Nostalgia for the Present

Philip K.Dick, Time out of Joint, 1959.

During a workshop ran in the frame of the event “Educational turn Internationale Perspektiven auf Vermittlung in Museen und Ausstellungen“ (organized in Vienna by Schnittpunkt (http://www.schnitt.org) in November 2010), the participants worked on the idea of a “nostalgia for the present“.

In Time out of Joint, Philip K.Dick uses science-fiction to describe his own time – the 1950's – from a future (1990's) perspective. This leads to a kind of “Nostalgia for the Present“, as in the title of a Fredric Jameson's article discussing this book. Dick's main character, Ragle Gumm, sees pieces of what he thinks to be the present reality, desintegrate in front of his eyes. Objects vanish and are replaced by slips of papers with the objects'names on it.

Inspired by that plot and by a discussion about nostalgia, the participants of the workshop chose a contemporary object which they think will become objects of Nostalgia in the future. The names of those objects were printed on slips of paper, along with a comment and a link to this web page.

The slips were laid down in different places chosen by the participants, in and around the Kunsthalle Wien (http://www.kunsthallewien.at), where the workshop took place. Nostalgia was a theme running through two of The Kunsthalle's exhibitions presented at the time.

A project proposed by microsillons, realized with the 12 participants.