Technostalgia of the Present: From Technologies of Memory to a Memory of Technologies

Abstract

This article reflects on today’s ‘technostalgic’ trend in media culture by examining the various ways in which Super 8 film as a media technology from the past is re-appropriated and remediated in contemporary memory practices. By looking specifically at restorative and reflective forms of technostalgia manifest in the project Bye Bye Super 8 – In Loving Memory of Kodachrome (2011) and the digital smartphone app iSupr8 (2011), the author explores how in contemporary memory practices media technologies not only construct and mediate memories but have also become the objects of memory themselves. While analysing this double mnemonic process – accounting for both the memory construction by the media technology and the reminiscence of the media technology itself – it is argued that we currently witness a new kind of memory practice enforcing an attentive shift from technologies of memory to a memory of technologies.