International Journal of Creative Media Research
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The Dark Academia aesthetic: nostalgia for the past in social networks
No full textThis article aims to approach the nostalgic essence of the aesthetic community Dark Academia through the social network Tumblr, in order to create new knowledge about nostalgic practices in the virtual environment. To do so, I will analyse the origins and evolution of the community, with an emphasis on the rise of its popularity in the wake of the global pandemic of 2020. Based on my own experience as a dark academic, I will make use of cyberethnographic and folksonomic analysis from the inside, as a participating member of the community. As a form of supporting research and to give users a voice, I will use survey methodology and online interviews to delve deeper into the nostalgic sensibilities of the community's participants, the dark academics, by surveying a thousand members. In this study, I will evaluate how important visual nostalgia has become in the early 2020s and whether the past is more present than ever among us
Ghastly Graphics: Tool Fandom, Bad Cinema, and the Haunted PS1 Game Development Community
No full textThroughout the late 2010s, a community of independent game developers has come together under the moniker “Haunted PS1” to produce an annual anthology of game demos and an accompanying livestreamed event showcasing these works celebrating a mode of game-making often referred to as “low-poly horror.” This emerging genre nostalgically celebrates the aesthetics of older generations of computer and console games, especially those made for the original PlayStation (PS1) during the mid-to-late 1990s. Over time, this has resulted in an increasingly large group of new indie games that have all been deliberately made to recreate the awkward control schemes, disorienting texturing warping, and jittery polygons inherent to PS1-era game development. To achieve these outdated effects using contemporary game engines, the Haunted PS1 community has produced and openly shared its own custom tools and plugins. This article uses one such tool called “The Haunted PSX Render Pipeline” as a prompt to investigate the relationship between independent game development and other nostalgic and DIY modes of creative practice, namely zine-making and underground horror film. Furthermore, we work to reveal why games and tools released within the Haunted PS1 community are so often distributed for free and how this is partially related to the distinctly obsolete, ugly, and non-commercial aspects of the PS1 aesthetic within contemporary videogame capitalism and fandoms for so-called “bad” media
The Digital Archivist: the Role of Digital Nostalgia Aesthetics in a Digital Preservation Game
No full textThe Digital Archivist is a brief 2D video game that seeks to engage general audiences with the topic of digital preservation. The digital nostalgia aesthetic plays a fundamental role in evoking an archival setting that draws a parallel between the work done by monks and miniaturists in preserving and distributing print books during the Middle Ages, and the role played by contemporary librarians and archivists in preserving digital formats
Who’re You Calling a Nerd?: How Identity, Marketability, and Nostalgia Impact Depictions of the 1980s in Stranger Things
No full textThe video essay portion of this article is a close reading of the Netflix TV show Stranger Things (2016-present), utilizing key scenes from the series to conduct a textual analysis of the treatment of nerd identities in the show, as opposed to the treatment of marginal identities of race, sexuality and disability. Whilst, the accompanying essay draws from research in the fields of popular culture studies, fan studies, cultural studies, and media studies in order to examine the significance of the nerd identities present within the series, and how material experiences of oppression are offset via a nostalgic vision of 1980s popular culture. Ultimately, the text concludes that nerd identities are emphasised when exploring the characters’ marginalization as a means of preserving a nostalgic view of the 1980s in the US in order to successfully market the Netflix series to contemporary streaming audiences
Hazy Pop Cultural Memories: An Analysis of the Shifting Reader Receptions of the Prosumer Publishing of Jane Pratt from Sassy Magazine (1988-1996) to xoJane (2011-2016)
No full textThis article will consider the publishing legacy of American editor Jane Pratt (b. 1962), both online and off. The American women’s lifestyle website xoJane (2011-2016) and the print magazine for teenage girls Sassy (1988-1996), both of which Pratt founded and edited, serve as the central examples for analysis. Positive audience receptions of Sassy are analysed against the more hostile responses to her later digital work. This is in order to understand how Pratt’s editorial work has developed in its shift from print to digital, and in audience, from teenage girls in the 1990s to adult women in the 2010s. This comparison is drawn with the aim of exploring shifting attitudes towards reader production. Here, xoJane’s prosumer model of digital production is compared and contrasted to Sassy’s DIY ethos of reader engagement. Whilst, elements of nostalgic readership that inform Pratt’s contested reception are explored. Finally, the impulse for, and limits of, authorial conclusion in digital spaces are considered in Pratt’s shifting of her first-person publishing format from print to digital
Bring Your Tamagotchis Up Gay: The Original Virtual Pets as Queer Digital Artifacts
No full textHow does a digital artifact come to be regarded as queer? Is it possible to make these artifacts queerer? In this article, I explore these questions in connection to one specific case study: the Tamagotchi. Launching the virtual pet craze of the 1990s, the Tamagotchi was created with conservative values in mind. Yet, like one of Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, the device rebelled. Not only does its ambiguous and arbitrary expressions of gender push against a more traditional framework, the Tamagotchi has also invited a wide array of queer play. Through each successive model released by the toy company Bandai, users have questioned and subverted binary constructions of sex, gender, identity, and desire.
While devoted fans have seemingly always been aware of the queer dynamics at play in the Tamagotchi, a wave of recent nostalgia has reunited many Millennials with the virtual pets of their past. In similarly returning to these devices (both to the original model released globally in 1997 as well as to their newer offspring), I have constructed an in-depth analysis of the modes, practices, and processes by which the Tamagotchi operates—and engages users—through queer dynamics
Retro-programming and the nostalgia for creativity in the 8-bit microcomputer era
No full textIn this article, we investigate a small community of ‘retro-programmers’ who use 8-bit microcomputers for coding. Writing code for old computers is embedded in the imagery of digital nostalgia. As we will demonstrate, investigating nostalgia for vintage computers as tools for creative coding, offers an insight into the cultural logic of the contemporary perception of old digital technologies
Unsensing MTV
No full textWhen MTV premiered on television in the summer of 1981, it embodied audio-visual novelty. The world’s first cable network, dedicated to all-day music video programming, screened and sounded a format of production and mode of consumption that offered stars and spectators a multi-layered portal of characters, narratives, and worlds of pop and culture. It proposed a language of pastiche, revelling in mashups of aesthetic, tonal, thematic, and sonic texts familiar and peculiar — heralding the raucous intertextuality and expressive interplay of sound and moving images in more recent mobile platforms and digital multimedia formats of entertainment, like the algorithmic chaos of streaming performances on social media. Nostalgic memory-making of MTV in academic scholarship and the popular press has often centered on the network’s portrayal as a cultural and institutional force of figures, phrases, and events that altogether form a web of networked systems.[1] But what would it mean to foreground MTV’s interludes — interruptive segments, unexpected segues, interstitial advertisements, and unintended broadcast mistakes — as forms of digital nostalgic meditation and mediation? Through the aid and accessibility of digital archives, we look back and excavate MTV as text and event to regard a sampling of its earliest broadcast anomalies as compelling nodes that realize aesthetic and narrative complexities specific to the network’s stylistic, symbolic, and institutional legacies
Park Avenue & East 53rd Street
No full textPark Avenue & East 53rd Street is a film about the Seagram Building and a New York City street corner on which it stands. It features a voice over by Asheq Akhtar, camera by Tom Lecky, synthesizer improvisations by Ben Edwards (aka Benge), and archival footage from the film Birth of a Building (provided by the Hagley Museum and Library). Drawing primarily on the geographer Doreen Massey’s theoretical work on space, Park Avenue & East 53rd Street is an experimental, poetic attempt to use digital video and sound to explore the ways in which a specific urban location might develop a character (or characters) – through a process of ‘becoming’ - that could not have been imagined by architects and planners. The film also seeks to examine how far representations might affect the identity or even the life of an urban space. The film asks: what are the potential ‘uses’ or ‘potentials’ or ‘experiences’ of architectural spaces, as opposed to their original plans and design intentions? Employing contemporary iPhone footage of a street corner by the Seagram Building in New York City (a celebrated corporate architectural structure emblematic of modernity and US capitalism), alongside stock documentary footage of this building being constructed in the late 1950s, Park Avenue & East 53rd Street uses a voice-over to examine links between personal memory, nostalgia and loss, but also poetry, visual representations, architectural design, history, and the everyday rhythms of an urban place. By writing the voice-over/voice-off to be performed in a variety of modes of delivery – such as personal reminiscence, dialogue, academic lecture, omniscient expository narrator (direct address) – and mixing this voice with an evocative synthesizer soundtrack that serves to evoke the rhythms of the modern city as industrial complex - the film becomes a meditation on how far specific places in cities might be understood to be in a process of ‘becoming’ (Massey), and how representations can facilitate this ‘becoming’