In both personal and collective memory, nostalgia is a simulacrum of an imaginary past, often permitting evasion of social responsibility. Or, an image might catalyze nostalgic malaise simply by laying bare the distance between presence, the presentness of seeing, and the irretrievability of the past. As such, nostalgia can be activated not only by the “content” in or “form” of an image, but also by its technological physiognomy. In general, the formation and dissolution of historically-situated visualities are driven by techno-cultural entwinement. But more specifically, the experience and characterization of memory/nostalgia are also profoundly affected by imaging technology, archival systems, and most recently, digital data storage. Digital memory destabilizes normative assumptions about what memory is and what it can do, calling into question the role of memory in human experience and, by extension, the role of images in the origination, codification , and preservation of memory.