Traditional media takes our experience of media and turns it into nostalgia.

What is interactive media doing to our desire? Is something analogous to
nostalgia being created from our experience of becoming?

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Date: 3.15.96
From: Sean Cubitt (mccscubi@vaxa.livjm.ac.uk)
Subject: certain musics, certain canvases

Do traditional media create nostalgia? Or is it that there are instances –
certain musics, certain canvases – that are either or both refusals of the
present without commitment to the past and/or dreams of a future which, because
the future doesn't (yet) exist, are empty of content – a utopia of pure hope,
pure desire?

The question then would be what relations we have with the past now – for
example, the 'TV' monitor in front of me, and the 'typewriter' keyboard I'm
using are very much 'old' media, clunky, clumsy. But, as a writer, I find one
old medium still very alive: writing, and words, conversations, dialogues, in
general – so perhaps we should start from the oldest media – language and
movement – in search of better ways of remaking the future?

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Date: 3.15.96
From: JSalloum@aol.com (Jayce Salloum)
Subject: nostalgia, desire and anxiety

nostalgia: homesickness; sentimental yearning for the past;
adv L f.Gk (nostos: return home, algos: pain)

Isn't it something else that media turns our experience into, or something
more, rather than a backward looking denial or acceptance of history (our
history) because we all know that returning home carries a lot of
implications with it, if there ever was a home, if you have one to return to.

Why would there be a difference to new or traditional media if the subjects
are remaining the same? As producers or consumers of media the agenda for
our desire exists within us irrespective of what stream we are interacting
with, doesn't it. The analogy might be closer to desire, as desire for the
'new' or 'other' as the present and past may have been lacking.

The present may be the key as Sean suggested, I'd like to agree with him
because it combines the nostalgia, desire and anxiety or all three time
periods. And in making or viewing 'art'/cultural productions the actual
responses and reactions are what lingers in our perceptual and residual
organs.

It seems to me the future is too insubstantial an article to do anything
with, all I can imagine and do is deal with various aspects of the present
while being informed of the past.

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Date: 3.17.96
From: Pit Schultz (pit@contrib.de)
Subject: intimate inversions

nostalgia takes our experience of desire and turns it into interactive media.
what is becoming doing to our old media? Is something digital being
created from our tradition of desire?