POV
Did Analog People Dream of Real Sheep?
Words: Charlie White
Photo: Courtesy Steve Kerner
This column begins with a picture I stumbled across online -- a photograph most likely processed decades ago at a yellow Kodak hut in the parking lot of some bygone supermarket. It showed a place I've never been to, but one I seemed to know, as if I were sharing another person?s memory. I'm not a replicant -- I have my own memories -- but this picture summed up something larger then a personal history. It spoke of an entire generation's last, fleeting moments in analog time.
As I write these words under pale halogen lamplight aboard a 767, I am everything our stories said we would one day become: I am science fiction's tomorrow. Sitting at 30,000 feet, typing on my laptop and listening to digitized music from a small white rectangle, I am completely cut off from my surroundings. When I land, I'll immediately use my mobile phone, and when I get home, I'll go online. We are what we decided to become, and if you do not recall the transition, perhaps you are too young to remember the board games or the rotary phone on the kitchen wall. But if you do remember, look at these children of the '70s relaxing in the summer sun at Camp Impala, a former sleepaway camp in upstate New York, and consider what happened, and what we might have lost along the way.
Recall with me the term "electronic" in all its revolutionary glory. This word, which preceded "digital," was once the consumer's cue for everything new. It signified our utopian potential, achieved through a simple shift from the static to the dynamic which would take us from the board to the screen, from the pen to the word processor, from the group to the individual and, more and more, from the natural to the synthetic. Within a few years we would travel from that grassy field outside to that big couch inside -- from that sunny afternoon with nothing much to do to a world defined by 250 channels of distraction, surfing, email, VM, SMS, Xbox and Paxil.
I think these youths have a peace in their postures that we have lost. To me, they seem more in tune with their surroundings than we are today. Can our technologically saturated minds regain their ability to embrace our immediate surroundings, or is the human consciousness now permanently subdivided into files, folders, layers and game levels? My hunch is that the truth is closer to the latter, but I believe that the analog pace is as important as oxygen, and without it, the next generation will lose any remaining capacity to enjoy the toasted marshmallows and campfire songs after their global link-up sessions, pre-college study interactives, pre-teen e-dating and four-day-long injection- assisted immersive game trips are done.
What seduction made us give up our own versions of Camp Impala in the name of progress? Was it the '80s, marked by the luminescent grids of Tron and the imagined tomorrow of William Gibson's urban sprawl? Can we blame the vinyl clothing, the jelly shoes? Was it the appeal of the machine, the plastic passions of New Wave, that set this in motion, or some deeper desire? The arrival of these new objects and ideas meant the removal of the preceding era's aesthetic. The look of the natural, however processed it may have been, was on its way out. And in its place came a fetish for neon and chrome that set the stage for nature's all-out removal. This mid-80s aesthetic trend marked a clear shift in social concerns, a transition from conservation to construction, from the organic to the synthetic.
The landscape of electronics -- calculator watches, Atari game systems, Commodore 64 computers and Sony Walkmen -- began infiltrating middle-class homes. Technology became cheaper, smaller, more individualized and, ultimately, more banal. This sea change was enhanced by the booming Reagan economy, which despite its staggering federal debt, junk bonds and nukes, made America feel safe in its global hegemony once again.
It was a strange time, one that in many ways was more about an imagined fiction of a technological future than the hard technological truths to come. This fiction made the mundane command line of the PC and the flat 2-D space of the videogame seem magical. From WarGames to The Last Starfighter , our collective imagination taught us the potential of our newfound technologies. Our enthusiasm wrapped all technologies, however disparate, into one category, because we didn't yet understand how they would actually change anything, we just knew they shared the same gloss and infinite promise of the new. From LCD-display speedometers to home computers to pushbutton phones, these objects pointed to a tomorrow that was electronic, mechanical and, ultimately, digital.
So when I look at this photograph, I am caught between an adult version of childhood and a true snapshot of youth, suspended forever in that molasses glaze common to commercially processed photos of that era. On one hand I feel the inevitable sheen of nostalgia, on the other, a recognition that something genuinely valuable was lost during the digital revolution. So what it comes down to is, what do we do now? We, the grown adults of yesterday's Camp Impalas, can do nothing if we want, because even at our most frantically logged on and plugged in, some whisper of the past reminds us to check in with our analog selves, to hunt for unspoiled lands on our two-week vacations or, at the very least, to take a yoga class in hopes of restoring a stillness that was once readily at hand. But we are no longer the future, our children are, and we are the last generation that can help them learn how to discover, preserve and value whatever is left of the natural, analog world. If they do not, they may spend their adult lives wondering why they are so nervous, overwhelmed and scared all the time. Analog is not a relic of the past. It is something essentially human, and we must not lose it altogether.
Artist Charlie White lives in Los Angeles, where he is a professor at USC's School of Fine Arts and director of the school's Intermedia program. His photographs explore America?s social fictions, and the tensions in identity and perception that they generate. Charlie White is represented by Andrea Rosen Gallery, NYC.
