Notes on Retrofuturism (Essay for RightClickSave.com)
Technostalgia can be described as the fuzzy feeling one gets when seeing a device one used to use, having forgotten all its limitations or why it was upgraded. It is the warm endearment toward home computers of the 1980s that one might have encountered as a child, or else an unexplained fetishism for technology that predates one’s own lifetime but which represents a certain idea of the future — usually the optimistic future that one wishes to inhabit, not the messy, complicated, fraught present.
Nostalgia is a longing for an imagined past which allows one to gloss over unpleasant or undesirable histories in order to cope with the present. In this way, technostalgia privileges an imagined history of technology and an anesthetized view of that history.
The Earthbound: Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia
Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime (2017) emerges from a sustained attempt to think through the implications of climate change not simply as an environmental problem, but as a transformation in the very conditions under which knowledge, politics, and collective life are possible. Closely linked to the concept of the Anthropocene, Latour names this transformation the “New Climatic Regime,” emphasizing that it is neither temporary nor external to human societies and radically destabilizes historical notions of nature as an inert backdrop for human action. Throughout Facing Gaia, Latour approaches this problem holistically, weaving together art, science, theology, and political theory to show that these domains are all complicit in the co-construction of a cosmology that has historically privileged human concerns while deanimating the natural world.
Refik Anadol and the Sublime Screensaver
A monumental LED screen covers an entire wall of the crowded NY MoMA atrium lobby. A moving image artwork morphs through endless compositions of pleasing formal abstraction, never repeating, yet always feeling familiar. The AI-generated video titled Unsupervised is an artwork by Refik Anadol commissioned by MoMA and is based on a large dataset of images from MoMA’s collection. It attempts to synthesize what modern art “looks like” by looking at all modern art and, like Borges’s totalizing library, tantalizingly suggests that every image ever made is within the AI’s grasp. Yet, as a spectacle of computation, it is unclear if the frothing sea of data holds any other meaning.
The Spectacle of Meaninglessness: Review of “An Essay in the Style of Douglas Hofstadter”
The essay “An Essay In the Style Of Douglas Hofstadter” is a meta-narrative in which Douglas Hofstadter uses recursion, parody and deliberate ambiguity to air his concerns around the uses of artificial intelligence to mimic human creative labor. Hofstadter shows how a seemingly innocuous example, such as imitating the style of a musical composer, intrudes on a class of cognition no different from other creative arenas such as writing or doing theoretical physics. He is deeply troubled by software developers and the general public who downplay and minimize his ethical concerns and cautions that the success of an AI in any of these domains should be cause for deep alarm.
Tree to Telegraph: Natural Entanglements in the Information Age
In the mid nineteenth century, the founding of the information age was deeply contingent upon the dark red blood of a particular species of rainforest tree native to Southeast Asia – the Palaquium Gutta. The natural latex of this and a few members of the Sapotaceae family, marketed in Europe as gutta-percha, had been used by indigenous forest tribes for centuries to fashion durable tool handles or water vessels. (Godfrey 18) Historian John Tulley relates that once its utility was learned in Europe it became nearly a household name in the late nineteenth century, being used to produce decorative and everyday objects of all kinds, from picture frames and walking sticks to golf balls and dental fillings. (564) Having properties similar to modern plastics, European engineers soon discovered that it was the perfect insulator for submarine cables in the nascent telegraph industry. An international telecommunications boom would follow when refined gutta-percha insulation made it possible to successfully connect Ireland to Newfoundland in 1859 with an undersea cable hundreds of miles long. (Tulley 568) The revolution in instantaneous communication would be indispensable for industries and empires, and lay the blueprint for the submarine communications which constitute the modern internet. (Winston 321)