retrotalk2021 #4 digital nostalgia

Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker from a weeks ago, exploring "Pokémon and the First Wave of Digital Nostalgia" and the poignant pangs triggered by the rudimentary graphics of early Nintendo. 

"The visuals of the original Nintendo Entertainment System, from 1985, consisted of a 256-by-240 grid of tiny squares of color. There were fifty-four hues altogether; each character was limited to three colors at a time...    a time before hyperrealistic 3-D graphics and screen overexposure, the desaturated pixels were innocently entrancing, an immersive other world."

Chayka notes that the 20-year-cycle is bang on cue for "the first wave of nostalgia for early digital life, a longing for our first digital worlds, onscreen spaces in which we could act, create, and communicate." 

"For many people, the earlier era of the Internet represents a time when they still had power over their digital lives, before they became dependent upon the repetitive templates, inhuman scale, and turbocharged content feeds offered by the likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.... The revival of pixel art may be a quest for the kind of variety and texture that massive social-media networks have gradually banished, a harkening back to a messier, more human moment in our digital lives."

Other symptoms of early 2000s-stalgia

"A clone of the Web site for MySpace, the early-aughts social-networking service, recently drew three hundred thousand subscribers. 

"Some of the most popular recent independent video games, such as the farming role-playing game Stardew Valley and the adventure game Celeste, are entirely pixel art... 

"With all of the gazing backward, the new digital era, which is often labelled Web3, may end up looking a bit like the older, pre-Facebook Internet."

Chayka references an essay by Robin Sloan called "Notes on Web3,” which argues that the retrodigital buzz is about "rediscovering a sense of online ownership and creativity that has been gone since the era of blogs and browser games."

Also interviewed, an artist called Maria Vorobjova whose work includes "Wood Wide Web,” 
a simulated video game of a biological office space, presented in glitching, imprecise polygon models with pixelated, supersaturated textures. The graphics are intentionally messy. Vorobjova, who recalls playing games on her father’s desktop computer as a young girl, uses the rendering software Blender and then films walk-throughs of her creations in low-resolution 320-by-265 pixels, mimicking the capacity of the original 1994 PlayStation. Upsizing the videos for modern platforms only exaggerates the graininess. The work is an attempt to evoke what the Internet used to be, Vorobjova said: “A continuous rabbit hole, leading to unpredictable, mystical destinations.” When she adds small details to the worlds she builds, she added, “I’m trying to make that old aesthetic new again.”

There's stuff on the aesthetics of NFTs and a Madeleine moment of the author's - "Succumbing to my own digital nostalgia, I recently bought the newly rebooted Pokémon Brilliant Diamond for the Nintendo Switch console... It has been a comfort to immerse myself in a digital environment that doesn’t update or change every minute, as social media does, with its thousands of blips of new content. I thought that it might be boring, too slow or simplistic, but playing Pokémon is easily more satisfying than an hour spent checking Twitter. My decisions have actual consequences, at least within the game; instead of shouting into the public void, I am performing for myself alone."