The Brooklyn Rail

“The structure of nostalgia is in many respects what it used to be, in spite of changing fashions and advances in digital technology. In the end, the only antidote for the dictatorship of nostalgia might be nostalgic dissidence. Nostalgia can be a poetic creation, an individual mechanism of survival, a countercultural practice, a poison, or a cure.”

— Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and its Discontents”

 

1. Though much of the work I will encounter in Japan has been described to me or identified in various articles as nostalgic, I found the term disorienting.

2. It’s startlingly quiet in the gallery of the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, where I see Genealogy of Nostalgia ― From the Taisho Era to the Present on its closing day, my first morning in Japan. Later, I take the train to Yokohama, a city south of Tokyo forced into foreign trade by the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce, in order to speak in person with the artist Emi Kusano, though we have messaged across various platforms about her work using generative AI, which I have seen online and on social media. Fourteen hours out of my usual time zone, past-present-future and situation blur in these visitations. I carry a gift: a map folded into a paper flower. That’s what research feels like. Lost within a design. It’s a way to resist identifying what has been predefined—a challenge in a country with such proliferating cultural imagery.

3. Dylan Levi King recently wrote in an excellent and disenchanting article for The Baffler about a “Tokyo of tourists” that “remains lodged in the postwar American imagination as a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, with a reputation for deferential hospitality,” which manages a “no less nostalgic” message presented to short and long tourists (like guest workers and expatriates) about “the dream of the 1980s…the futuristic, clean, fashionable Japan…that is better for having preserved what the rest of the world has lost.” Techno-orientalism builds on prior limitations.

4. I’m not in Japan to resurrect some exotic vision, but to speak with artists about their use of transnational generative AI systems, the same text-to-image/video/sound used by others around the world. And yet, I am there in recognition that context does matter. Attitudes and aesthetics may have been flattened by a global image culture, but not entirely. We breathe the codes of conduct and creative criteria produced by the art and architecture, designs and histories of our upbringing as well as current meanderings. What we see from our windows matters as much as the SEO seductions of content culture. Sometimes the only way to mitigate biases is to keep their potential intrusion firmly in view.

5. The artist Saeko Ehara is known for the shimmering, twinkling light in her work. She cultivates this aesthetic, identifying its origins in childhood memories and the Kirakira (sparkling) cards of her favorite Anime characters. This Kirakira provokes a joy and beauty that she wants in the world today. No surprise, then, that nostalgia should get invoked. And yet, when we speak, I have no sense of some longing to return. If we understand nostalgia as revisionist history that glosses the discomforts of the past, that wasn’t what I saw in her work or others.

6. The woodcut prints of Kawase Hasui open Genealogy of Nostalgia and I am immediately struck by how his landscapes are blocked, veiled, obscured as in the glimpse through the bamboo reeds to the water and distant town in Komagata Embankment (1919). The photojournalist Ken Domon led the movement towards realism and the “absolute snapshot,” with several of his images from “Children of Koto” on view that are slightly terrifying in their intensity (his works from a similar series three years later in Hiroshima were not shown); the near vibrating activity of the figures captured is reinforced by the composition’s lines of direction so that the viewer is transfixed, held in stillness like the earlier woodcuts, but here due to the eye’s unceasing movement across the photograph. It requires ripping oneself away.

The stark photography of Yutaka Takanashi from the 1960s and ’80s offers a similar formalist composition as Hasui Kawase, but the dark shadows obscure what can be seen, or objects and figures implicate a story beyond the camera’s frame, as discomfiting as Ken Domon’s work. Takashi Homma’s color photography of Tokyo suburbs from the 1990s uses open spaces as forms that invite the viewer to settle, only to disrupt that sense of tranquility with shadows from unseen elements undermining what one thinks one sees.

Are these artists bemoaning a lost city in these efforts, or merely indicating the sense many had across the twentieth century that things are not as they seem? If this is Japanese nostalgia, then it does not read as the sentimental longing-to-return meant by a Western Europe or United States usage.

7. The scholar Svetlana Boym explains in “Nostalgia and Its Discontents” that nostalgia’s modern version “is a mourning for the impossibility of mythical return, for the loss of an ‘enchanted world' with clear borders and values. It could be a secular expression of a spiritual longing, a nostalgia for an absolute, for a home that is both physical and spiritual, for the edenic unity of time and space before entry into history.” Certainly some in Japan may seek a return to its isolationist past, prior to the United States’ insistence that it accept Western trade and influence, but the woodworks and photographs didn’t show me the loss of a better past. I saw an uncomfortable awareness of changed times. Remembering the past as part of the present, these artists swim in a stream of choices and events now past, but present through their evolution.

