Temporal Nostalgia

Vivian Sobchack considers and celebrates QuickTime “movies” – or “memory boxes” – in the reading Nostalgia for a digital object. Sobchack expresses that QuickTime movies “draw us down and into their own discrete, enclosed and nested poetic worlds: worlds re-collected and re-membered; worlds miniture, intensive, layered and vertically deep“.

Sobchack’s poetic and highly image-intensive language explaining her thoughts on QuickTime movies adds to this innate sense of nostalgia distilled within them. The following video is Lev Manovich’s “A Single Pixel Movie”, an example of a short QuickTime movie:

Sobchack notes the idea of the computer as a “memory box”: it “collects, preserves and allows for the conscious retrieval and re-membering“. This is interesting to consider but a point I agree with. Often when I’m bored and/or procrastinating, I’ll go through old photos stored on my computer, or fiction pieces written years ago and memories will come flooding back.

Reading this article I can’t stop thinking about the idea that everything is a journal, everything is a museum of or lives. My computer, with documents comprising uni work, job applications, photos and videos from events and trips, and pieces of fiction; my desk, home to notebooks, framed photos, sewing machine, weekly schedule and makeup. Everything around us tells us something about ourselves. A living labyrinth of our lives.