NEW AGE FUN with a VINTAGE FEEL!!!

This is to American Apparel's bankruptcy, the New York Times' 20s something article and the death of the hipstamatic application:

Arcade Fire's Nostalgia: The Past Packaged as New Age Fun with a Vintage Feel

Last month Chris Milk launched an 'interactive' video for the Arcade Fire's song "We Used To Wait."

While it has all the qualities to be the coolest thing on the planet - an interactive personalized trip into your childhood via multi-popup narratives (cool), google street view (super cool) and 2,335 likes on facebook (super cool and cutting-edge) - it's pretty much the visual version of the clunky nostalgia of the band's lyrics. 

If the polarized versions of the past and easy grabbing feelings of loss in their lyrics ("i don't want to work in a building downtown," "but in your dreams we're still screamin' and runnin' through the yard" or "all of the houses they build in the seventies finally fall") are tolerable because of the beautiful harmonies, in Milk's video it feels like a packaged rebellion (against what? time? change? suburbia?).

The plot is simple: in the pop ups trees growing through the (bad) cities our parents have built, and a runner (you) desperately tries to find his/her childhood by running away from his/her present (adulthood).

But the generic adolescent fear of change doesn't end there, the observer/main character can even send a digital message (a digital drawing/postcard from which root-like lines grow) to his/her past self (which is actually their tour).

Overall the whole thing is totally tacky. It's suppose to feel amazing;y cool and cutting edge, but it turns out ot be a bland version of what personal memories are suppose to be. Let memories run off on their own. Like Google trying to archive all knowledge, let at least memories alone (especially when google street view never gets an address perfectly enough for the thing to work).

To make your own arcade fire memories: http://www.thewildernessdowntown.com/

A recent example of an anti-modern twist to LaTour's 'quasi object', or Why does the Hipstamatic iphone application exist?

Compare and Contrast: France from Hondarribia in Spain

I was in the Pays Basque for a couple days and finally discovered the what behind the uploading of 'hipstamatic' images on facebook (which is mostly a French phenomenon). These images are slightly fuzzy and sporadically covered with clearer dots. They are also darker around the frame and their colours are warmer than the reality they capture. Another distinguishable feature is the varying result - so the size of the shadow near the edges is different from one photo to another,- and the beige film paper of a Polaroid that frames all the photographs.

Interestingly it isn't only the aesthetic of the image that recall the photos of the past but also the act itself. So unlike all the recent digital photographing processes, there is a lapse of time between when the photo is taken and when the final photo is visible - a lapse of time or process called 'development' - and a definite unclarity of what you are actually photographing since the frame of the hipstamatic camera is reduced to a few centimeters while the final image captures a much larger reality.

The original Hipstamatic was created in 1982 and was the result of a merge between the Kodak Instamatic and the desire to make a cheap and practical camera by two Americans called Bruce and Winston Dorbowski: "It doesn't matter if the photos aren't prefect -- as long as people are capturing memories I will be happy." And basically the iphone App is quite successfully trying to recapture that imperfect image quality and process.

But why?

In 1993 the French theorist Bruno LaTour articulated the idea of 'quasi-objects' or things that can create multiple times and diffuse conceits of a predictable ontological order. In other words the hipstamatic iphone app is jumble of multiple time periods (both of 2010 and the 1980s) or a combination of anachronistic artifacts. It's a retro aesthetic and a ultra-modern device. And in many ways this can be paralleled to other contemporary lifestyle choices that are often coined anti-modern: "DIY labor, recycling, thrifting, urban gardening, sewing while simultaneously seizing individual control over mystified technologies such as computers, the internet, digital recording, medicine, and even water purification and food production and consumption. This is sustainability with an attitude and an aesthetic" (Lee Dawdy June 20th 2010).