8. Looking through Ehara’s family picture album during a studio visit, the stories she tells don’t gloss the realities of the past. Discussing her practice reflects a laborious process of research, trials, and use of multiple software programs. Inspiration, in the form of canonical painters or personal memory, eases the process no more than prompt-output expectations of “AI.” The light touch stems from long days at a screen, one she polishes every night before putting the computer to sleep. We have a moment about techno-animism, when she remarks that “sparkling connects to something invisible,” making me realize that the light capturing the eye’s attention leads back to something evanescent. There’s not some single thing there but the scattering of light at different angles as it bounces off a multifaceted surface, a proliferation of trajectories which we then attach to the object deemed to have caused the effect. All those courses glisten. Pick one and it’s just a glint, a path to trod as wave or particle, another example of options narrowed by an observer’s determinism.

The experience of childhood isn’t sparkly, any more than that of being an adult. But memories of childhood are fuzzy, rough instances teetering on the edge of loss, what came before or after diffused, though we turn to them recalling so much potential.

9. The photograph undermined various models of aesthetic decoding, argued Vilém Flusser, because the apparatus intervenes in ways that the artist can’t predict. Addressing new media technologies constantly requires new vocabularies. New media’s very newness seems to cultivate a classifying impulse, which is enticing to the analytic endeavor. A parallel rise of interest in affect theory occurs with theorists delineating the realm of emotions and feelings.

10. Boym indicates how “technology and nostalgia have become co-dependent: new technology and advanced marketing stimulate ersatz nostalgia—for the things you never thought you had lost—and anticipatory nostalgia—for the present that flees with the speed of a click. […] Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.” If things were slower “back then,” it’s a comparative illusion. My mother expressed my grandmother’s housekeeping in the 1950s as urgent and demanding. My grandmother narrated life after the 1929 Depression as frantically trying to make ends meet.

11. One emoji for a timepiece looks like a red version of the Bradley 1940s double bell alarm. I stupidly got one in my twenties and was terrorized by its shattering clamor. The icon is a strange reference for a culture dependent on digital precision, but an apt representation of the alarming persistence of pings associated with our twenty-four seven on-call presence. Jeremy Rifkin argues in Time Wars that astronomical timekeeping introduced the notion of cycles, while mechanical timekeeping produced the concept of fixed, linear time. Computers unraveled all that for associative relations: “It is a stepchild of psychological consciousness, just as the concept of linear time was a stepchild of historical consciousness.”

12. The appearance of obsolete devices in media art gets attributed to technostalgia, suggesting these objects recall a more innocent time in tech culture. Rifkin’s point invites an alternate role for these objects (which doesn’t obviate the presence of such delusions in some, but it seems an error to assume that’s always at play). Seeing the Victrola or Walkman, the Atari console or Nintendo Game Boy, the jewel-toned iMac G3 or the BlackBerry, the Motorola brick phone or all of the above could lead to questions about the lack driving our need for connection.

13. Technostalgia usually means “the fuzzy feeling one gets when seeing a device one used to use, having forgotten all its limitations or why it was upgraded,” privileging “an imagined history of technology and an anesthetized view of that history,” as the artist Dev Harlan wrote in an insightful assessment for Right Click Save. This understanding shifts these devices from a fetish, an anxious objet petit a, to a grappling with political, economic, and (as he pursues in the article) ecological concerns. Remembering national and temporal context adds other complexities for these signifiers. Reading artists’ inclusion of these devices can be more sophisticated than the nostalgia being mobilized by right or left political parties these days.

14. Ehara’s imagery doesn’t evoke childhood but its color palette of bold pink, red, purple, turquoise and the glittering white, silver, gold leaves some viewers at that familial doorstep. Works don’t show specific products but do introduce objects we think we understand: flowers, pathways, lace patterns, domestic spaces, narrow streets, works from the Northern European Renaissance…except now, suddenly, those earlier objects land squarely within the iconography of that sixteenth-century period that she reconstructs otherly.

15. Her evocations may be due to her period studying in the Netherlands (says the biopathographer), the ease of drawing those elements from generative AI systems trained on Western data sets (says the socio-political critic), a feminine preference or feminist reappropriation (says the gendering reader), and yet such interpretations undermine a more interesting approach to Ehara’s work, building upon scholarship about those Dutch works’ depiction of changes in notions of time, infiltration of consumer capitalism, interest in common life, among other considerations. The semiotic fullness of that era’s painting is sometimes ascribed to their design appropriation of book emblems, another text-image complex prior to generative AI. Her works are animated (though many reproductions here and online are stills that lose the works’ subtlety by pinning elements in place) but the slowness of her glimmers invites us to pause, much like the serenity in those paintings. She succeeds in that, despite working as a VJ, equally deft at pulsing imagery.

16. Nostalgia smoothes out the rough hewn forms of history. While acknowledging nostalgia’s complexity, Boym introduces a typology of two common articulations.

17. Restorative nostalgia “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” that posits itself as truth and enforces tradition (though these are frequently manufactured). We see that around the world, making it ironically transnational.

18. Reflective nostalgia finds ambivalence in longing and belonging, accepts the contradictions of modernity, calls truth as such into doubt, revisits the many routes of narratives, inhabits multiple temporalities and locales: “It loves details, not symbols. At best, it can present an ethical and creative challenge.”

19. Reflective nostalgia remains attuned to semiology while allowing that things don’t always point to the same idea from one moment to the next, for one person or another. Sometimes, they don’t mean at all. Sometimes, a rose just arose.

20. Emi Kusano is another artist whose work with generative AI lands in this discourse around nostalgia, perhaps because her work includes Japanese fashion history and pop culture. This guides some to default into sociological tropes of nationalist, mediated, and subculture conflicts on cultural identity and memory. Few discuss the technical challenges of her work, even less the formal qualities that suggest an aesthetic continuity with “fascination” in film, particularly as theorized by Mikko Tukhanen. Sometimes, nostalgia becomes a veil to more rigorous analyses.

21. Kusano’s series “Neural Fad” recalls the vibrant fashion scene of Tokyo street life, Harajuku (but also Gyaru and Decora), by blending archival photographs with imagined cultural movements. She mentions the difficulty of producing Takenoko-zoku dance styles because the western trained data sets were insufficient to reproduce this major 1970s to ’80s street culture, while also conflating different Asian cultures. The style of Harajuku, drawn through the networked stack behind generative AI foregrounds a cultural moment, but also extrapolates problems in the discourse around style, as the term has been stretched beyond meaning by these softwares.

22. Discussing fashion knowledgeably as a former street and red carpet photographer, she walks me through the decreasing time period for a style to represent an era, until all of a sudden (as others have noted about the retro effect overall), there is no fashion style to capture. A restorative nostalgia would want to instantiate style as determinant and so recuperate it as indicative of a symbolic order (as it served in the Tokugawa era). A reflective nostalgia appreciates the details of fashion style eras, but doesn’t seek to enforce them as symbols of some truth to be restored.

23. Interviews with Kusano often ask about nostalgia and so, much like we capitulate to SEO, the term sticks. I challenge us to consider her work without using the term.

24. Her invocation of retrofuturism shifts temporal relations. Past depictions of the future situate us neatly in a present that was the future, and remind us we are the past for what will come—one we are creating. It is a particularly contemporary phenomenon…unless we consider the various images of Christian paradise, but those are as cloud based as utopias stemming from Silicon Valley’s TESCREAL ideology.

25. Retrofuturism also reminds us that our picture of the future influences the present and what we think we can or can’t do. “Fantasies of the past, determined by the needs of the present, have a direct impact on the realities of the future,” Boym rightly states. “The history of culture is the history of its images of the future,” wrote the philosopher of science and proto-futurist Frederik Polak in The Image of the Future: Enlightening the Past, Orienting the Present, Forecasting the Future (translated from Dutch in 1961 by the peace activist and sociologist Elise Boulding and applied towards her peacekeeping strategies).

26. Following a conversation with the artist and scholar Hasaqui Yamanobe, he emailed me about some values and aesthetics that reminded me why one language is sometimes better than another, and how art’s own discourse can still broaden its terminologies: “In Japanese, there are words like engi (縁起) and en (縁), which refer to connections or relationships but also carry a more spiritual, animistic sense—something like a network binding all things. Sometimes en is accepted as an irresistible force, and the question becomes how to make good use of that opportunity when it arises.”

27. Ruth Benedict famously tried to describe en in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, but this inspiriting of responsibility, obligation, relationality transcending time and place is hard to capture because it is not something one has but something in which one finds oneself…and even that language is inadequate. I am trying to present from conversations across my brief stay in Japan a glimpse of how time folds rather than unfurls.

28. Kusano’s retrofuturism resounds in her series “Synthetic Reflections,” one of which appeared on the cover of WWD JAPAN in June 2023. The “AI”-generated self-portraits imagine her in various contexts, fictional and real as the 1980s women’s pro-wrestling movement. The feminist ethos across this project multiples a woman’s potential. She has fun seeing “herself” in various modes, but not because they inspire her to become a “circuit gal” or busty Stepford cyborg, but to create herself as the change effect in the world here and now.

29. Even in my few weeks there, I witnessed a subtle diminishment of women, which many confirmed, emphatically. To imagine a woman capable of anything, right now, anywhere, is no small political feat. To do so while addressing the limitations of that imagination in the data sets of our programs and cultural programming, and in those who think the images are iconic representations of Kusano’s own desire…well, that asks us to hold these as images and not reality—neither hers nor ours. It asks us to conceive a future that escapes from the narrow visions of the past.

30. The wall text opening the Tokyo Metropolitan nostalgia show puts the term in quotations as if to emphasize its variability, and even so I get the sense that we are discussing different things:

The nostalgia manifest in works by artists such as Kawase Hasui and Domon Ken is liable to touch anyone, even if the times they portray differ entirely. The “nostalgia” of Taisho- and early Showa-era scenes, lost in Japan’s rush to modernize, and the “nostalgia” of the American culture sweeping the nation after the war can touch us in same way as the “nostalgia” of townscapes that fell to homogenized redevelopment in Japan’s period of rapid economic growth.

This doesn’t sound like moments of longing, but a situated historical sensibility, one that ensures we aren’t so fatuous as to think no others have been through times of decimation, development, and debate.

31. Reflective nostalgics, Boym explains, appreciate “modern ruins that keep alive memories of destruction and of multiple contested histories and coexisting temporalities.” Apparent in much work of late, I’m confronted by it when seeing Genbaku Dome. The only remaining structure in the area of the hypocenter, where the first atomic bomb exploded on August 6, 1945, it has been conserved, even the rubble within undisturbed. Standing before the Memorial Cenotaph, where a chest under the arch keeps the names of those who died, the eye glides over the Hiroshima Pond of Peace, sees the Flame of Peace burning since it was lit on August 1, 1964, and lands on the skeletal former Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall. A complex narrative unfolds.

32. Design details serve symbolic purpose. Also, the light sparkles across the pond, just because the sun radiates… even when we can’t see it on cloudy days.

33. Another line in the wall text for Genealogy of Nostalgia states: “Our thoughts of bygone days encourage us to reflect meaningfully on our lives, feel empathy for other people, and sustain hope for the future.”

34. The exhibition Can I Believe in a Fortunate Tomorrow? at Kotaro Nukaga showcases Hiromi Ozaki (better known as Sputniko!) tackling the networked systems she had hoped would break down hegemonies of control, but seem to have done the opposite. The works present a tranquil beauty productively at odds with the algorithmic goodness formulated. Drone in Search of a Four-Leaf Clover (2023) analyzes fields that she recorded around Japan looking for the symbol of good fortune. But, doesn’t its luck stem from the charm of discovering how effort accomplishes something? The flip side is the AI-simulated video of saiun, when clouds shimmer rainbow hues near the sun, a felicitous symbol in Asia; the exhibition gets its title from this series. No amount of effort, no on-demand order can produce saiun.

35. The ease that an entire industry suggests we seek across all facets of our lives might just undermine the very joy at stake. At the same time, effort isn’t all … sometimes unexpected radiant loveliness underscores the strange happenstance occurrence that is being here now.

It's not nostalgia to remember former aspirations and recognize the systems that failed those dreams. It’s not nostalgia to remember hope. It might be, if losing sight of hope’s creative drive.

36. Sometimes you have to face a mountain. Sometimes thirty-six views provide the complexity to relinquish capture, and recognize the field of possibility. Sometimes the folds of past-present-future are a map, but one that needn’t be squared with the flower in hand.