Nostagain: Time in a Bottle Symposium

Richy Srirachanikorn, Annie Harrison, Derek Pasborg, Rowena Chodkowski, and M. Shahrom Ali

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.