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What: Symposium critically looking at our relationships with nostalgia in everyday life, profitable commercial uses, political promises, journey to fast futures (X to Mars), or a past (Titan sub).
When: February 2nd, 2024.
Where: 4TH SPACE at Concordia University, Montréal, Canada. Hybrid also available.
Who: Emerging and established scholars, artists, students (Undergraduate to Graduate) enthusiastic or interested about an active and socially generative kind of nostalgia.
Key Dates:
Research-creation AND symposium presentation abstract – Friday 5th January, 2024.
Final notice of acceptances sent out by – Friday 12th January, 2024.
Time in a Bottle symposium happens – Friday 2nd February, 2024.
Contact: projectlostagain@gmail.com to Derek Pasborg or Richy Srirachanikorn
Website: https://nostagain.ca/cfp2024
Why: As we emerge from a global period of great loss, sacrifice, and patience into a “new normal” fraught with conflict, ecological crisis, and rapid sociotechnical change…digital nostalgia has taken a turn towards encapsulation.
On social media, custom-made pop-culture dioramas are sold out to buyers eager to preserve the set of their favorite childhood video game or TV show. Meanwhile, costs of supporting digital cloud storage to hoard our pasts mount while we risk forgetting it anyway. Large language models “speak” from the frozen moments of their training data, stuck between the past and the next update. Those who itch for clairvoyance seek their own remembrance as cold comfort: in 2019, over 25,000 Koreans engaged in therapeutic “living funerals,” donning burial shrouds, posing for their own memorial portraits, and lying inside real coffins as the living chant prayers for the “dead”.
These containers of time are comparable to bottles full of ideological messages which recall a rose-tinted past, a somber future, a present tinged with grief.
If these items could talk, what “message in a bottle” do they have for us?
What are the social, ecological, and cultural impacts left in the present by our pursuit of the nostalgic past or future?
How far will we go to preview, pay, and pursue a time outside the present?
Rather than resting on the adage, “only time will tell,” this symposium asks participants to consider what these “bottles” tell us about the future we are drifting towards.
In what ways do we try to capture nostalgia, and what do these containers capture about us?
Topics for Submission:
(i) What are the NOSTALGIC OBJECTS that are present in everyday life?
Nostalgic franchise revivals: Barbie (2023), Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)
Objects that are now rare due to its historical or cultural brand: happy meal toys…etc.
The material and the immaterial: cleaner air, insect populations, ‘noctalgia’ etc.
Patriotic, political, or personal items passed down from generations; visually/orally
Potential Questions to Consider
Socially, culturally, or politically, how do they (nostalgic objects) remain so pervasive?
Why do we hoard so many things? Or, why do we “collect”, “curate”, or “store” them?
What is strategically made to be remembered and forgotten?
Does the ideological memory belong to any particular group? Who benefits/loses?
How effective are these nostalgic objects at impacting or overriding the present?
(ii) What OBJECTS OF NOSTALGIA promise to help us get somewhere else beyond the present moment? Where does it take us and what do we bring back?
Photographs, videos, drawings, art brings the old to the now, or the now to the new
Advertisements and campaigns to take us “Back to ___”, or Make Things Great Again
The perils and power of discourse on nostalgia in the digital or real-world
Libraries, archives, storage units, year books, iCloud photos you never synced
Potential Questions to Consider
Socially, culturally or politically, how do they remain so pervasive today?
What are its effects on the existential, environmental or ethical domains of social life?
How big is the empire of nostalgia that “was and is a business” (Niemeyer 2016:29)?
Submission Guidelines
Symposium Presentations:
Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words.
Accepted submissions are presented at the symposium, possibly with a panel, followed by a hybrid Q&A.
Submission Link for Presentations: https://forms.gle/moNJkKfYRR6Krxkk7
Research-Creation Projects:
Please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words and/or media.
The project can be a work in progress, a prototype, or a finished product. Creators will showcase their work alongside other artists, interact directly with the participants of the event, and through a hybrid Q&A.
Submission Link for Research-Creation: https://forms.gle/moNJkKfYRR6Krxkk7
Note: **Submissions are reviewed on an ongoing basis.** The availability of spaces for presentations and research-creation showcases are therefore based on a first-submitted-first-accepted basis.