Nostalgia, Media, Materiality, or: Transforming Experiences of Time, Reimagining Futures

Since the early 1990s nostalgia and retro have boomed, once again. Still, both phenomena and their interrelation keep resisting concise cultural conceptualization. Aiming to account for what nostalgia and retro manage to accomplish in times of (supposed) acceleration and multiply motivated cultural anxieties, I suggest that nostalgia works as an affective mode of perception monitored by media and materialities clad in the garb of retro aesthetics—an aesthetics that sells particularly well. Nostalgia thus operates as a media and materiality effect closely interacting with processes of commodification to shape imagined and imaginary time-spaces that seem to defy the collateral damages of globalization.