New technologies enable new behaviors, relations and expectations by dissolving old ones. Yet as I have mentioned in the past the relation between high-tech products with outdated technologies, in particular their vintage aesthetic, design and materiality, is ambiguous. For example the iphone has a successful camera producing endless quantities of high pixelised images, yet the iphone's hipstamatic application - that creates unfocused, variable, blurry photographs with vintage polaroid boarders - is a true success story. Why would anyone want blurry versus high-def?
The potential reasons are multiple. Maybe newness is too overwhelming, too ever-changing, and there is a certain desire to use more tamed and defunct technologies. Like the hipstamatic's recent reappearance, over the past decade the sales of vinyls that were in decrease since the 1970s, have been increasing. A desire for materiality? A desire for material looking?
But this doesn't mean that vinyls are replacing music downloads or that hipstamatic pictures are replacing the classic high-def iphone ones. Rather this nostalgia for rudimentary objects from the past is ironically more an addition to novelty - the hipstamatic necessitates the iphone and the vinyl necessitates the downloads to convince it is worth buying.
This Irish ad for Citroën banks on something similar the coolness of the past to sell the new:
The potential reasons are multiple. Maybe newness is too overwhelming, too ever-changing, and there is a certain desire to use more tamed and defunct technologies. Like the hipstamatic's recent reappearance, over the past decade the sales of vinyls that were in decrease since the 1970s, have been increasing. A desire for materiality? A desire for material looking?
But this doesn't mean that vinyls are replacing music downloads or that hipstamatic pictures are replacing the classic high-def iphone ones. Rather this nostalgia for rudimentary objects from the past is ironically more an addition to novelty - the hipstamatic necessitates the iphone and the vinyl necessitates the downloads to convince it is worth buying.
This Irish ad for Citroën banks on something similar the coolness of the past to sell the new:
