Ghastly Graphics: Tool Fandom, Bad Cinema, and the Haunted PS1 Game Development Community

Patrick Dolan and Andrew Bailey (York University)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2023.10 | Issue 10 | July 2023

Throughout the late 2010s, a community of independent game developers has come together under the moniker “Haunted PS1” to produce an annual anthology of game demos and an accompanying livestreamed event showcasing these works celebrating a mode of game-making often referred to as “low-poly horror.” This emerging genre nostalgically celebrates the aesthetics of older generations of computer and console games, especially those made for the original PlayStation (PS1) during the mid-to-late 1990s. Over time, this has resulted in an increasingly large group of new indie games that have all been deliberately made to recreate the awkward control schemes, disorienting texturing warping, and jittery polygons inherent to PS1-era game development. To achieve these outdated effects using contemporary game engines, the Haunted PS1 community has produced and openly shared its own custom tools and plugins. This article uses one such tool called “The Haunted PSX Render Pipeline” as a prompt to investigate the relationship between independent game development and other nostalgic and DIY modes of creative practice, namely zine-making and underground horror film. Furthermore, we work to reveal why games and tools released within the Haunted PS1 community are so often distributed for free and how this is partially related to the distinctly obsolete, ugly, and non-commercial aspects of the PS1 aesthetic within contemporary videogame capitalism and fandoms for so-called “bad” media.

Keywords: nostalgia, PlayStation, the Haunted PS1, The Haunted PSX Render Pipeline, low-poly horror, independent game development, tool fandoms, shot-on-video, underground horror, zines, paracinema, non-cinema, bad cinema, VHS

Introduction

“We’re in something of a golden age for horror games,” declares NME writer Oisin Kuhnke.[1] While the Japanese videogame developer Capcom has seen great success recently with their long-running Resident Evil series (1996-ongoing), Kuhnke is not referring to the output of mainstream companies such as this. Instead, they praise the output of a rapidly expanding and nebulous group of independent and DIY game developers commonly referred to as The Haunted PS1 (HPS1) who produce short, experimental horror games that nostalgically eschew the detailed graphics of AAA games for the outdated aesthetics of the PlayStation 1.

Cultural perspectives on digital games and nostalgia have dramatically shifted over the last two decades. In many ways, this was spurred by the proliferation of independent games that began in the mid-2000s with the release of popular pixel-art platformers such as Braid (Number None, Inc., 2008), FEZ (Trapdoor, 2012), and Cave Story (Studio Pixel, 2004). The critical and commercial success of these indie games helped to establish a growing market for game mechanics and visuals that pay homage to previous eras of game development practice. More often than not, they borrow the aesthetics associated with older 8- or 16-bit consoles such as the Nintendo Game Boy (released in 1989) or Super Nintendo Entertainment System (released in 1990). Within the field of game studies, much of the existing scholarship on these kinds of indie games tends to focus on their commercial relationship with the mainstream industry and how their independence from it is perceived and defined.[2] Although less common, there have also been recent attempts to explore the aesthetics and style of the genre[3] and the cultural significance of the innumerable smaller grassroots, hobbyist, and informal communities of practitioners that compose it.[4]

This article builds on this growing body of research, examining HPS1 as a novel configuration of indie game-making practice that, unlike the consistently marketable retro pixel art styles referenced above, deliberately engages with videogame aesthetics that many perceive as ugly, obsolete, and unpleasant. Since approximately 2018, games associated with these outdated visuals and mechanics have commonly been grouped under the HSP1 communal moniker. This name comes from the community’s nostalgic predilection for the low polygon counts, pixelated textures, and jagged edges of the 3D graphics seen on the original PlayStation, (released in 1994 in Japan and 1995 in the US and EU) and the pioneering survival horror games that were released on it during the mid and late 90s. Beyond this invocation of outmoded visuals and genre conventions, HPS1 developers often advertise their games using branding flourishes that harken back to this era. Examples include retrofuturist studio names and logos and promotional imagery reminiscent of the jewel case packaging that PlayStation games were sold in. Much of this nostalgic signposting tends to be found on the developers’ social media accounts and store pages that are most often hosted on itch.io. For those unfamiliar, itch.io is a digital storefront that is widely renowned within the indie game development scene for how small a percentage of sales it takes and the ease with which developers can upload and sell their games—especially in comparison to much larger platforms such as Steam and the Epic Games Store. It is also a hub for community engagement, hosting online game jams and its customizable store pages and customer profiles. Furthermore, and crucial to our arguments concerning the HPS1 community’s complicated relationship with capitalism and art, most games released on itch.io by HPS1 developers are freely available with only a prompt for a suggested donation that pops up on the download pages. We contend that the HPS1 community—with its preference for older, less inherently marketable forms of game development and the tendency for its members to share and cross-promote each other’s work through unified branding and platform choices—is a nexus of creative practice that is becoming increasingly necessary to study and theorize in relation to other, more firmly established communities that similarly blend media fandom with artistic production. HPS1 games’ use of outdated, ugly graphics along with remediated CRT and VHS visual artifacts reflects not only a bad cinema fandom that formed in the wake of 80s Shot-on-Video horror movies, but also DIY creation communities that rose through zine making, horror conventions, and online forums.

In the next section of this article, we introduce a freely available tool named the “Haunted PSX Render Pipeline.” Made by and shared within the HSP1 community, it is intended to help users reproduce the nostalgic aesthetics of the PlayStation console within the Unity game engine (a piece of software that is commonly used by independent game designers and media artists).[5] Not only is this tool evidence of the non-commercial and communal qualities of the community, but displays their painstaking dedication to reproducing the material qualities of old, ugly, and distorted PS1 graphics. These kinds of non-commercialized, freely available, communal tools partially reflect what Emilie Reed, museum studies and art history researcher and game developer, defines as “mass art engines” and “mass art tools” that resist industry pressures toward “professionalization, polish and scale.”[6] Using the game making tool as a culmination of energies, we trace the HPS1 community’s roots through independent horror movie distribution before moving on to analyze its preference of ugly aesthetics through theories of bad cinema.

HPS1’s Tool Fandoms and Communities of Practice

Beyond HPS1’s tendency to release their games for free, there have also been several custom-made tools that have been freely distributed throughout the community that allows members to more easily reproduce the desired aesthetics of the original PlayStation. One of the most prominent examples of this is an add-on for the Unity game engine called the “Haunted PSX Render Pipeline” (more commonly referred to as HPSXRP) that was created by indie developer Nicholas Brancaccio and released in January 2021 via GitHub. According to another developer in the HSP1 community with the itch.io and Twitter handle “leafthief” who wrote and published an installation guide for HPSXRP, the add-on is meant to emulate “the hardware limitations of the PS1” such as “vertex jitter and the pixelation post processing.”[7] The add-on was initially previewed as part of the 2020 iteration of the HPS1 community’s annual EEK3 Indie Horror Showcase in the “Game Dev Tech Showcase” section and has since been used to make a vast collection of games, animations, and art assets—many of which are easily found by searching the hashtag HPSXRP on Twitter. For example, Bryce Bucher, who has been a frequent contributor to the HPS1 community, has made several posts highlighting their use of the HPSXRP to help create their games. Similarly, Brancaccio has also made posts to this effect, in one instance pointing out how Bucher’s 2022 game Mysteries Under Lake Ophelia represents one of the first games made using the HPSXRP to be released for the Nintendo Switch.[8]

Collectively, the communal cross-promotion of the HPSXRP referenced above functions as a strong example of what Stefan Werning, Associate Professor for Digital Media and Game Studies at Utrecht University, refers to as “tool fandom,” where a group of practitioners organizes itself around a particular platform or piece of software in a way that is comparable to the more commonly understood fandoms of specific narrative media franchises.[9] When initially defining tool fandoms, Werning points to large media companies such as Adobe, Disney, and Sony, arguing that they increasingly “perceive their tools more as a service, which becomes more valuable through sharing, than as a product, which has to be kept scarce to maintain its value.”[10] Werning then complicates this by explaining how tool fandoms also exist in relation to much less known, though more easily accessible game development tools such as Bryce, Scratch, and GameMaker.[11] Werning states that participation within tool fandoms is inherently a social experience and that the communal learning, engagement, and participatory culture they offer allows for members to accrue a complex blend of gaming and social capital. These intertwined forms of social recognition allow members of tool fandoms to express and display a wide array of qualities about themselves and their creations, such as “status, prestige, authority, value, skills, tastes and knowledge.”[12]

Using the HPSXRP hashtag to promote one’s work on Twitter is not the only way in which Brancaccio’s Unity add-on has worked to foster a community of practice around itself. In addition to the interlinked network of art that the Twitter hashtag has produced over time, there are links to and descriptions of the broader HPS1 community’s Discord server included within the GitHub page for the tool. Within this server, there is a specific subchannel dedicated to discussion related to HPSXRP where game developers can ask or answer technical questions, and share images, videos, or links to the games they have been working on.

The intimacy and enthusiasm that the HPS1 community and the HPSXRP tool fandom collectively foster have many novel qualities worthy of further research but are not without precedent. Unsurprisingly, there are many cultural and socio-economic resonances with the broader independent game development community, but through HPS1’s deliberate alignment with grungy aesthetics, there are also productive insights to be gleaned from the history of zines and other similar forms of DIY print publication.

The term “zine” comes from the word magazine but is used primarily for a DIY-style print publication that is independently produced (normally by one person). Elke Zobl, creator of the Grrrl Zine Network and associate professor at the Paris-Lodron University and the University Mozarteum Salzburg, traces the history of zines from 1930s sci-fi fiction, through the DIY punk scene when photocopiers were becoming more accessible, to the 1990s the riot grrrl movement and third-wave feminism.[13] Game developer and author Anna Anthropy explores the relationship between this mode of low-tech book-making and the kind of independent videogame development that the HPS1 community represents. She argues that due to the rapid proliferation of easily approachable game-making tools that are designed for non-coders, it is “now possible for people with little to no programming experience—hobbyists, independent game designers, zinesters—to make their own games and to distribute them online.”[14] What this allows for is game production to go beyond the homogenous cycle where publishers “permit only games that follow a previously established model,” one which historically, has catered primarily to white cishet males.[15] In effect, the development of these DIY tools has resulted in many feminist, queer, experimental, and artistic game scenes to arise that collectively reveal a much wider possibility space than what is offered by the mainstream industry. In many ways, this echoes the relationship between the history of zines and largescale commercial book publishers. As Susan E. Thomas, librarian at Pace University and scholar on independent publication, points out in her art historical analysis of zines, they are “deliberately messy, inefficient, and labor-intensive”[16] and often made by creators who have a “fondness or preference for obsolete technologies.”[17] Just like the HPS1 community’s desire to invoke the outdated controls and visuals of bygone game consoles, these anachronistic qualities place zines on the outer fringes of the commercial industry. Additionally, using phrasing that feels in sync with HPS1’s monstrously creative output, Thomas also identifies much of contemporary “art zine subject matter has tended towards the fantastic and gothic as well as the queer, cryptozoological, ‘emo,’ and creepy.”[18] Finally, although zines have historically often been distributed in person at annual fairs and festivals, over the last couple of decades, artists have increasingly made their work available to view and purchase through e-commerce platforms such as Gumroad. Like itch.io, Gumroad allows creators to set up a store page to sell their work with the option of including a Pay-What-You-Can (PWYC) or donation-based payment option instead of charging a specific product price.

Looking beyond historical and contemporary zine-making practices, the DIY sensibilities of the HPS1 community can be productively linked to the in-person gatherings[19] and online forums[20] of horror fans and VHS collectors as well,[21] particularly the fetishization of VHS aesthetics that became increasingly popular with Facebook-centric underground horror filmmakers of the late 2000s and 2010s. This particular era of underground horror featured very low budgets, high violence, and gore and was marketed and distributed across several Facebook groups and online forums.[22]

The growing use of PayPal for money transfers along with e-commerce platforms like Storenvy for online stores and affordable consumer DVD production technology or a-la-carte DVD manufacturers like MVD in the late 2000s to early 2010s made distributing videos outside of the mainstream increasingly frictionless. While these filmmakers still frequented conventions and festivals, discourse between creators and fans increasingly occurred online, primarily through Facebook groups, providing an inexpensive venue for marketing their products, but also a vibrant exchange of discourse about horror films, new and old, and a venue for community building centred around these distinct products.[23]

The Facebook horror scene is part of a history of independent horror that can be traced from midnight screenings of cult and exploitation films in privately owned theatres beginning in the late 60s (often called the “Golden Age of Horror”) to the home video market and the influx of horror released on and made for VHS.[24] The scene’s immediate progenitor is the horror DVD market of the mid-2000s which saw a slew of older slasher films and Italian horror and Giallo from the 1970s and 1980s, alongside contemporary films by auteur directors like James Wan (Saw, 2004), Eli Roth (Hostel, 2005), and Rob Zombie (House of 1000 Corpses, 2003) (referred to as the “Splat Pack”) released to stores.[25] Producers at the time took advantage of the lax ratings of the home market to release uncut and unrated versions of the film as well as make use of the added storage of DVDs for commentary tracks and video extras.[26] As a result, owning a movie became less about the content and more focused on physical media as a collector’s item.[27] The Splat Pack also saw a more extreme and low-budget contemporary in the 2000s in a growing underground horror scene, including, but not limited to filmmakers like Lucifer Valentine (Slaughtered Vomit Dolls, 2006), Fred Vogel (The August Underground Trilogy, 2001/2003/2007), and Bill Zebub (Jesus Christ: Serial Rapist, 2004). Infamous for their crude production and transgressive content, these films were not as readily available as the horror re-releases and the Splat Pack, instead, they were acquired through horror conventions and the filmmakers' own websites. The horror DVD market and underground horror of the early-to-mid 2000s paved the way for Facebook filmmakers.

What made this Facebook-focused iteration of underground horror stand out, apart from their online marketing and distribution, was how much these titles paid homage to outmoded VHS aesthetics through visual effects and iconography. For example, Slaughter Tales (2012) and All Hallows Eve (2013) are anthology horror films that revolve around the main character finding an old VHS tape that features the segments of the films. The director of Slaughter Tales even used an old camcorder bought at a garage sale to authentically recreate the look of older digital video. Part of the appeal of these movies was their postmodern nod to the materiality and the narrative tropes of the Shot-on-video horror of the 1980s and 1990s. Furthermore, a number of underground horror films have been anachronistically released on VHS through distributors such as Lazer Paladin Video, Videonomicon, and SRS cinema. This focus on materiality in the Facebook scene was part of a growing cultural appreciation of VHS in the 2010s that had a notable influence on the HPS1 scene. Following in the footsteps of zine cultures, ad-hoc online distribution, and underground horror production, the HSP1 community has formed itself using a messy mould of deliberately ugly aesthetics, DIY collaboration, and fan-like interaction. In doing so, we argue that they have created an appealingly distasteful new genre of videogame that manages to exceed uncritical, enthusiast videogame nostalgia. Furthermore, in line with the DIY communities before them, the creation of the HPSXRP has given HPS1 developers a free tool to more easily—and as we will see in the following section more pleasurably—produce their deliberately ugly games easier. The influences of HPS1, of course, did not solely derive from Facebook horror filmmakers. Its lineage can be traced through the independent horror games in the 2010s (such as Slender: The Eight Pages, Parsec Productions, 2012), internet urban legends/fiction (also called Creepypasta), especially those about haunted games (see Ben Drowned, Sonic.exe, or Sad Satan), and found footage horror films (The Blair Witch Project, 1999, and the V/H/S series, 2012-2022). Yet, the Facebook-based underground horror stands out as a key progenitor for its communal production and its focus on aesthetic ugliness.

Para- and Non-cinema

Pleasure in horror,[28] certainly plays a role in the appeal of HSP1 games. However, as the HPSXRP works to demonstrate, there is also a distinct allure in the aesthetics of the original PlayStation that heavily works to structure this community’s tastes and creative output. This preference for what is now perceived to be unpolished, outdated, ugly, and unappealing is also not without precedent and has tangible roots in recent media history through what Jeffrey Sconce, professor in the Screen Cultures program at Northwestern School of Communication, defines as “paracinema.”[29] According to Sconce, paracinema describes an oppositional pleasure that purposely seeks out media deemed low culture, offensive, crass, and even mundane. The objects of paracinema include, but are not limited to, low-budget 80s action films, lude and gory Hong Kong Cat-III films (an equivalent rating to X rating in North America), DIY prank videos like the CKY series (1999-2002), or corporate training tapes. The notion of paracinema also has close ties with what William Brown, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Roehampton, London, refers to as “non-cinema,” a conceptualization of a particular mode of low-budget digitally-produced art film that he refers to as “the low end of filmmaking” that aims to “divert attention beyond that which already has the means to demand our attention in terms of films, and to focus us on the small, the peripheral, the barbaric, the wretched.”[30] Furthermore, several aesthetic tropes unite para- and non-cinema, such as “lo-fi images, location shooting, regularly amateur or amateur-ish acting, [and] an emphasis on darkness.” As Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Monash University Julia Vassilieva expresses, pleasure for this kind of “bad” cinema “marvels at the sight of blood, excrement and slime; and it celebrates abject emotions stretching from shock, horror and disgust to boredom.”[31] It renders “bad into sublime”[32] through a distanced, ironic reading of texts, resembling a postmodern spectatorship. In short, these theories claim that enjoyment of bad media is derived from its badness.

There are significant medium-related differences that can easily be noted between the kinds of micro- or zero-budget films that Brown and Sconce are focusing on in their respective cinematic speculations and the indie horror games that are produced within the HSP1 community. Yet, their shared aesthetic focus on the low, the dark, and the messy allows for this concepts to be applied nonetheless. Early 3D graphics with low polygon counts from the mid 90s have long been considered ugly when compared to the pixel graphics that were dominant previously and the refined 3D visuals that developed after. For example, Meg Pellicio, editor at TheGamer, praises games of the console, but highlights that “plenty of PS1 games feature hideous visuals.”[33] Even among PS1 fans, game graphics are deemed “ugly-ass polygons”[34] as is communicated in the title of a forum thread on Retro Game Boards otherwise espousing love for the games. In another example, user Balgore on the Steam community forums for the throwback action game ULTRAKILL (Arsi "Hakita" Patala, 2020), says he found the game fun but cannot get past the “brutal brutal polygons”[35] Using Brown’s non-cinematic framework, this places these kinds of ugly aesthetics on the peripheral of industrial modes of production and thus allows them to fill the role of the “barbaric” and “the wretched” when compared to those of mainstream videogame capitalism.[36] Additionally, just as Brown argues in relation to non-cinematic filmmaking, these barbaric aesthetics are not only restricted to those without budgets, but are also something that “haunts” mainstream, big budget production as well. Briefly invoking Mark Fisher’s hauntological approach to media,[37] this means that the ghost of game-making’s graphical past is always lurking around, ready to be deployed as a criticism over lack of visual polish while simultaneously acting as a creative well for nostalgically-minded artists such as those within the HPS1 community. Additionally, like para- and non-cinema, this willful embrace of the impoverished is not something that is restricted to the visual or technical choices being made, but also includes a distinct enthusiasm for similarly peripheral content, for storylines and themes that most would consider to be ugly.

Many HPS1 games feature shocking, brutish, and trippy narratives of the kind referred to above. For example, RIIP (Pastafuture and Neurobew, 2021), included on the Holiday-themed HPS1 collection Madvent Calendar 2021, drops the player in a series of environments, both residential homes and commercial spaces, where they must rip through part of the environment to escape a glitching entity. The game is in first person perspective and features low poly graphics distorted with thick pixels, dark and dirty environments, with TV static blocking entry into many doors. It gives you no instructions or even a title screen and the player must frantically find a way out of their current space to the next before a white, jagged, fuzzy entity reaches them and sends them back to a previous section. Its distorted graphics, glitchy enemy, and rippable environments collaborated thematically to make a unique, disorienting, surreal, and very frightening game. RIIP without the implementation of “ugly-ass polygons” would not be as effective an experience.

SOV horror

Beyond the garish polygons and dreadful narratives of the games, what is often most striking are the video effects used in HPS1 games. While emulating PS1 graphics, many games implement VHS tape static and the visual distortion of a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT) television. Their content, coupled with their emulation of these anachronistic aesthetics, suggests the influence of shot-on-video (SOV) and VHS horror, like the Facebook horror filmmakers of the late 2000s and early 2010s.

SOV horror refers to a subgenre of low-budget horror movies shot on consumer or semi-professional video equipment and distributed through video rental stores. The home video rental market saw a boom in the 1980s and into the 1990s. As horror filmmaker and author Richard Mogg states, at this time, VCR and consumer video production technology became more affordable and as a result, was adopted by many homes in North America and Europe. Movies on VHS were expensive in the 80s, therefore the primary distribution of movies was through rental stores. There was high demand for home video and, starved for content, many stores stocked low-budget horror movies made by independent and hobbyist filmmakers shot on newly accessible video production equipment.[38] This wave of scary DIY tapes was deemed SOV horror, and hold a cult following today among VHS and B-movie horror enthusiasts.

As amateurish productions, many titles lack the technical aptitude and narrative pacing of filmmakers well versed in the language of cinema. As a result, many require a refined palette for this quality of the product and patience for plodding and often nonsensical unfolding of the plot.[39] These movies often feature poorly paced plots that, despite their simplicity, are hard to follow due to the filmmakers’ lack of technical know-how in creating spatial and narrative logic. Sound is typically mixed poorly, scores are rudimentary synth compositions, and the shocking moments in the films are accompanied by shrill musical stabs or sound effects that clip, distort, and warble. Furthermore, as films were shot on consumer video equipment and transferred onto VHS, the visual quality of these movies is poor, full of static, noise, and degeneration, often accentuated by the decay of the tape it is watched on. Beyond their unique pace and balance, pleasure for SOV horror is also tied to its materiality. The tape as an artifact, complete with its deterioration, becomes part of the pleasure. VHS visuals have also become aesthetic shorthand for gritty and authentic depictions of real-life violence. Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Lincoln, UK Neil Jackson et. al. name it the snuff aesthetic[40] with features that include “location shooting, handheld cameras, imperfect or improvised compositions, [...], degraded video imagery, lens phenomena, [..] print scratches, [...] and sound irregularities.”[41] The snuff aesthetic appears in many found footage horror films such as Cannibal Holocaust (1980), The Blair Witch Project, and Paranormal Activity (2007), and has also been used in more recent mainstream horror games such as Outlast (Red Barrels, 2013) and Resident Evil 7 (Capcom, 2017) to heighten the terror of their first-person perspective gameplay and cinematics.

Along with an aesthetic signifier for gritty real-world horror, the decayed visuals of SOV horror are tied to their physical medium, the VHS. This materiality is well known to VHS horror collectors today. Daniel Herbert, Associate Professor in the department of Film, Television, and Media at the University of Michigan, points out that while the concept of movies as a physical object is in decline, there are many companies that are distributing new VHS movies, primarily horror, cult, and exploitation.[42] Examples include SRS Cinema and Videonomicon (mentioned above) that distribute SOV horror and new films with a similar aesthetic on VHS, as well as DVD and Blu-Ray.

HPS1 games’ DIY production, their creepy, gory, brutal, and/or trippy content, their mix of tedium and mundanity with shock and novelty, matches the low budgets, lack of technical polish, and the subject matter of SOV horror and VHS tapes. Many HPS1 games use visual effects that resemble the static and degradation of VHS tapes and some even use the medium’s iconography in their games. Scary Tales Vol. 1 (Puppet Combo, 2019) has a title screen that looks like the cover of a VHS. In order to play the games in the collection, in this simple meta-game, you need to insert a tape into the VCR. CRT TVs and tapes also feature in numerous other titles such as Paratopic (Arbitrary Metric, 2018), TV Night (David Rodmad, 2019), and There’s Nobody (Gabrielndjldc). Some games, such as Bloodmoon Church (AzaGameStudio, 2021) and Ode to a Moon -The Lost Disc (colorfiction, 2019) ask the user to “play VHS tape” or “insert” to start the game. Publisher Torture Star Video even satirically brands themselves as a VHS distributor.

What’s curious about the melding of PS1 graphics with VHS aesthetic is the technological mismatch. While the CRT effects are fitting for the low-polygons of the 90s, the VHS decay is not. As the gaming console was connected directly to the TV and running off a CD, images featuring static lines and faded, blurred colours do not match up to PS1 technology. That being said, the PlayStation entered the market in Japan in 1994, and North America and Europe a year later. While DVDs launched sometime between 1995 and 1996, what has been called “the DVD Revolution” (the mass market adoption of the format) did not occur until 1997.[43] Of course, while the DVDs entered the mass market, their use did not fully catch on in every household. Therefore, it can be assumed that VHS was the dominant mode of home video exhibition when many people were playing PS1. Therefore, memories of home entertainment that combine limited polygons and VHS degradation is a natural nostalgic amalgamation.

PlayStation also marked an explosion in survival horror games. While many horror games were produced before Sony’s first home console, the golden age of survival horror is commonly attributed to the 90s.[44] Alone in the Dark (Infograms, 1992) is considered the first survival horror, but the term was coined by Capcom for Resident Evil (1996),[45] the game that popularized the genre, spawned a long-running series and inspired the creation of another giant franchise in the genre, the Silent Hill series (Konami, 1999-ongoing). The 90s also saw a slew of less successful survival horrors released, all featuring 3D graphics, environmental puzzles, menacing enemies and limited resources to defend yourself. 3D environments of many early survival horror games were represented with pre-rendered backgrounds and fixed camera angles. While this allowed developers to create more detailed surroundings it also mimicked horror cinematography and surveillance video, which reflected snuff aesthetics even in these earlier titles. Apart from the formation of a specific genre in the 90s, the low powered polygonal visuals of the PS1 saw games take on an eerie verisimilitude with their three-dimensional world created with distorted graphics. As Aaaron Tacker-Weiss, co-developer of The Devil (cathroon, et al., 2020) explains, the “240p screen resolution, severe aliasing, and unfiltered textures” lent an uncanny quality to the games of the PS1 through their visual distortion.[46] When we consider games like The Devil, and the many other HPS1, we see a conflation of content and aesthetics similar to SOV horror.

Still from The Devil | source: cathroon.itch.io/the-devil

Occurring at a time when the particular sub-genre and mode of exhibition were at their zenith, the formal elements of SOV horror and the visual elements of VHS are linked. The PlayStation, similarly saw an explosion of a certain kind of content (survival horror) married to specific aesthetics (low poly graphics). In turn, plodding, mysterious, and surreal horror games have been married with nostalgic graphics of the “embryonic 3D” age.[47] Many HPS1 also mix in elements of VHS horror through their shocking, gory, and surreal content, and in their evocation of the “badness” of SOV horror in video game form, HPS1 welcomes “ugly ass,” low-poly graphics into the bad cinema fold.

Conclusion

As we have argued throughout this article, the HPS1 community represents a unique synthesis of nostalgia and novelty that is differentiated from other retro-oriented indie game development practices through its love of outdated and unpolished aesthetics. These “bad” graphics are often constructed in reference to the specifically ludic conventions of 90s-era survival horror games. However, as we have shown, there are not infrequent instances of the community opting to blend these references to older games with the static, scan lines, and visual decay of VHS-based horror cinema. Furthermore, the need for custom add-ons and plugins such as the HPSXRP that force modern game engines to produce these deliberately less marketable visuals works to reflect the kind of platform-based tool fandoms that are increasingly common within many forms of digital creative practice. This practice-led fandom also allows for the HSP1 community to be speculatively theorized through the similarly DIY histories of zine-making and underground horror.

Collectively, all of this positions HPS1 as a community of practice that warrants further study. As low-poly horror continues to grow in prominence, how will its relationship with videogame capitalism correspondingly shift? Although, as we have referenced above, most HPS1 games hosted through itch.io are freely distributed, many of the most popular titles on this platform have been ported onto consoles with accompanying non-donation-based price tags. Looking toward the small press and indie horror contexts we have used to build historical context for the HPS1 community, therein lies some potential answers in terms of how this nebulous and informal network of creators may loosely formalize itself over time. There have already been some examples of small groups of low-poly horror game developers successfully assembling themselves into commercial studios and/or publishers (for example, DreadXP and New Blood Interactive) that mirror independent book publishers and film distributors. Looking to the future, it will be interesting—especially to those within the fields of platform studies, and game production studies—to see how this trend develops and at what point this nostalgic and bad cinema-infused mode of game-making reaches a threshold of popularity and financial success where their ugly aesthetics become normalized. Although the technical limitations of the PlayStation 1 work especially well alongside the grungier aspects of the horror genre, as tool fandoms like HPS1 expand, there will be more opportunities for artists to recreate other bygone aesthetics and genres. Many of the HPS1 developers currently engaging in this practice are of the age where they experienced the survival horror games of the PlayStation 1 first-hand throughout their childhood or teenage years. But what remains to be seen is how future points of reference will distort and adapt these "ugly-ass" aesthetics into new forms of artistic expression.

Footnotes

1 Oisin Kuhnke, “The Resurgence of the PS1 Horror Game,” NME (blog), October 27, 2021, https://www.nme.com/features/gaming-features/the-resurgence-of-the-ps1-horror-game-3076237.

2 Felan Parker, “Boutique Indie: Annapurna Interactive and Contemporary Independent Game Development” in Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics, ed. Paolo Ruffino, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020.

3 Lana Polansky, “Towards an Art History for Videogames,” Rhizome, Aug 03, 2016, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/aug/03/an-art-history-for-videogames/

4 Brendan Keogh, “From aggressively formalised to intensely in/formalised: accounting for a wider range of videogame development practices,” Creative Industries Journal, 12, no 1, (2019):14-33.

5 Benjamin Nicoll and Brendan Keogh, The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software, 1st ed. 2019 edition (Palgrave Pivot, 2019).

6 Emilie Reed, “Game Art Engines Talk,” emreed.net, September 5th, 2019, https://emreed.net/GameArtEngines_Transcript.html.

7 leafthief, “Setting up the HPSXRP,” itch.io, 2021, https://leafthief.itch.io/turnpike-north/devlog/212145/setting-up-the-hpsxrp.

8 Nicholas Brancaccio (@pastasfuture), “#HPSXRP on Switch! 👀,” Twitter June 4 2022. https://twitter.com/pastasfuture/status/1533115100256784384

9 Stefan Werning. Making Games: The Politics and Poetics of Game Creation Tools (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2021) 51.

10 Ibid.

11 Werning, Making Games, 52.

12 Sturm, Damion, and Andrew McKinney. 2013. “Affective Hyper-consumption and Immaterial Labors of Love: Theorizing Sport Fandom in the Age of New Media.” Participations 10 (1): 357– 362.

13 Elke Zobl, “From DIY to Collaborative Fields of Experimentation: Feminist Media and Cultural Production Towards Social Change – A Visual Contribution,” in Feminist Media (transcript Verlag, 2012).

14 Anthropy, Anna. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters : How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 9.

15 Anthropy, 6.

16 Thomas, Susan E. “Value and Validity of Art Zines as an Art Form,” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Fall 2009, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2009), 28.

17 Thomas, 27

18 Thomas, 28.

19 Alison Harvey and Stephanie Fisher, “‘Everyone Can Make Games!’: The Post-Feminist Context of Women in Digital Game Production,” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 4 (July 4, 2015): 576–92; Stephanie J. Fisher and Alison Harvey, “Intervention for Inclusivity: Gender Politics and Indie Game Development,” Loading... 7, no. 11 (December 31, 2012); Daniel Joseph, “The Toronto Indies: Some Assemblage Required,” Loading... 7, no. 11 (December 31, 2012).

20 Chris J. Young, “Game Changers: Everyday Gamemakers and the Development of the Video Game Industry” (Thesis, 2018), https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/89734.

21 Matt Hills, “Attending Horror Film Festivals and Conventions: Liveness, Subcultural Capital and ‘Flesh-and-Blood Genre Communities,’” in Horror Zone : The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema (London ; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 87–102; Brigid Cherry, “Stalking the Web: Celebration, Chat and Horror Film Marketing on the Internet,” in Horror Zone : The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema (London ; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010), 67–86.

22 Patrick R. Dolan, “Illicit Objects: Subversive Forms of Value Production in Horror Cinema” (Master’s Research Project, Toronto, York University, 2016).

23 Dolan, “Illicit Objects: Subversive Forms of Value Production in Horror Cinema.”

24 See Mark Bernard, Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film (Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2014); Richard Mogg, Analog Nightmares: The Shot On Video Horror Films of 1982-1995, 1st edition (RickMoe Publishing, 2018).

25 Mark Bernard, Selling the Splat Pack; Raiford Guins, “Blood and Black Gloves on Shiny Discs: New Media, Old Tastes, and the Remediation of Italian Horror Films in the U.S.,” in Horror International, ed. Steven Jay Schneider and Tony Williams (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 15–32;

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 See Mathias Clasen, Why Horror Seduces (Oxford University Press, 2017); Bartłomiej Paszylk, The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey (McFarland, 2009); Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13; Robin Wood, “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s,” in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond: A Revised and Expanded Edition of the Classic Text (Columbia University Press, 2003), 63–84.

29 Jeffrey Sconce, “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style,” Screen 36, no. 4 (December 21, 1995): 371–93.

30 William Brown, “Non-Cinema:Digital,Ethics,Multitude,” Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 104-130.

31 Claire Perkins and Julia Vassilieva, “B for Bad Cinema,” Colloquy, no. 18 (December 2009): 7.

32 ibid.

33 Meg Pelliccio, “10 Terrible-Looking PS1 Games With Amazing Gameplay,” TheGamer, December 2, 2020, https://www.thegamer.com/playstation-ps1-games-graphics-best-gameplay/.

34 Chacranajxy, “PS1 Appreciation/Collectors Thread of Ugly-Ass Polygons,” Retro Game Boards: Video Games, October 25, 2017, https://www.retrogameboards.com/t/ps1-appreciation-collectors-thread-of-ugly-ass-polygons/87?page=9.

35 Balgore, “Graphics?,” ULTRAKILL: ULTRA General, December 22, 2020, https://steamcommunity.com/app/1229490/discussions/0/3002177675804624601/.

36 Brown, “Non-Cinema,” 108-109

37 Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, (Portland, Oregon: Zero Books, 2014).

38 Mogg, Analog Nightmares.

39 Caetlin Benson-Allott, “Affect & Apparatus: Horror After Cinema,” in Terror on Tape: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the History of Horror on Video (Yale University, 2016).

40 Neil Jackson et al., Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media, 1st ed. (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016), https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501304590.

41 Neil Jackson, “ Cannibal Holocaust : Realist Horror and Reflexivity,” Postscript 21, no. 3 (2002): 36 as quoted in Neil Jackson et al., Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media.

42 Daniel Herbert, “Nostalgia Merchants: VHS Distribution in the Era of Digital Delivery,” Journal of Film and Video 69, no. 2 (June 1, 2017): 3–19.

43Janet Wasko, How Hollywood Works (London, 2003).

44 “Survival-Horror,” Wiki, Middlebury College MediaWiki Server, May 14, 2014, https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/FMMC0282/Survival-Horror; James Troughton, “From Resident Evil To Dead Space: The History Of Survival Horror,” TheGamer, August 13, 2021, https://www.thegamer.com/survival-horror-history/.

45 Troughton, “From Resident Evil To Dead Space.”

46 Kuhnke, “The Resurgence of the PS1 Horror Game.”

47 Ibid.

Works Cited

• Anthropy, Anna. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters : How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Dropouts, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012).

• Balgore. “Graphics?” ULTRAKILL: ULTRA General, December 22, 2020. https://steamcommunity.com/app/1229490/discussions/0/3002177675804624601/.

• Benson-Allott, Caetlin. “Affect & Apparatus: Horror After Cinema.” In Terror on Tape: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on the History of Horror on Video. Yale University, 2016.

• Bernard, Mark. Selling the Splat Pack: The DVD Revolution and the American Horror Film. Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

• Brown, William. “ William Brown, “Non-Cinema: Digital,Ethics,Multitude,” Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 104-130.

• Cane, Shannon Michael. “Xerox, Paper, Scissors.” Aperture (San Francisco, Calif.), no. 218 (2015): 46–51.

• Chacranajxy. “PS1 Appreciation/Collectors Thread of Ugly-Ass Polygons.” Retro Game Boards: Video Games, October 25, 2017. https://www.retrogameboards.com/t/ps1-appreciation-collectors-thread-of-ugly-ass-polygons/87?page=9.

• Cherry, Brigid. “Stalking the Web: Celebration, Chat and Horror Film Marketing on the Internet.” In Horror Zone : The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, 67–86. London ; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010.

• Clasen, Mathias. Why Horror Seduces. Oxford University Press, 2017.

• Dolan, Patrick R. “Illicit Objects: Subversive Forms of Value Production in Horror Cinema.” Master’s Research Project, York University, 2016.

• Fisher, Mark. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures, Portland, Oregon: Zero Books, 2014.

• Fisher, Stephanie J., and Alison Harvey. “Intervention for Inclusivity: Gender Politics and Indie Game Development.” Loading... 7, no. 11 (December 31, 2012). http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/118.

• Guins, Raiford. “Blood and Black Gloves on Shiny Discs: New Media, Old Tastes, and the Remediation of Italian Horror Films in the U.S.” In Horror International, edited by Steven Jay Schneider and Tony Williams, 15–32. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005.

• Harvey, Alison, and Stephanie Fisher. “‘Everyone Can Make Games!’: The Post-Feminist Context of Women in Digital Game Production.” Feminist Media Studies 15, no. 4 (July 4, 2015): 576–92.

• Herbert, Daniel. “Nostalgia Merchants: VHS Distribution in the Era of Digital Delivery.” Journal of Film and Video 69, no. 2 (June 1, 2017): 3–19.

• Hills, Matt. “Attending Horror Film Festivals and Conventions: Liveness, Subcultural Capital and ‘Flesh-and-Blood Genre Communities.’” In Horror Zone : The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, 87–102. London ; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2010.

• Jackson, Neil, Shaun Kimber, Johnny Walker, and Thomas Joseph Watson. Snuff: Real Death and Screen Media. 1st ed. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2016.

• Joseph, Daniel. “The Toronto Indies: Some Assemblage Required.” Loading... 7, no. 11 (December 31, 2012). http://journals.sfu.ca/loading/index.php/loading/article/view/123.

• Keogh, Brendan. “From aggressively formalised to intensely in/formalised: accounting for a wider range of videogame development practices,” Creative Industries Journal, 12, no 1, (2019): 14-33.

• Kuhnke, Oisin. “The Resurgence of the PS1 Horror Game.” NME (blog), October 27, 2021. https://www.nme.com/features/gaming-features/the-resurgence-of-the-ps1-horror-game-3076237.

• leafthief. “Setting up the HPSXRP.” itch.io, 2021. https://leafthief.itch.io/turnpike-north/devlog/212145/setting-up-the-hpsxrp.

• Mogg, Richard. Analog Nightmares: The Shot On Video Horror Films of 1982-1995. 1st edition. RickMoe Publishing, 2018.

• Nicoll, Benjamin, and Brendan Keogh. The Unity Game Engine and the Circuits of Cultural Software. 1st ed. 2019 edition. Palgrave Pivot, 2019.

• Parker, Felan. “Boutique Indie: Annapurna Interactive and Contemporary Independent Game Development” in Independent Videogames: Cultures, Networks, Techniques and Politics, ed. Paolo Ruffino, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2020.

• Paszylk, Bartłomiej. The Pleasure and Pain of Cult Horror Films: An Historical Survey. McFarland, 2009.

• Pelliccio, Meg. “10 Terrible-Looking PS1 Games With Amazing Gameplay.” TheGamer, December 2, 2020. https://www.thegamer.com/playstation-ps1-games-graphics-best-gameplay/.

• Perkins, Claire, and Julia Vassilieva. “B for Bad Cinema.” Colloquy, no. 18 (December 2009): 5–15.

• Polansky, Lana. “Towards an Art History for Videogames,” Rhizome, Aug 03, 2016, https://rhizome.org/editorial/2016/aug/03/an-art-history-for-videogames/

• Reed, Emilie M. “Game Art Engines Talk.” emreed.net, September 5, 2019. https://emreed.net/GameArtEngines_Transcript.

• Sconce, Jeffrey. “‘Trashing’ the Academy: Taste, Excess, and an Emerging Politics of Cinematic Style.” Screen 36, no. 4 (December 21, 1995): 371–93.

• Sturm, Damion, and Andrew McKinney. 2013. “Affective Hyper- consumption and Immaterial Labors of Love: Theorizing Sport Fandom in the Age of New Media.” Participations 10 (1): 357– 362.

• Middlebury College MediaWiki Server. “Survival-Horror.” Wiki, May 14, 2014. https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/FMMC0282/Survival-Horror.

• Thomas, Susan E. “Value and Validity of Art Zines as an Art Form,” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Fall 2009, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Fall 2009), 27-36.

• Troughton, James. “From Resident Evil To Dead Space: The History Of Survival Horror.” TheGamer, August 13, 2021. https://www.thegamer.com/survival-horror-history/.

• Wasko, Janet. How Hollywood Works. London, 2003.

• Werning, Stefan. Making Games: The Politics and Poetics of Game Creation Tools (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2021) 51.

• Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13.

• Wood, Robin. “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 70s.” In Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... and Beyond: A Revised and Expanded Edition of the Classic Text, 63–84. Columbia University Press, 2003.

• Young, Chris J. “Game Changers: Everyday Gamemakers and the Development of the Video Game Industry,” 2018. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/1807/89734.

• Zobl, Elke. “From DIY to Collaborative Fields of Experimentation: Feminist Media and Cultural Production Towards Social Change – A Visual Contribution.” In Feminist Media. transcript Verlag, 2012.

Author Biographies

Patrick Dolan is a Ph.D. candidate in Communications and Culture at York University. His current research interests include affect, aesthetics, critical industry studies, video games with pixel graphics and low-polygon counts, and the politics therein. His research background focused on the industry, economics, and collector communities of horror VHS and DVD. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of First Person Scholar, a middle-state academic journal.

Andrew Bailey is a Mitacs Accelerate Postdoctoral Fellow with Archive/Counter-Archive and York University. Andrew’s current research is focused on exploring the way videogames and their paratexts can function as interactive archives. Andrew also teaches new media art history and game studies at OCAD University and previously been on the editorial boards of First Person Scholar and Press Start Journal. His writing has been recently published in the Videogame Art Reader, Critical Distance, Loading: The Journal of the Canadian Game Studies Association, and Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Literature.

Retro-programming and the nostalgia for creativity in the 8-bit microcomputer era

Dr. Patryk Wasiak (Independent Researcher)

Dr. Marcin Cabak (Institute of Pedagogy, University of Maria Curie-Sklodowska, Lublin)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2023.09 | Issue 10 | July 2023

In this article, we investigate a small community of ‘retro-programmers’ who use 8-bit microcomputers for coding. Writing code for old computers is embedded in the imagery of digital nostalgia. As we will demonstrate, investigating nostalgia for vintage computers as tools for creative coding, offers an insight into the cultural logic of the contemporary perception of old digital technologies.

When we think about retro-computing, probably the first thing that comes to our mind is retro-gaming, which is using vintage 8-bit microcomputers to play games from the 1980s, or contemporary games that share the 1980s vintage pixel-art aesthetic. However, ‘retro-computing’ refers to a broader range of practices that share the core element – digital nostalgia for the 8-bit microcomputers. We discuss ‘how’ and ‘why’ 8-bit home computers such as the Commodore 64 (C-64) are still used for a range of creative practices related to programming. While doing so, we address the central theme of this special issue of The International Journal of Creative Media Research and offer an insight into how contemporary retro-programming culture celebrates the past and attempts to reenact it through practices of creative coding.

We argue that the central value of the contemporary retro-programming culture is the nostalgia for the idealized image of creativity in the thriving amateur programming culture of the 1980s.[1] Retro-programming community builds connections between the notion of creativity and vintage 8-bit computers. Such positively valued imagery of the past is confronted with the negatively valued imagery of contemporary digital culture. The most celebrated elements of computing of the 1980s are limitations and simplicity of hardware that challenged computer users interested in coding, thus stimulating their creativity. Such imagery is juxtaposed with discussions on how contemporary digital technologies hinder creative practices. According to the narrative shared by the retro programming culture, in contemporary digital culture, knowledge on programming and computer architecture is not as easily available as in the 1980s. Moreover, the availability of ready-to-use tools for digital creative practices discourage computer users from learning about the underpinnings of computer technologies.

There are two distinct major retro-programming communities. The first community is built on the remembrance of the social impact of the entry-level BASIC programming language. The BASIC, an acronym for Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, was designed in 1964 as the first programming language which primary consideration was the ease of use for those with no prior training in computer science.[2] In the 1980s, all home computers were provided with BASIC interpreters that enabled accessible entry-point for learning to code. This language became a highly successful tool for creative experiments with programming and now it is a key element of the imaginary of the 8-bit computer era.

Retro-programmers embrace BASIC as a tool suitable for mastering programming skills and understanding the principles of computer science. Retro-programming, and the celebration of 8-bit computers as ‘retro’ machines, began in the 1990s but it became much more widespread in the 2000s and particularly the 2010s and 2020s. This community lies at the intersection of retro computing culture and the ‘learn to code’ movement. This movement, represented by the Code.org nonprofit emerged in 2000s as a result of the perceived lack of interest in obtaining programming skills as a social and economic problem.[3] However, as historian Janet Abbate has demonstrated, similar initiatives emerged in the 1960s and 1970s.[4] They aimed to seek social empowerment, particularly for women and other underrepresented groups by helping them to obtain valuable coding skills. In our paper, we will discuss how proponents of the benefits of learning how to code in programming languages for 8-bit computers draw from both cultural trends, the nostalgia for vintage digital technologies, and ‘learn to code’ ideology.

The second community is a small 8-bit platform ‘retro-demoscene’ that programs audio-visual presentations to demonstrate the mastery of programming skills and the capabilities of the hardware.[5] The demoscene has emerged in the late 1980s as a subculture which members aim to prove their technical competences by programming computer demos that include impressive audio-visual effects and mastery of coding skills. Aside from the majority of demosceners who embrace contemporary technologies, there is a small dedicated group of those who still use 8-bit computers, primarily the C-64 as their computer of choice. The C-64 introduced in 1982 became the most popular 8-bit home computer and achieved a substantial success both as a game machine and as a demoscene platform. Their key objective is to challenge the severe technical limitations of hardware and demonstrate how such constraints stimulate creativity in terms of creative programming and the design of audio-visual content of demos. Such a milieu distances itself from a contemporary PC demoscene that embraces contemporary hardware and programming tools that offer little technical limits when it comes to the design of demos. Contemporary demos, such as fr-041 debris, are usually complex 3D animations that fully use the possibilities of contemporary hardware and graphic engines.[6] Instead, retro-demosceners claim that the limitations of older hardware such as the C-64 offer possibilities for the pursuit of technical excellence and creativity, while arguing contemporary technologies hinder such pursuit.

Our case study is grounded in selected works on the cultural logic of nostalgia. We particularly refer to two relevant papers, Katharina Niemeyer’s essay on digital nostalgia, and Christina Lindsay’s study of a 21st century community of dedicated users of a vintage 8-bit Tandy Shack TRS-80 computer.[7] Lindsay’s study investigates a small community that existed in early 2000s, however, the cultural logic of such a community closely resembles contemporary retro-programing communities. Although, we will refer to Lindsay’s work, we will discuss contemporary retroprogramming culture drawing from our research.

Such works offer an interpretative framework that helps to grasp the cultural logic of retro-programming. Niemeyer in her essay distinguishes multiple forms of ‘digital nostalgia’ such as ‘nostalgia expressed via the digital’ or ‘nostalgia for the digital.’ As Niemeyer notes: ‘Nostalgia for the digital is a yearning for the early digital culture, a longing for the human relations it created but also their devices, techniques and related user rituals.’[8] Retro-programming is an instance of nostalgia for the digital, but it is also performed through other digital technologies, so both categories are relevant to this article. Later, we will investigate how retro-programming culture constructs a juxtaposition between past and present by emphasizing difference in human relations, devices, and techniques between the mythologized 8-bit microcomputer era and the contemporary world.

As research material for this article, we use content analysis of books that teach retro-programming, website content, YouTube videos, forums, and selected digital artifacts such as retro demos. The article follows a three-part structure. First, we offer an introductory section overviewing the cultural logic of retro-programming and discussing relevant secondary literature on different forms of digital nostalgia. Later, we will discuss how this community builds imagery that confronts the positively valued past and the pessimistic image of the present. In the final section, we examine how the repertoire of programming-related digital nostalgia is used in identity construction. Discussion on these topics will offer an insight into the relationship between practices of creative coding and the construction of imagery of digital nostalgia.

Section One: Performing digital nostalgia in retro-programming culture

A popular ‘retro-computing’ term refers to a broad range of practices structured upon celebrated ‘retro’ hardware and software, as well as rose-tinted imagery of both human-machine and social relations related to computers from a bygone era.[9] There are four distinct retro-computing trends, that usually overlap with each other. First, and definitely the most popular, is retro-gaming, which refers to an interest in original vintage computer games played on original hardware and accessed with emulators, or playing and creating games that resemble vintage games in terms of structure and particularly the pixel-art aesthetic, for instance Terraria (2011), Shovel Knight (2014), or Blasphemous (2019).[10]

Another form of retro-computing is collecting and preserving vintage computers, accompanying peripherals, and software. Preserved computers can be used to run software but they are often too valuable to turn them on at all. A smaller community not only collects the original hardware but also attempts to use their computers for computing in the contemporary world. This form of retro-computing is extensively discussed by Lindsay with the case study of contemporary use of the TRS-80 computer.[11] The TRS-80, introduced in 1977 was the first highly popular and affordable 8-bit home computer. Although, its capabilities were less impressive than of the more famous Apple II introduced in the same year, the TRS-80 costed half of its price and played a pivotal role in the popularization of home computers in the US. Lindsay discusses a milieu of devoted TRS-80 fans that claim to use their machines as their everyday digital technologies. However, such attempts are mostly proof-of-concept challenges to demonstrate that 8-bit computers can do the same tasks as a contemporary PC. The most popular form of such an appropriation is to try to browse the internet on 8-bit computers. Lindsay notes the centrality of nostalgia for such a small community:

One of the primary reasons that people were still using their TRS-80 machines was nostalgia. This was more than just wishing for a time of (depending upon one’s viewpoint) less or more complex computing. However, there was an element of fond remembering of people’s introduction to the computing world.[12]

The last, and of course most relevant here, form of retro-computing is using original 8-bit computers and emulators to write new programs. Coding can have a practical purpose such as making games that can be distributed as freeware, or very rarely as commercial products. However, often the objective of such programming is the exploration of the capabilities of hardware architecture and gaining mastery in programming skills. A unique form of retro-programming is the part of the demoscene dedicated to 8-bit computers. Retro-demoscene members use vintage computers to make attractive audio-visual presentations that prove the skill of a programmer in using programming tricks and prove the capabilities of a specific hardware platform.[13] This community primarily embraces the C-64 and its main internet platform is The C-64 Scene Database).[14] For instance, one of the most celebrated C-64 demos in history, Edge of Disgrace (2008) shows a typical audio-visual aesthetics of the C-64 demoscene productions.[15] Later, we will discuss in detail the tension between ‘modern’ and ‘retro’ demoscene.

Jussi Parikka, media historian, argues that retro-cultures ‘seem to be as natural a part of the digital-culture landscape as high-definition screen technology and super-fast broadband.’[16] Retro-computing is a ubiquitous part of our contemporary digital culture. The popularity of retro-computing can be, for instance, illustrated with the omnipresence of the aesthetics of pixel-art that closely refers to the aesthetics of graphics of 8-bit computers. It may be easy to simply think about it as the next ‘vintage’ trend. However, Niemeyer offers an insight into how such seemingly trivial fashions, reveal some broader cultural currents and discontents with the present.

This is what we can superficially observe, but what is ‘hidden’ behind these longings? It would certainly be very ‘in vogue’ to ride this nostalgia wave by exclusively discussing this notion in terms of the retro styles, vintage moods and designs emerging in our environments. But nostalgia is not only a fashion or a trend. Rather, it very often expresses or hints at something more profound, as it deals with positive or negative relations to time and space. It is related to a way of living, imagining and sometimes exploiting or (re)inventing the past, present and future.[17]

There is a substantial body of work beyond Niemeyer that discuss nostalgia for older media and how such media are situated in a past-present-future continuum that can inform understandings of retro-programming.[18] This specific form of ‘nostalgia for the digital’ is built upon the ‘(re)imagining past and present.’ Such ‘(re)imagining’ includes challenging the popular imagery of modern computer technologies as better than older, ‘obsolete’ computers which were vastly slower than modern PCs.

Going back to Niemeyer’s remark, retro-programming and more broadly the whole culture of retro-computing is not only ‘nostalgia for the digital’ but also ‘nostalgia expressed via the digital.’[19] There are several forms of performing retro-programming in contemporary digital culture. The most popular platforms for sharing the retro-programming culture are private websites with available tutorials and resources, and YouTube videos that teach the basics of programming the 8-bit microcomputers. Such websites and videos are mostly created by men in their forties and fifties who personally experienced coding in the era of the 8-bit micros. Such websites include some element of personal testimonies for the ‘good old days’ and resources intended to help others, presumably younger generations, in order to stimulate their interest in programming Such tutorials provide primarily hardware reference manuals, memory maps, guidelines of handling graphics and sound programming and tutorials on programming game routines such as sprite animation. There are also two major books on retro-programming.[20] Again, such materials usually include some remarks on the author’s personal experience and the formative role of learning how to code in the 1980s in their professional careers and life projects. When it comes to the demoscene, major demoscene websites (Pouet.net) include both contemporary and retro demos, but the aforementioned CSDb website is dedicated only to the C-64 and includes a vast database of demoscene-related digital artifacts.[21] It is a primary platform where contemporary demos written with the C 64 are shared and celebrated.

Aside from internet-based media, the essential technology for the whole retro-computing culture is emulation. Small, usually freeware programs enable an accurate and convenient emulation of virtually all 8-bit computers, including obscure platforms and multiple hardware variants, on contemporary PCs. Such software is essential to accessing original programs written for those computers. For instance, one of the most popular programs that enable to have a virtual C-64 on a PC desktop is VICE (an acronym for Versatile Commodore Emulator (VICE - the Versatile Commodore Emulator).[22] A substantial effort that went into writing such emulators is an instance of digital nostalgia itself. Such emulators are essential for the growth of the popularity of retro-computing since the early 2000s. In terms of programming, they offer instant access to the original ‘welcome screens’ of 8-bit computers that enabled starting to write code just after turning on the computer.

Niemeyer summarizes major strategies used by those who perform nostalgia. ‘What is gone can only be re-enacted, repeated, reconstructed, reshown, rethought and restored by an artificial act, by mimesis.’[23] This list of different nostalgia-related strategies also summarizes what exactly those who embrace 8-bit computers as programming tools do with the past. Websites, YouTube videos, and forums dedicated to retro-programming offer technical knowledge, personal memories, elaborate claims on the technical excellence of 8-bit computers, and expressions of how these computers enabled some beneficial human-machine and social relations and how such technologies offered conditions for creativity.

The notion of restoring the past brought by Niemeyer was also used by Stefan Höltgen in the title of his edited volume SHIFT – RESTORE – ESCAPE.[24] The names of computer keys are used as a metaphor for nostalgia-related strategies in retrocomputing. For those, who are not familiar with 8-bit computers, RESTORE was a computer key used on some 8-bit computers including the C-64. Later, in Sections Two and Three, we will discuss how these three strategies are relevant to the culture of retro-programming. Such strategies can be summarized as: ‘To SHIFT,’ that is to stimulate some positive change in contemporary digital culture. ‘To RESTORE’ refers not only to restoring vintage devices but more importantly to attempts to bring back some techniques, and social and human-machine relations from the past.[25] Finally, ‘to ESCAPE’ can be interpreted as an escapist strategy of searching for solace from the dark side of contemporary digital culture.

Section Two: Confrontation of past and present in 8-bit computer programming

Sharing technical knowledge on how to write code for 8-bit computers is embedded in narratives on the nostalgic image of the past and substantial changes between past and present. The crucial element of that narrative is the claim on how both computer technologies and relations between the computer industry and computer users have evolved from the idealized past into a dystopian present.[26] Earl Carey, the author of a book on writing retro-games, notes how the contemporary computer industry hinders access to knowledge on programming, which was much more accessible in the past:

[T]here is an ever-increasing level of secrecy around today's hardware—"security by obscurity." Computer designers and manufacturers want to keep a competitive edge by making the inner workings of their hardware a closely guarded secret. When the computer industry was young, hobbyists and hackers were encouraged to experiment with computers. To that end, every single piece of information about the computer system was made public, including schematic diagrams of how the entire system was wired together! This information was often included in the Owners' Manual. Try finding it in the manual of any computer that you buy today—assuming that it even comes with a manual.[27]

Carey’s remark highlights a difference in the conditions for writing programs and more generally creative experiments with computers. Such a statement illustrates one of the central elements of nostalgia for some form of media from the past. As Niemeyer notes, those who share nostalgia for specific vintage media yearn not only for specific media artifacts such as an 8-bit computer, video-cassette recorder, or a vinyl record player but also offer elaborate discussions on how such media were ‘being interwoven with social practices as well as historical and economic (production) conditions.’[28] An essay on the legacy of the C-64 and BASIC language programming culture provides a similar narrative and praises the ‘production conditions’ offered by the C-64:

There are a few reasons Commodore 64 game dev continues to this day, including the original motivation - it remains a machine engineered to welcome its users to the world of creative coding. And while game development tools have progressed and evolved much since 1982, the Commodore 64 still offers a fantastic way to get to grips with the absolute fundamentals.[29]

This statement shows how a contemporary community of retro-programmers identify a vintage computer as a tool that still can be used to achieve a specific objective of understanding how computer architecture works and how this can be used in creative practices. Both Carey’s remark from 2005 and Freeman’s quote from 2021 reflects the continuity of retro-programming culture. They exhibit a similar confrontation of positively valued “then” and pessimistic perception of “now.” We would like to compare these claims of the past and present with the essay by Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase from their 1989 book, The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. They note that ‘a secular and linear sense of time, an apprehension of the failings of the present, and the availability of evidences of the past’ are ‘the prerequisites for a popular mood of nostalgia’[30]

Both aforementioned statements include all three prerequisites for the ‘nostalgia for the digital.’ First, there is a linear sense of time. Mainstream, that is non-retro narratives on the developments in the computer industry are examples of the history in which old ‘slow’ and ‘primitive’ computers are brought to public attention only to illustrate how we have reached the era of faster and more user-friendly computers. This is clearly an instance of the Whig history that perceives history as a progress from the “obsolete,” “primitive” and “oppressive” past to “modern” and “liberated” world. Virtually any advertisement, or a review of new computer, new processor, graphic card, a new version of a program, or a report from the Consumer Electronics Show, emphasize such progress. In contrast, the narratives shared by the retro-computing community are structured very differently. According to people engaged in retrocomputing culture, although vintage computers were slower, they offered much more opportunities for creativity. Second, the above quotes offer some insight into the apprehension of the failings of the present. The discourse of nostalgia for the digital shares a substantial body of references to the failings of contemporary digital capitalism and particularly the work conditions in the software industry.[31] The 8-bit retrocomputing culture itself already emerged in the 1990s, when 8-bit home computers became superseded by omnipresent PCs. Later, in 2000s and 2010s, it evolved into an idealized past used in the emerging critique of the contemporary world of digital technologies. Third, there is an abundance of online evidence, archives and ephemera of the past, to the extent that there is even no need to have a vintage computer to witness this history. One can run emulated games from the 8-bit era or read scanned copies of computer magazines from the 1980s easily accessible in the Archive.org collection, or any other online retro-computing collection.

Going back to Chase and Shaw, the authors note the connection between the sense of nostalgia and the notion of modernity. ‘In sociology nostalgia has always been implicit in the literature concerned with the elusive concept of modernity. Our present was unfavourably contrasted with some putative property found in the past.’[32] Retro-programming offers a specific vision of the past which was more modern than the present because, as they claim, in the 8-bit microcomputer era more people embraced computer science which allowed them to use computers for creative purposes. Here, we can see how this community produces an imagery of retro-futurism in which the past is perceived as an unfinished and abandoned project of a society where every computer user is capable of controlling this technology instead of being controlled by it.[33]

The essence of the notion of modernity that happened sometime in the past can be found in an article published by Gerald Friedland, the author of one of the major books on retro-programming on the Medium website in the ‘Young Coder’ section.[34] Friedland, with his academic credentials in computer science, is plausibly the most publically visible figure of the retro-programming community and a supporter of the ‘learn to code’ movement. Friedland’s author biography shows both his credentials and a typical personal story of a retro-programmer:

Gerald Friedland is Principal Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Like many, he taught himself to program as a child in the 1980s with the ancient — but refreshingly straightforward — Commodore 16 [an obscure computer model from the C-64 family].[35]

This short bio also shows what one can achieve by learning to code an 8-bit computer as a child. In his article, Friedland refers to Bandersnatch (dir. David Slade 2018), an episode of Black Mirror sci-fi television. This episode, very loosely based on a real story of a highly ambitious and unfinished British computer game, is itself a piece of nostalgia for the programming culture of the 1980s.

Netflix recently released a multiple-choice movie in their Black Mirror series, called Bandersnatch. The protagonist is a teenage programmer working on a contract to deliver a video-game adaptation of a fantasy novel for an 8-bit computer in 1984. […] For me, the movie also raised another very interesting question: “How is it that teenagers were able to become professional computer game developers through self-education?” In today’s world, this would be considered an amazing accomplishment. So is there something we can learn from the history behind Bandersnatch as we work to empower the next generation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)?[36]

A teenager that self-educated himself in computer science and was capable of independently writing a highly successful computer game, is a central figure in the imagery of computer-related modernity of the 1980s. For instance, one of the most celebrated game programmers of the 1980s, Matthew Smith who authored highly popular ZX Spectrum games Jet Set Willy (1984) and Manic Miner (1985), represent such a figure. For his achievements, he is widely celebrated in retro-programming culture. Melanie Swalwell, in her book on writing homebrew games in the 1980s discusses in detail the realities of learning how to write games.[37]One of the interviewees from Lindsay's study explains a difference between the past and present:

A very very high percentage of all owners learned to program to at least a small degree. Practically no one who buys a PC ever learns to write programs on it.[38]

Such a statement shows how retro-programming community perceive a critical difference between past and present in terms of the technical competencies of computer users. In the final section, we will discuss how such an opinion on the change in programming competencies, another apprehension of the failings of the present, can tell us more about how retro-programmers construct their identities.[39]

Section Three: Retro-programming identities

One of the key strategies of ‘nostalgia for the digital’ is an attempt to form one’s identity in connection to the imagined identities of people from the past who creatively used digital technologies. In the case of retro-programming community, its members seek to build some connections with computer users from the 1980s. Obviously, those in their forties and fifties who were computer users in that era as children or adolescents, seek the connection with their personal past. This strategy involves highlighting one’s connection with the past and distance from the present. Going back to Niemeyer, this feature shows how nostalgia for computers of the 1980s includes ‘a longing for the human relations’ from the past.[40] Here, a ‘social relation’ refers to the identity of someone who can master computer hardware with programming techniques. Retro-programmers establish such an identity by building connections to a specific social circle that existed in the past, as well as distancing themselves from other people from the present. For example, Lindsay discusses in detail how contemporary TRS-80 users shape their identities and distance themselves from imagined ‘contemporary PC users’:

Contemporary TRS-80 users define themselves as being in resonance with the computer hobbyists who first used the TRS-80 in the 1970s and in contrast to users of current personal computers.[41]

Many of the users I interviewed portrayed the TRS-80 user as a hacker who had been at the frontier of personal computing in the 1970s and who was now at the frontier of the physical boundary of the artifact of the personal computer. Unlike users of current PC technologies, these current TRS-80 users were able to cross this physical boundary and to manipulate their machines: These days computers have been reduced to pre-packaged consumer tools, and that aspect of exploration is out of reach of many potential hobbyists.[42]

This ideal archetype of a competent programmer from the 1980s is a central figure and a point of reference in retro-programming community. Such an archetype was a male teenager, however, here, we do not discuss in detail the issue of gender in computing. We can only note that the dominance of young males in programming cultures of the 1980s has followed gendering in the field of computer science, a subject discussed by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher.[43] Such an archetype is also a point of reference in “to RESTORE” strategy of an attempt to merge past and present. As Lindsay notes:

Thus, the TRS-80 users constructed their identities through relationships with the users representations and technologies of both the past and the present, forging links between the two times and the different computer cultures.[44]

Here Lindsay refers to a crucial element of such identity, which is a claimed ability to cross the physical boundary between human and machine. She refers to the ability to open the computer case and tinker with the hardware. Such an ability to establish a direct connection to a machine often referred to as ‘being close to the machine,’ in computer cultures equally refers to Do-it-yourself modifications of hardware and to the experience of using assembly language to program a computer.[45] This language that enables direct control over the flow of data between processor and memory was highly popular in the 1980s. But contemporarily has limited use in programming culture, for instance in programming device drivers. Carey notes how today's programmers simply had no possibility of crossing such boundaries due to modern hardware design:

With the advent of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), such as OpenGL and DirectX, many games today do not make use of assembly language programming! Instead of writing fast screen routines and other common functions needed to create a game, most programmers use the graphic functions found in the previously mentioned APIs (DirectX and OpenGL).[46]

The necessity of using DirectX or other APIs in writing programs limits the possible creativity that comes with direct control over processor and memory. Here we bring in an introduction to a technical guide on coding demos for the C-64 that grasps the creativity, and required mastery that comes with the control over the 8-bit hardware. This is also a manifesto of the cultural values of the retro-demoscene:

That the C-64 is old and slow might not sound like much of an advantage, but when it comes to demo programming, it is. Why? It means that it's difficult to do stuff that requires lots of computations. You can't just throw CPU cycles at it, and write inefficient code. You have to think, to make it efficient. And doing really difficult things (or rather, impossible things) is what demo programming is all about. A good programmer can write a program that does something that seems very hard to do. A good demo programmer can write code that does something that is completely impossible.[47]

Such explanation is accompanied by a statement on why modern computers are not suitable for such a creative task as writing demos:

That's why it's meaningless to start writing demos on a modern computer: it's too easy to make stuff that looks impressive, it's too easy to fool people into thinking that you've done something impressive, so you really don't have the right sort of motivation to actually write good code. Instead you're pushed in another direction, towards writing large programs, which will require that you use abstraction, which probably means that you'll use some high level language, and then you're not even close to programming demos.[48]

Writing impressive demos for the C-64 that are extensively celebrated on demoparties and CSDb forums offers a form of mastery over technology. As claimed, such mastery is denied to those who code contemporary demos with the use of APIs since one can easily ‘throw a lot of CPU cycles’ to achieve impressive effects. The central conclusion of Åkerlund’s manifesto is that contemporary technologies do not offer an opportunity for forging an attractive personal identity based on mastery of creative programming techniques. The text provides an explicit statement on why vintage computers, with their severe limitations, offered a much greater opportunity for being creative. Retro-programmers argue contemporary computers, whose audio-visual content of a game or a demo can be only designed through DirectX, offer very little space for creative coding. The key element of retro-programming ideology is that contemporary computer users are distanced from their machines not only by specific technologies, such as DirectX, but more importantly by the production conditions of the contemporary digital economy.[49] Similarly, Lindsay quotes a TRS-80 user who expressed the difference between him and people from his community and ‘today’s programmers’:

These people also differentiated themselves from the programmers of today’s personal computers. Some of the TRS-80 users were there when you had to do “more with less” of the technology, and learned to use these same skills on today’s computers. One interviewee stated:

Today’s programmers are not the same caliber of people we had in my day. Today’s software is large and fat and wastes huge amounts of memory, CPU and disks for very little benefit. . . . You sit there saying “I’ve got a machine 100 times faster [than the TRS-80], with 100 times more memory, and 10,000 times more disk and IT’S SLOWER.” It makes you wonder what today’s programmers know.

This interviewee was using his knowledge of the TRS-80 to construct an identity of a “real programmer” that set him apart from today’s programmers, and even further from today’s end users.[50]

The excerpt makes a distinction between ‘real programmers’ and ‘contemporary PC users’ which corresponds with one of the central elements of nostalgia: dissatisfaction with the present. Chase and Shaw draw upon Émile Durkheim’s work to understand this. Noting that one of the reasons for embracing nostalgia is the dissatisfaction with the fact that living in the present time offers little possibility for the formation of an identity based on mastering technology. As they note, ‘To Durkheim, modern industrial society was rootless and gave its members no sense of identity and role.’[51] Learning how to program vintage computers offers such an identity while contemporary computer culture offers little possibilities for it. Such mastery, which can be demonstrated by writing attractive demos that are celebrated by other members of the community offers an attractive identity and opportunity to escape ‘the rootless modernity’ in the era of digital capitalism.

Conclusion

In our paper, we have shown how a niche community that exists in a landscape of contemporary digital culture builds a mythology of the past. As we have seen, for some people engaged in retro-programming who are in their forties and fifties, this mythology interconnects with their personal experience. But for younger people, this is a form of an ideal past they yearn for. Importantly, this mythology equally builds an ideal model of old digital technologies and the people who used them. Of course, the most widely celebrated icons of digital culture of the 1980s are computers themselves. In quotations, from testimonies of people engaged in this community we have seen how some machines such as the C-64 and TRS-80 are celebrated from the contemporary point of view. But this mythology also refers to an idealized figure of a creative teenage programmer and a specific vision of human-machine interaction.

Here, we see how digital nostalgia has been embedded in the contemporary politics of digital culture. This case study provides us with an insight into a strategy of escapism from the contemporary world. Retro-programmers note that contemporary computers, despite their supposed user-friendly graphic interfaces, alienate users. But more importantly, they yearn for a period when computer use offered an attractive identity based on mastering esoteric programming knowledge and the ability to use such knowledge in creative practices. We may read materials shared by the retro-programming community as an expression of disenchantment with contemporary digital culture. Such disenchantment refers both to the limits of creativity available for computer users and the lack of the possibilities of forming an attractive identity in an alienating ‘rootless modernity.’

Footnotes

1 Tom Lean, Electronic Dreams. How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer (London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2016); Melanie Swalwell, Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2021).

2 Joy Lisi Rankin, A People’s History of Computing in the United States (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2018), 66-105.

3 “Code’org,” https://code.org/.

4 Janet Abbate, ”Code Switch: Alternative Visions of Computer Expertise as Empowerment from the 1960s to the 2010s,” Technology and Culture 59, no. 1 (2018): 134-159.

5 Antti Silvast and Markku Reunanen, “Multiple Users, Diverse Users: Appropriation of Personal Computers by Demoscene Hackers.” in Hacking Europe. From Computer Cultures to Demoscenes, eds. Gerald Alberts, and Ruth Oldenziel (London and New York: Springer, 2014), 151-163.

6 “Farbrausch - fr-041: debris. [HD],” 2007, Youtube. Accessed 28th June 2023. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqu_IpkOYBg

7 Katharina Niemeyer, “Digital nostalgia,” The World Association for Christian Communication website, 26 Oct. 2016, Accessed 28th June 2023.https://waccglobal.org/digital-nostalgia/. Christina Lindsay, “From the shadows: Users as designers, producers, marketers, distributors, and technical support,” in How users matter. The co-construction of users and technology, ed. Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 29-50.

8 Niemeyer, “Digital nostalgia.”

9 Stefan Höltgen, ed., SHIFT – RESTORE – ESCAPE Retrocomputing und Computerarchaologie (Winnenden: CSW-Verlag, 2014).

10 Péter Kristóf Makai, “Video Games as Objects and Vehicles of Nostalgia,” Humanities 7 no. 4 (2018), https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/7/4/123; Jaakko Suominen, ‘The Past as the Future? Nostalgia and Retrogaming in Digital

Culture.” The Fiberculture Journal, 11 (2008), Accessed February 5, 2023. https://eleven.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-075-the-past-as-the-future-nostalgia-and-retrogaming-in-digital-culture/.

11 Lindsay, “From the shadows.”

12 Lindsay, “From the shadows,” 46.

13 Silvast and Reunanen, “Multiple Users.”

14 The C-64 Scene Database, Accessed 1 November 2022. https://csdb.dk/.

15 “Edge of Disgrace,: 2008, The C-64 Scene Database entry, https://csdb.dk/release/?id=72550)

16 Jussi Parikka, What is Media Archaeology? (Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2012), 3.

17 Katharina Niemeyer, “Introduction: Media and Nostalgia,” in Media and Nostalgia Yearning for the Past, Present and Future, ed. Katharina Niemeyer (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 2, cf. also Katharina Niemeyer, “A theoretical approach to vintage: From oenology to media,” ECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 4, no. 2 (2015): 85-102.

18 Gil Bartholeyns, “The Instant Past: Nostalgia and Digital Retro Photography,” in Media and nostalgia: Yearning for the past, present and future, ed. Katharina Niemeyer (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 51-69; Vera Dika, Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film – the Uses of Nostalgia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ryan Lizardi, Mediated Nostalgia. Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media (London et al.: Lexington Books, 2015).

19 Niemeyer, “Digital nostalgia.”

20 Earl John Carey, Retro game programming unleashed for the masses (Boston: Course Technology Press, 2005); Gerald Friedland, Beginning Programming Using Retro Computing: Learn BASIC with a Commodore Emulator (New York: apres/Springer, 2019).

21 Pouet.net website, https://www.pouet.net/index.php.

22 VICE- the Versatile Commodore Emulator, Accessed 1 November 2022. https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/.

23 Niemeyer, “Introduction,” 3.

24 Höltgen, SHIFT.

25 Niemeyer, “Digital nostalgia.”

26 Rob Kling, “Hopes and Horrors: Technological Utopianism and Anti-Utopianism in Narratives of Computerization,” in Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, ed. Rob Kling (San Diego et al.: Academic Press, 1996 [1991]), 40-58.

27 Carey, Retro game.

28 Niemeyer, “Introduction,” 6-7.

29 Will Freeman, “Back to BASIC. Understanding the dazzling legacy of the C64,” June 16, 2021. Bitmap Books, Accessed February 5 2023.

https://www.bitmapbooks.com/en-pl/blogs/news/back-to-basic-understanding-the-dazzling-legacy-of-the-commodore-64.

30 Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw, “The dimensions of nostalgia,” in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase. The imagined past. History and nostalgia (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999), 4.

31 Jathan Sadowski, Too Smart. How Digital Capitalism Is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2020); Ergin Bulut, A Precarious Game. The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2020).

32 Chase and Shaw, “The dimensions,” 6.

33 Elizabeth E. Guffey, Retro. The Culture of Revival (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 152-159).

34 Gerald. Friedland, “Learning to Code in a “Retro” Programming Environment,” Medium, April 12, 2019. Accessed February 5, 2023. https://medium.com/young-coder/learning-to-code-in-a-retro-programming-environment-fb5c5982ca54

35 Friedland, “Learning to Code.”

36 Friedland, “Learning to Code.”

37 Swalwell, Homebrew Gaming.

38 Lindsay, “From the shadows,” 47.

39 Chase and Shaw, “The dimensions,” 4.

40 Niemeyer, “Digital nostalgia.”

41 Lindsay, “From the shadows,” 29.

42 Lindsay, “From the shadows,” 46.

43 Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse. Women in Computing (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2002).

44 Lindsay, “From the shadows,” 47.

45 Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984).

46 Carey, Retro game.

47 Linus Åkerlund, “An Introduction to Programming C-64 Demos.” Accessed 28th June 2023. http://www.antimon.org/code/Linus/.

48 Åkerlund, “An Introduction.”

49 Sadowski, Too Smart.

50 Lindsay, “From the shadows,” 44.

51 Chase and Shaw, “The dimensions,” 7; Émile Durkheim, De la division du travail social (Paris: Alcan, 1893).

References

• Abbate, J. ”Code Switch: Alternative Visions of Computer Expertise as Empowerment from the 1960s to the 2010s,” Technology and Culture 59, no. 1 (2018): 134-159.

• Åkerlund, L. “An Introduction to Programming C-64 Demos.” Accessed 28th June 2023. http://www.antimon.org/code/Linus/.

• Bartholeyns, G. “The Instant Past: Nostalgia and Digital Retro Photography.” In Media and nostalgia: Yearning for the past, present and future, edited by Katharina Niemeyer, 51-69. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

• Bulut, E. A Precarious Game. The Illusion of Dream Jobs in the Video Game Industry. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2020.

• Carey, E. J. Retro game programming unleashed for the masses. Boston: Course Technology Press, 2005.

• Chase, M., and Shaw, C. “The dimensions of nostalgia.” In Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase. The imagined past. History and nostalgia, 1-17. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999.

• Cross, G. Consumed Nostalgia. Memory In The Age Of Fast Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.

• Dika, V. Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film – the Uses of Nostalgia. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

• Durkheim, É. De la division du travail social. Paris: Alcan, 1893.

• Freeman, W. “Back to BASIC. Understanding the dazzling legacy of the C64,” June 16, 2021. Bitmap Books. Accessed February 5, 2023. https://www.bitmapbooks.com/en-pl/blogs/news/back-to-basic-understanding-the-dazzling-legacy-of-the-commodore-64.

• Friedland, G. Beginning Programming Using Retro Computing: Learn BASIC with a Commodore Emulator. New York: apres/Springer, 2019.

• Friedland, Gerald. “Learning to Code in a “Retro” Programming Environment,” Medium, April 12, 2019. Accessed February 5, 2023. https://medium.com/young-coder/learning-to-code-in-a-retro-programming-environment-fb5c5982ca54

• Guffey, E. E. Retro. The Culture of Revival. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.

• Holdsworth, A. Television, Memory and Nostalgia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

• Höltgen, S. ed. SHIFT – RESTORE – ESCAPE Retrocomputing und Computerarchaologie. Winnenden: CSW-Verlag, 2014.

• Kling, R. “Hopes and Horrors: Technological Utopianism and Anti-Utopianism in Narratives of Computerization.” In Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, edited by Rob Kling, 40-58. San Diego et al.: Academic Press, 1996 [1991].

• Lean, T. Electronic Dreams. How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer. London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2016.

• Lindsay, C. “From the shadows: Users as designers, producers, marketers, distributors, and technical support.” In How users matter. The co-construction of users and technology, edited by Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, 29-50. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.

• Lizardi, R. Mediated Nostalgia. Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media. London et al.: Lexington Books, 2015.

• Makai, P. K. “Video Games as Objects and Vehicles of Nostalgia.” Humanities 7, no.4 (2018). Accessed February 10, 2023. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/7/4/123, Accessed 1 November 2022.

• Margolis, J., and Fisher, A. Unlocking the Clubhouse. Women in Computing, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2002.

• Niemeyer, Katharina. “A theoretical approach to vintage: From oenology to media,” ECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies 4, no. 2 (2015): 85-102.

• Niemeyer, K. “Introduction: Media and Nostalgia.” In Media and Nostalgia Yearning for the Past, Present and Future, edited by Katharina Niemeyer, 1-23. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

• Niemeyer, K.. “Digital nostalgia.” The World Association for Christian Communication website, 26 Oct. 2016, https://waccglobal.org/digital-nostalgia/.

• Niemeyer, K., ed. Media and Nostalgia Yearning for the Past, Present and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

• Parikka, J. What is Media Archaeology? Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2012.

• Pouet net. Accessed 1 November 2022. https://www.pouet.net/

• Rankin, J. L. A People’s History of Computing in the United States. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2018.

• Sadowski, J. Too Smart. How Digital Capitalism Is Extracting Data, Controlling Our Lives, and Taking Over the World. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2020.

• Silvast, A. and Reunanen, M. “Multiple Users, Diverse Users: Appropriation of Personal Computers by Demoscene Hackers.” In Hacking Europe. From Computer Cultures to Demoscenes, edited by Gerald Alberts, and Ruth Oldenziel, 151-163. London and New York: Springer, 2014.

• Suominen, J. ‘The Past as the Future? Nostalgia and Retrogaming in Digital

• Culture.” The Fiberculture Journal, 11, 2008. Accessed February 5, 2023. https://eleven.fibreculturejournal.org/fcj-075-the-past-as-the-future-nostalgia-and-retrogaming-in-digital-culture/.

• Swalwell, M. Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2021.

• Turkle, S. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.

• The C-64 Scene Database. Accessed 1 November 2022. https://csdb.dk/.

• VICE- the Versatile Commodore Emulator, Accessed 1 November 2022. https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io/.

The Dark Academia aesthetic: nostalgia for the past in social networks

Lara López Millán (University of Valencia)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.33008/IJCMR.2023.08 | Issue 10 | July 2023

This article aims to approach the nostalgic essence of the aesthetic community Dark Academia through the social network Tumblr, in order to create new knowledge about nostalgic practices in the virtual environment. To do so, I will analyse the origins and evolution of the community, with an emphasis on the rise of its popularity in the wake of the global pandemic of 2020. Based on my own experience as a dark academic, I will make use of cyberethnographic and folksonomic analysis from the inside, as a participating member of the community. As a form of supporting research and to give users a voice, I will use survey methodology and online interviews to delve deeper into the nostalgic sensibilities of the community's participants, the dark academics, by surveying a thousand members. In this study, I will evaluate how important visual nostalgia has become in the early 2020s and whether the past is more present than ever among us.

Keywords: Dark Academia, Nostalgia, Social Media, Tumblr.

Introduction

We are currently living in a time of global uncertainty. Having undergone social, political and economic changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic, perspectives and approaches to daily life has shifted significantly. Social unrest and the uncertainty of tomorrow has pushed younger generations such as millennials —born between 1982 and 1994—, but especially Generation Z[1] —born between 1995 and 2010—, towards nostalgia for the past.[2] The recent emergence of aesthetic communities on social networks is a clear example of this. Today, the word aesthetic refers to a set of communities[3], that develop on online platforms and maintain a visual coherence. Tumblr, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, and even YouTube, are some of the main platforms where users develop such aesthetics. The variety of aesthetics that have emerged is immense, each of them characterised by a completely different visual identity. Amongst the most popular in recent years are: Dark Academia, Light Academia, Cottagecore, Feralcore and Fairycore, among others.

When we cross the borders from the real to the virtual, we discover that nostalgia broadly permeates the digital environment echoing the past and constituting what we call "visual nostalgia." Several research studies have dealt with this visual nostalgia over the last decades, most notably, Katharina Niemeyer’s Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future (2014). This nostalgia has the function of beautifying or aestheticising the visual objects of the past, objects that vary in terms of aesthetics, but which refer to previous centuries or decades. Aesthetic communities provide numerous examples, such as 1950s Valentine’s cards for Lovecore, or Victorian botanical encyclopaedias for Cottagecore.

Figure 1 - Post from the aesthetic Lovecore by @ valenpupp

Figure 2 - Post from the aesthetic Cottagecore by @ die-rosastrasse

These online aesthetic communities, offer their members experiences that are not easy to access or encounter in physical spaces. Such as fantasy places we find in fiction —Hogwarts, Narnia, Middle-earth, etc.— or the dreamlike spaces of yesteryear —Ancient Rome, the Regency era, the Roaring Twenties, etc.—. Their members conceive nostalgia as a process of continuous feedback to lose themselves in supposedly simpler times.[4]

Through this lens, I will analyse the case of Dark Academia: an aesthetic community that romanticises studying and privileges the academic environment of an often-elitist past. It should be noted that not all aesthetic communities refer to the past, as in the case of feralcore, which focusses on themes of mental health, survival and feral animals such as raccoons and opossums. However, those that do, as in the case of Dark Academia, will attempt to create a simulation of the past, allowing users to enter and enrich themselves through aesthetic expressions. Thus, the connection between individuals is reinforced through the exchange of virtual objects, artistic works or information that they associate with this symbolic past. We can observe such personal, and at times contested, experiences with the nostalgic subculture through the 2022 special issue for Post45, edited by Olivia Stowell and Mitch Therieau, where academics analyse their relationship with Dark Academia.[5]

This article seeks to understand how social networks play a fundamental role in the idea of nostalgia, concentrating on the development of nostalgic aesthetic communities that have become a safe space for young people during the pandemic. The text will explain how the pandemic has been a driving force for these online communities, focusing its attention on Dark Academia. This is with the objective of discovering what kind of online practices or daily routines the dark academics value in order to escape from the present and live in the past, specifically on the social network Tumblr. This platform was chosen because it is considered the space where Dark Academia first developed before reaching out to other social networks. This includes certain Dark Academic fandom practices, for example: The Secret History or Harry Potter; as well as communities such as Studyblr. Using this objective as a focal point, the research will make use of two types of methodology. First, a review of the practices exercised by the community on Tumblr will be carried out, using the folksonomic method, which will be explained below. Next, a survey of dark academics will be conducted, in order to understand members’ affective relationship with the Dark Academia aesthetic.

Literature review:

Immersive Media: Nostalgia in social networks

The concept of nostalgia has a long and ever evolving history. Starting with the 19th century definition given by Dr. De Witt C. Peters as: “a species of melancholy, or a mild type of insanity, caused by disappointment and a continuous longing for home.”[6] Until the middle of the 20th century, nostalgia was clearly related to melancholy, loneliness, and depression, and was therefore often considered a psychological pathology.[7] However, later research in the mid-20th century has changed its significance and there are no longer any associations with the disease.

Works such as sociologist Fred Davis’, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (1979), conceptualises nostalgia as a sentimental longing for yesterday or a fondness for the possessions and activities associated with the past.[8] His research is a clear reflection of how nostalgia can be clearly linked to “a period of radical discontinuity in a people’s sense of who and what they are”,[9] referring to a “collective identity crisis.”[10] Recalling the global pandemic situation, we have been living through in recent years, it would not be wrong to describe this era as a period of radical instability, and to consider how it has affected our identity.

It should also be noted that there have been numerous studies that highlight nostalgia has a mixed character. Although concepts such as loneliness and melancholy are associated with nostalgia, it also has positive effects that: “increases social connectedness, enhances positive self-regard, improves mood and contributes to perceptions of the meaning of life by linking the past and the present.”[11] Throughout history, nostalgia has maintained associations with negative,[12] positive,[13] or both, negative and positive,[14] conceptions. But when we focus on the present, it is impossible not to refer to the idea of economic postmodernity promoted by Fredic Jameson. The literary theorist develops the concept of "nostalgia" around user consumption, focusing especially on postmodernist cinema:

“We are now, in other words, in ‘intertextuality’ as a deliberate, built-in feature of the aesthetic effect, and as the operator of a new connotation of ‘pastness’ and pseudo-historical depth, in which the history of aesthetic styles displaces ‘real’ history”.[15]

The typology attached to nostalgia has expanded to the point of being associated with cultural phenomena. Nostalgia has moved from being individual to becoming collective, being clearly associated with certain objects and practices. Videogame franchises of the 1990s such as Pokémon are a clear example of this, as well as the revival of past objects such as vinyl records, each evoking a preceding subculture or era of childhood. Theorists Susan L. Holak and William J. Havlena described nostalgia as “a positively valanced complex feeling, emotion, or mood produced by reflection on things (objects, persons, experiences, ideas) associated with the past.”[16] When we talk about objects, we refer to "symbolic objects" that help us to stir our emotions and trigger that nostalgic wave. Business academic Russell W. Belk goes further and speaks of “a wistful mood that may be prompted by an object, a scene, a smell, or a strain of music.”[17] Belk's idea is arguably the ideal method of juxtaposing past and present. Today we know that social networks have become the main space for carrying out this function collectively. Not only in a private social environment, but also in a public one.[18]

Due to the evolution of new technologies and virtual paradigms, media theorists have argued that research into 21st century nostalgia should go further. Here, Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley argue that we should go beyond conceptions of nostalgia where the public is seen simply as a passive recipient of nostalgic content.[19] Day after day, the action of logging onto a social network and posting content related to the past —images, videos, music, quotes, etc.— has become commonplace. The consumption and creation of symbolic objects or images through social networks consequently promotes connections between certain individuals who share the same practice.

Ryan Lizardi, Digital Media and Humanities theorist, notes that "social media is certainly about the eternal "now," but there is a growing trend within contemporary communication applications and platforms that, though not universal, points to the increasing encouragement of waxing nostalgic."[20] The last two decades, we have been able to observe, thanks to folksonomic studies of social networks,[21]how categorisation tags related to the past have increased. One of the main examples is #ThrowbackThursday, also known as #tbt, which marks its presence in the vast majority of online platforms, showing a blast from the past on Instagram. This was followed by others such as #WayBackWednesday and #FlashbackFriday, because of a nostalgic overflow associated with the days of the week.[22]

To delve deeper into the practices of other users, the folksonomic methodology is essential to establishing such a framework for studying digital nostalgia. The term was coined by Thomas Vander Wal,[23] following a discussion at the Asylomar Institute for Information Architecture. Folksonomy is a process of tagging, where users of a certain platform use keywords to identify their shared content. Vander defines it as: "the result of personal free tagging of information and objects (anything with a URL) for one's own retrieval."[24] Recent studies have identified the pandemic’s influence on social networks, making use of social folksonomic analysis, and this approach will be key to this article’s methodological basis.[25]

But going further, studies such as Sergio Davalos et al. (2015), focus on addressing the most recurrent nostalgic topics on the social network Facebook: "film making, spirituality (Christianity and spiritual path), historical events (presidential elections, man on the moon and Gandhi) and life stories (love story, family and working parent)."[26] Their findings reveal that nostalgic Facebook posts contain more words and that a higher percentage of these words reflect cognitive and affective processing than general posts.[27] Some studies have assumed that Facebook updates were more emotional and interpersonal,[28]this may be due to the style of its interface and the use it offers. Facebook users seek to feel close to a clearly idealised past, which in most cases they have directly experienced, thus creating a collective nostalgia and affirming an existing sense of identity. However, when users try to escape from the present by delving into a past they have not experienced, these shared practices can help to forge a new identity, creating new communities and senses of belonging. In demonstrating that nostalgia is a social and collective feeling, we find that it is effectively constructed in online networks of affective communities, as social media serves as a means of virtual access to the past, both real and imagined.

Aesthetic communities of nostalgia on Tumblr

In reference to emotional communities, historian Barbara Rosenwein first introduced the concept in 2001, following her article in the American Historical Review.

“People lived - and live - in what I propose to call "emotional communities." These are precisely the same as social communities - families, neighborhoods, parliaments, guilds, monasteries, parish church memberships - but the researcher looking at them seeks above all to uncover systems of feeling: what these communities (and the individuals within them) define and assess as valuable or harmful to them.”[29]

However, in an interview conducted in 2010, Rosenwein proposes two new definitions of the concept: the first, "social groups that adhere to the same valuations of emotions and how they should be expressed", and the second, "groups of people animated by common or similar interests, values, and emotional styles and valuations." [30] Both definitions are essential to understanding how nostalgic narratives develop in social networks and how these narratives ultimately create aesthetic communities of nostalgia.

But what about Tumblr? Founded in 2007 by David Karp and Marco Arment, this platform focuses on the archiving and circulation of visual media. Tumblr's interface is multifunctional, it can host text, audio, images, videos, links, etc. Since its inception, communities and fandoms from all corners of the world have gathered on the site to share their reflections, as its infrastructure encourages participation and collaboration. Thanks to the organisational folksonomy that has characterised the microblogging platform from the outset, it has made it possible over time to create a website architecture based on the common interests of its users shared through tags. This practice has facilitated the creation and development of online communities with collective tastes, thus generating numerous aesthetic phenomena. It should be noted that "the fact that Tumblr users are bonded primarily by common, passionate affective and progressive interests rather than solely by age group is an essential aspect of the platform for many of its young users."[31] Tumblr is a constantly changing site where diverse aesthetics —Dark Academia, Cottagecore, Naturecore… —, communities —Studyblr, Bookblr, Witchblr…— or fandoms —Harry Potter, Marvel, Stranger Things…— coexist, within which its members possess a trait of multivocality that follows different discourses in reference to their preferences. In this way, numerous presentations of nostalgia can be found on the platform, making virtual nostalgia cyclical.

But the situation has evolved in recent years since the pandemic. Helga Mariel Soto, professor at FADU, informs us that content related to aesthetics, understood as styles or subcultures that function as identity brands, has grown exponentially, especially among centennials, or Generation Z, and millennials.[32] This is connected to the needs that have arisen due to the pandemic situation: “a need to romanticise and aestheticise life in the face of an uncontrollable and unpredictable environment.”[33] This is the urge to escape from the everydayness of an unsatisfied life into imaginary worlds related to the idealised past. Users of nostalgic aesthetic communities on Tumblr make use of the platform to construct through visuality an escape route, to be able to escape into a past that they considered somehow "better."

The annual analysis of Tumblr by the account https://fandom.tumblr.com, called "Year in Review", reveals that during the year 2021 the trendiest popular aesthetic communities on the platform were: Cottagecore, Dark Academia, Light Academia, Fairycore, Farmcore, Chaotic Academia, Naturecore, Romantic Academia, Cyberpunk and Lovecore.

Figure 3 - Post from the aesthetic Cottagecore by @etherea1ity.

Figure 4 - Post from the aesthetic Romantic Academy by @academia-lucifer.

Figure 5 - Post from the aesthetic Fairycore by @happyheidi.

Figure 6 - Post from the aesthetic cyberpunk by @elina-clevergull.

Each of these aesthetics functions as a grouping agent of values and associated images as can be seen in the figures (3-6). However, they can also be materialised through certain stylistic elements such as clothing or hobbies. In terms of clothing, dark academics tend to wear outfits inspired by this aesthetic, which mixes American preppy style with Victorian-era masculinity (fig.8). On the other hand, in reference to the preferred activities of the cottagecore aesthetic, members try to recover the intimate and homely and therefore revalue the manual and handmade (fig.7). It should be noted that similarities can be found in the different aesthetics. For example, between Cottagecore and Naturecore, or the Academies. In this sense, Soto opens two paths when it comes to how these aesthetic communities make use of nostalgia: "on the one hand, audiovisual and graphic resources of Tik Tok are used to show these aesthetic choices. But at the same time, they reject the excess of technology in the current context to immerse themselves in other past techniques: users use typewriters or pen and paper to write or pick their own fruit instead of buying it on the internet.”[34] Although Soto is referring to TikTok, the same is true of Tumblr, where Dark Academia originally emerged.

Finally, it is vital to be aware of the affective response of such aesthetic subcultures. Louisa Stein, a theorist of film and media culture, reminds us that “millennial feels culture combines an aesthetics of intimate emotion—the sense that we are accessing an author’s immediate and personal emotional response to media culture—with an aesthetics of high performativity, calling attention to mediation and to the labor of the author.”[35] Stein’s argument can be taken as a basis for understanding the sentiment shared by members of aesthetic communities, whether they belong to the millennial or Z generation. This sentiment takes part in the actions of romanticising and idealising, expressing that nostalgia or longing. This is embodied in their aesthetics and virtual practices, which can be analysed to understand the symbolic essence of each of the aesthetic communities.

Method and visual materials

Social network analysis: Tumblr

The main method of understanding and analysing Dark Academia on Tumblr will be cyberethnographic analysis as, “it is no longer imaginable to conduct ethnography without considering online spaces.”[36] The sociologist John Beattie reaffirmed that:

Whatever the type of culture, close and sustained observation is needed in order to understand what people are doing, to identify their major social institutions, and to investigate the casual interrelationships between them. [...] The observer must live in and with the community he is studying.[37]

As a Tumblr user since 2017, after discovering aesthetic communities and delving into them during confinement, in early July 2020 I changed the name of my Tumblr account to @nostalgicacademia, and began to feel more familiar with Dark Academia, the environment and its members. We know that practices within the community are an important factor in connecting with the members, so from September 2020 I started to share virtual practices like those proposed by the dark academics.

In order to carry out the study, I investigated the relationship between two elements: Dark Academia and nostalgia. Although we understand that nostalgia is part of the aesthetic community, and permeates both the imagery and practices that dark academics value, I sought to go further and focus on posts that share the following tags: #Dark Academia + #Nostalgia, this was achieved by implementing a folksonomy search.

Data collection

In parallel, I made use of two data collection techniques to broaden the study paradigm: online interviews with Dark Academia users to ask them about their engagement with the Dark Academia phenomenon, and an online survey of 1000 dark academics. Thanks to the Tumblr account, I was able to publish the survey and thus reach the aesthetic’s members much more easily. The survey was conducted between 15 December 2021 and 01 February 2022, as the survey was closed when it reached 1000 responses. The use of both methodologies are justified, as the perspectives of dark academics are crucial to understanding the essence of their visual imaginary. This approach allows researchers direct access to the voices, articulations, and interpretations of some fans.[38]

The questions asked were as follows:

• How old are you?

• What country do you live in?

• Gender (You can write a hyphen [-] if you do not wish to answer this question)

• In what year did you discover the aesthetic of Dark Academia?

• How did you discover the aesthetic of Dark Academia?

• Do you think the pandemic has helped make the Dark Academia aesthetic more widely known?

• If you answered yes, why do you think so?

• What are the books you associate with the Dark Academia aesthetic?

• What films or series do you associate with the Dark Academia aesthetic?

• Have you acquired some habits related to Dark Academia in your day-to-day life?

• When you think of Dark Academia what comes to mind? (Places, objects, sounds, smells, sensations... it can be anything)

• Feel free to leave a message or comment here if desired (You can leave your social media profile or your email if you wish)

The questions selected were chosen to approach Dark Academia from the widest possible angle, broadening its scope so that in the future it could be studied from multiple approaches and disciplines. However, this study will focus its attention on those responses that show the affective essence of Dark Academia and allude to the nostalgic sensations of its members.

Dark Academia: an approximation

Aesthetic nostalgia communities function as subcultures associated with both stylistic codes and interests, and often are related to a specific historical period, such as the Victorian era with Dark Academia or the Regency era with Cottagecore. By simply accessing the social network and typing in the name of the aesthetic community, the user can get a first impression of the essence of the aesthetic.

Figure 9 - Screenshot of the recent Tumblr page, with the search term "Dark Academia", on 19th January 2023.

As of today —19th January 2023— the #Dark Academia hashtag has 417.200 followers and between 150 and 200 posts are published daily, making it extremely difficult to keep up with the analysis of individual posts. However, after having carried out an exhaustive search on the platform for two years, using the folkosnomic method, I found the first publications with the hashtag #Dark Academia in January 2017 (fig. 10), when a post went viral that highlighted the three works considered "the holy trinity" of the community: Kill Your Darlings (John Krokidas, 2013), Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989) and The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992). It is true that each of these texts had a long history thanks to their fandom, both online and off. For example, The Secret History’s popularity had been on the rise since the early 2010s, but at no point had the relationships between the three works become closer than on Tumblr. This connection is known thanks to the following research carried out on the platform. A large number of the fandom’s accounts have disappeared over time, but databases such as the Wayback Machine allow us to access their interface of the time. This online archive is how I discovered the increase in Tumblr posts related to The Secret History at the beginning of the 2010s.

It should be noted that the formative process of these nostalgic aesthetic communities will stipulate a relational network of elements, maintaining a certain coherence between them. The three works mentioned above have many similarities in their plots, starting from the fact that their characters are young academics with a tragic ending. Likewise, both their setting in the last century, Kill Your Darlings (1940s), Dead Poets Society (1959) and The Secret History (1983), and their close relationship with the academic world and the arts, Kill Your Darlings (literature and writing), Dead Poets Society (poetry and theatre) and The Secret History (classical culture, Latin and Greek), help to clarify the aesthetic code of the community.

As the nostalgic community evolved and gained popularity, it was the users themselves who began to create guides or offer tips to help the new dark academics to enter more easily. These types of posts (figs.11 and 12) were extensive, offering everything from a list of the type of clothing associated with the aesthetic, to the set of literary or audio-visual works that could be consumed to enter into the subculture. The need to associate oneself with an aesthetic and implement it in everyday life acquired a normality in the younger generations.[39] The growing popularity in the use of social networks, and the striking emergence of numerous aesthetic communities can be seen through the data. But there are also accounts from young people that reinforce this fact, such as the articles by Post45[40] within the academic world.

Social networks are a focus of union and connection between subcultural groups, and their power is so great that it transcends virtual borders to host real-world practices. One earlier example is the hipster subculture, an urban tribe with antecedents in the 20th century, but which became popular in the 2000s and 2010s, who embraced nostalgic signifiers such as typewriters, polaroid cameras, vinyl records and vintage clothing, alongside earlier forms of blogging and online curation.[41] Because of its capacity for freedom, any aesthetic community of nostalgia can be taken as a way of life, one only must decide which one is right for oneself.

Through the analysis process, I discoveredthat users' interest in joining this community has been increasing since the end of 2019. Thanks to the survey conducted on the 1000 respondents between 2021 and 2022, I foundthat the years of highest discovery and community entry were: 2018 (117 users), 2019 (285 users), 2020 (316 users) and 2021 (102 users). Whilst, the social networks with the highest discovery rate were Tumblr (388 users) and Pinterest (248 users). Oneof the clearest and strongest influences on the rise of these types of nostalgic networking communities was the pandemic. Due to the context of social isolation, millions of users took refuge in social networks, this also favoured the popularisation of the social network TikTok in 2020[42] which led to a wider diffusion of aesthetics. Here, Idecided to ask respondents if they thought the pandemic had made Dark Academia more popular, and the results were as follows:

Figure 13 - Percentages of results to the question “Do you think the pandemic has helped make the Dark Academia aesthetic more widely known?”

As can be seen, 83.2% (832 users) think that the situation caused by COVID-19 has favoured the increase in community recognition, compared to 16.8% (168 users). However, several respondents mentioned nostalgia when they were asked: ‘If you answered yes, why do you think so?’

• More people clung to dark academia and other academia aesthetics because they embodied the nostalgia of academia at a time when access to academics was limited due to the shutting down of schools temporarily. (Female from the United States of America, aged 15-20, who discovered Dark Academia in 2020 via Pinterest).

• Because people have time to isolate themselves from the society and have time to reflect upon the nostalgic memories. That kind of self-reflection was impossible when we were so busy with life before pandemic. (A person from Kachinland, aged 25-30, who discovered Dark Academia in 2019 through TikTok).

• Like many other aesthetics, it is an escape from the current crisis, which in turn is a somewhat nostalgic idealisation. We associate this aesthetics with a better time where we could devote ourselves entirely to the studies that genuinely interest us, enjoy them and lead a life of learning. In my case, I like it because it makes me feel that my studies have not been completely in vain, that at least they have helped me to learn more about something that interests me and have given me the tools to do research (I am an unemployed historian). It may be the same for other university students without a job in their field. It's also a space where you don't feel judged for your more intellectual tastes or hobbies. (A woman from Spain, aged 25-30, who discovered Dark Academia in 2020 as a result of the Goblincore aesthetic).

• Pandemic heavily triggered a feeling of nostalgia for "good old times" and DA aesthetics responses very well to this psychological need. (A woman from the Czech Republic, aged 20-25, who discovered Dark Academia in 2021 through YouTube Playlists).

• More people online looking for something older and nostalgic. (A non-binary male from the United States, aged 15-20, who discovered Dark Academia in 2019 via Tumblr).

The audience research has shown that appeals to the search for nostalgic idealisation or escape from the material present are constant in these idealistic online subcultures. Most users tend to make use of these aesthetic communities of nostalgia to escape from current difficulties and enter into their ideal past, perhaps based on other historical periods, by evoking certain aesthetic aspects and implementing them in their daily lives.

Dark Academia: the essence of nostalgia

Having made an approximation of the evolutionary process of Dark Academia, the article will now analyse the nostalgic essence that the community evokes based on the practices that users value on Tumblr. As a result of this broad typology, and after having carried out an extensive cyber-ethnographic and folksonomic analysis, we could establish a typological classification of the nostalgic content shared by dark academics:

• Projection of the nostalgic aesthetic community: users share posts that provide knowledge about the community. Practical guides are established, or tips are offered on how to get into Dark Academia. Likewise, dark academics themselves are critical of the aesthetic’s potentially exclusionary nature in regards to race, class and nation. For example, in reference to broadening horizons and breaking with Eurocentrism, or proposing second-hand outfits or elements so that anyone can feel involved, in the hope of breaking the class divide.

Mel Monier, PhD student and Rackham Merit Fellow in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Michigan, in the Post45 special issue on Dark Academia, describes her experience of entering the online community during the pandemic, stressing that "joy is an assertion of Black people's humanity and dynamic emotionality, and digital spaces — such as the online communities built around dark academia — can offer Black women sites to reclaim their subjecthood and highlight Black joy and life."[43] Amatulla Mukadam, undergraduate student at NMIMS University, who first discovered the Studyblr community, gives her impressions of Dark Academia in Post45: “As a person of Indian origin, I watched dark academia unfold with a sense of awe and aspiration — and also with a persistent feeling of imminent dejection”.[44] Also, reinforcing Monier's words, Mukadam says: “Further, women, people of color and minorities can find a place within dark academia, if not within the actual academy (even if, as Mel Monier notes elsewhere in this cluster, the spaces of dark academia retain the potential to replicate the exclusionary logics of academia itself).”[45] Such research has helped to expand understanding of Dark Academia’s dual nature as both accessible and empowering, and potentially exclusionary and alienating.

• Sentimental evocations: users express their feelings and moods. Mostly it is an allusion to times they consider better, related to a past not lived. In other words, to idealised times. As Olivia Stowell and Mitch Therieau, set out in their introduction to Post45's special issue on Dark Academia: “The further the idealized vision of campus life slips out of reach for academic workers and students alike, the more acolytes dark academia gathers."[46]

• The artistic imaginary: in a similar way to the practices carried out by fandoms, users share content of those artistic works (literary, audio-visual, pictorial, sculptural, architectural, musical, etc.) that they associate with the nostalgic aesthetics of the community. In this case, let's remember that aesthetics are always open to revision, so users take it upon themselves to create more inclusive horizons.

The Tumblr posts in this section give us a revealing glimpse of the nostalgic aesthetic community of Dark Academia. We discovered that the favourite garments are knitted fabrics, wool or cotton, tweed blazers, pleated skirts, pleated trousers and, in terms of shoes, Oxford or moccasins stand out. Likewise, the most repetitive colours that complement the wardrobe are earth tones or neutrals, sometimes including checks or diamonds.

Beyond clothing, we are offered a set of activities that help to create a nostalgic aura in the day-to-day life of the person who practices them. These include making hot drinks such as coffee or infusions, reading books under the dim light of candles or the fireplace, exploring antique or second-hand bookshops to look for classic editions, strolling along cobbled streets at dawn or dusk, writing with a fountain pen or reading poetry on a stormy day, among many other things. These are generally solitary activities, which centre the introspection and aesthetic experience of the person who puts them into practice. It is worth noting that the great part of these romanticised rituals were adapted for times of confinement, as we can see in the publication by @abernathyvalois (figure 18).

On the other hand, sentimental evocations are the main form of emotional expression of dark academics. These can range from wishful thinking: "no YOU live in a society. I live in an 'abandoned' Victorian castle 'infested' with a vampires with a huge library containing first edition books that have been banned by the catholic church for immoral content" (@deadpoetwilde); to a feeling: "the inherent eroticism of the university library after dark" (@teamurder); or a contemporary trend: "she's a 10 but she reads classic literature to escape the modern world" (@nymphpens). While it is true that each text brings a personal version, most of them tend to have points in common. Escapism from the unsatisfied present, nostalgia for times not lived, idealisation of past eras and existential crises are the basis of this type of posts.

The allusions to visual works are fundamental to stipulate the fictional environment of the nostalgic aesthetic of Dark Academia. The films will be part of the users' cultural consumption and can serve as a complement in their sentimental evocations, as the dark academic may identify with the characters or authors of these works. Referring to audio-visual works, we find certain essential texts: Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989), Kill Your Darlings (John Krokidas, 2013), the Harry Potter saga (David Yates, Alfonso Cuarón, Mike Newell, Chris Columbus, 2001/2011), Maurice (James Ivory, 1987), The Dreamers (Bernardo Bertolucci, 2003) and Mona Lisa Smile (Mike Newell, 2003). It should be noted that depending on the time of year or associated fandoms, popularity will either increase or decrease. This is because aesthetics are also often related to the seasons. For example, Dark Academia is more associated with Autumn and Winter: the school year starts, the style of dress changes with shades associated with the summer period, the weather gets colder, Halloween is celebrated, etc.

In reference to literary works, the essential classic of the Dark Academic community is The Secret History (Donna Tartt, 1992). The Secret History fandom has a long tradition on the Tumblr platform and has grown over the years thanks to the author's new work, The Goldfinch, released in 2013. Her film production in 2019 also generated a surge in fandom. Although it is true that there are other essential works such as The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde, 1890). Nevertheless, breadth is clearly its essence, given that all types of consumption of classical literature are highlighted. From poetry, with authors such as Charles Baudelaire to Sylvia Plath, to Latin and Greek works, such as The Odyssey (Homer, VIII BC) or The Bacchae (Euripides, 409 BC); theatre is also fundamental, with Shakespeare standing out above other authors. Within this set of remarkable narratives, the presence of homoeroticism is significant, novels like Maurice (E.M. Forster, 1971) exemplify that existing union between homoeroticism, neo-Classicism and academia. Similarly, in contemporary literature we find The Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller, 2011), a partial retelling of Homer's Iliad narrated from the point of view of Patroclus, showing the homoerotic relationship between the two.

Other contemporary novels with Dark Academic characteristics are If we were villains (M. L. Rio, 2017) and The Atlas Six (Olivie Blake, 2020). The first novel is about a mysterious murder of a young man at the prestigious "Dellecher Classical Conservatory." The drama highlights Shakespeare's various plays while wrapping itself in an academic aesthetic, constantly appealing to an elite academic atmosphere. The second is a fantasy novel, where six magicians must compete for a place in the most important secret society in the world, the Alexandrian Society. The two share similarities with some of the aesthetics’ landmark works, such as The Secret History and Harry Potter, and also clearly maintain their relationship with academia and elitism. Moreover, the above-mentioned works belong to a Eurocentric milieu, they are notable for being set in elite schools, in both the UK and the US, where Eurocentric studies tend to be prominent, as seen in the focus on the works of Shakespeare. However, I have previously commented that the Dark Academics also try to break with this tradition by sharing literature from other cultures. For example, Chinese —The Peony Pavilion (Tang Xianzu, 1598)—, Persian —Shahnameh (Ferdousí, 1010)—, Indian —Aithihyamala (Kottarathil Sankunni)—, Mexican —El vampiro de la colonia Roma (Luis Zapata Quiroz, 1979)—, Malian —Sunjata (unknown)—, among others.

Finally, we find a breadth of artistic movements and periods in the selection of pictorial and sculptural works. The sculptural works of art most commonly shared by the Dark Academics are often characterised by the fact that they are made of marble. Periods such as Greek or Roman antiquity, the Renaissance and Neoclassicism are the most prominent. A fact that strengthens the often Eurocentric vision of the aesthetic. At the same time, the paintings cover many more periods,[47] though they tend to share visual signifiers from romantic landscapes featuring ruins to anatomical studies or vanitas. Mythological depictions, as for example the myth of Dionysus associated with The Secret History, and austere portraits of 18th and 19th century British personalities are also quite popular. Obviously, any engravings or sketches on literary works are welcome.

On the other hand, architecture is more restricted to certain styles, such as Gothic and neo-classical and collegiate locations in the Global North. The architectural landscape projected by university spaces such as Cambridge and Oxford in the U.K., and Harvard, in the U.S. stands out above any other place. The long historical tradition of these institutions has been marked by the presence of notable figures, many of them symbols for the dark academics. See: Oscar Wilde, E. M. Forster, Sylvia Plath, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Lewis Carroll, etc. As we can assume, the academic landscape for the members of this community is the essential focus of their illusory universe. The popularity of this group of universities is enhanced by the filming of some of the aforementioned literary adaptations. —Harry Potter, Maurice and Brideshead Revisited—, creating a visual imaginary of direct allusion. Likewise, in the British countryside or cities where time seems to have stood still, such as Edinburgh, we can find settings that served as inspiration to create the magical world of Harry Potter. All of these spaces reflect the locations to which the dark academics are attracted to and creatively embody online.

To support the world-building material provided by Tumblr, the survey’s data helped to consolidate the essence of the community in order to understand what dark academics were really looking for when they decided to become part of it. Thanks to the question, "When you think of Dark Academia what comes to mind? (Places, objects, sounds, smells, sensations... it can be anything)", I was able to discover the importance given to sensations. The majority referred to certain objects, places or actions that provided them with that experience of approaching nostalgic aesthetics. Some of the most notable are books (540 users), bookshops (242 users), the sound of rain (135 users), classical music (102 users), coffee drinking (249 users), tea drinking (115 users), the use of candles (196 users) or the university environment (106 users). It is worth noting that several respondents alluded to the feeling of nostalgia associated with the Dark Academia and provoked by the performance of certain practices or the consumption of such objects:

• That vintage aesthetic and nostalgic feeling of wearing an older cloth or reading an old book. (A man from Romania aged 10-20, who discovered Dark Academia in 2016 through the internet).

• Dark browns, dark wood, smell of wood and firewood, gorgeous hardcover books, academic papers, fall and winter, long wool coats, boots, turtle necks, glasses, tea, coffee, old architecture, libraries, warm feelings of nostalgia and longing, feelings of contentedness, quirks, messes, darker shades of lipstick, gold accents, dark greens, and a sense of cozy comfort. (A woman from Canada aged 25-30, who discovered Dark Academia between 2010-2015 via Tumblr).

• I think of the pursuit of knowledge, no matter the cost. That is what comes to mind as the inherent idea and reason behind dark academia. After that I find myself gravitating towards the style (tweed, suits, leather bags) and a vague feeling of longing for a time long gone. (A man from the Netherlands aged 15-20, who discovered Dark Academia in 2018 via Tumblr).

The use of the survey as a methodological technique has facilitated our understanding of the nostalgic essence of Dark Academia. Nostalgia is sustained through the existing values of academia and knowledge accumulation, which take on a new meaning and gain greater popularity due to confinement during the Covid-19 pandemic. The idealisation of a classical and erudite past fosters the importance of an aesthetic of academic elitism that is set against an arrested and ever accessible technological present. Through these social networks, a younger generation feel the need to foster new identities through the humanities and classical studies, consuming often Eurocentric literary classics of past centuries and losing themselves in images of academic places that evoke an idealised past they have not experienced for themselves.

Conclusion

By virtue of all the information gathered and analysed for this article, it can be affirmed that nostalgia is no longer wholly reserved for virtual practices but goes much further, with online users embracing what interests them and implementing it in their daily lives. The pandemic provided an unexpected twist to our lives, bringing them to a halt practically overnight, so that society had to look for alternative ways to alleviate its needs — social, academic, personal, and psychological. Jameson, in his study on postmodernism and consumer society, concluded that human beings were becoming unable to focus on our own present: "We had become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience."[48]As is well known, nostalgia can provide a sense of stability, especially in turbulent times of change.[49] This is why the dark academics, like many other young people who entered other aesthetic communities, used Dark Academia to escape the present reality and express their nostalgic emotions for the past. Consequently, this community, which had emerged only a few years before, began to take shape, establishing an identity of its own and a social identity that was linked to the times of yesteryear where Oxbridge culture was a benchmark. The limitations around race, gender and social status that this kind of cultural context encompasses are well known, but dark academics are aware of these concerns and are trying to break through these limitations and expand its canon of reference.

This analysis has provided us with new knowledge to understand the relevance of digital environments in the development of nostalgia practices. The results show that the past is invading the present now more than ever. This is a past not lived directly, but instead creatively idealised by users who wish to abstract themselves from their present, making use of social networks. Therefore, dark academics, through artistic objects, clothing, locations, or activities, seek to enter into a lived aesthetic experience in order to escape from the present, and find a new identity and online community in an imagined past. This research therefore encourages further reflection on the importance of digitally enabled nostalgia in these new aesthetic communities that have grown in recent years on social networks.

Footnotes

1 Also labelled as centennials.

2 For an understanding of nostalgia for the past in today's society see: Simon Reynolds. Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to Its Own Past. (London: FABER & FABER, 2010).

3 Helga Mariel Soto. “Estéticas en Tik Tok: entre lo histórico y lo digital.” Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación (2022): 199-209.

4 See: Reynolds. Retromania.

5Olivia Stowell and Mitch Therieau, ‘Introduction’, Dark Academia, Post45, 2022, Available at: https://post45.org/sections/contemporaries-essays/dark-academia/ [ Accessed January 20, 2022]

6 Quoted in: Janelle L. Wilson, Nostalgia – Sanctuary of Meaning (Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 2005), 21.

7 Willis H. McCann, “Nostalgia: a review of the literature.” Psychological Bulletin 38 (1941): 165-182.

8 Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. (New York: The Free Press, 1979).

9 Davis. Yearning for Yesterday, 106.

10 Davis. Yearning for Yesterday, 106.

11 Jenny Gregory, “Connecting with the past through social media: the ‘Beautiful buildings and cool places Perth has lost’ Facebook group.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 21 (2015): 28.

12 Russell W. Belk, “The Role of Possessions in Constructing and Maintaining a Sense of Past.” ACR North American Advances (1990): 669-676.

Joel Best and E. E. Nelson. “Nostalgia and discontinuity: A test of the Davis hypothesis.” Sociology and social research (1985): 221-233.

13 Krystine Irene Batcho, “Nostalgia: A Psychological Perspective.” Perceptual and Motor Skills 80 (1995): 131 - 143.

Vincent J. Pascal, David Sprott and Darrel D. Muehling. “The Influence of Evoked Nostalgia on Consumers' Responses to Advertising: An Exploratory Study.” Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising 24 (2002): 39 - 47.

14 Susan L. Holak, and William J. Havlena. “Nostalgia: An Exploratory Study of Themes and Emotions in the Nostalgic Experience”. Advances in Consumer Research 19, (1992): 380-387.

15 Fredic Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 67.

16 Holak, and William “Feelings, Fantasies, and Memories” 217-226.

17 Russell Belk, “The Role of Possessions” 669-676.

18 Global Web Index. “Connecting the dots Consumer trends that will shape 2020”.

19 M. Pickering, M., and E. Keightley, “The Modalities of Nostalgia”. Current Sociology 54, no.6, (2006): 919–941, accessed August 8, 2022, doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392106068458

20 Ryan Lizardi, Nostalgic Generations and Media: Perception of Time and Available Meaning. (London: Lexington Books, 2017)

21Hend Suliman Al-Khalifa, and Hugh C. Davis. “Measuring the Semantic Value of Folksonomies.” Innovations in Information Technology (2006): 1-5.

Jennifer Trant, “Studying Social Tagging and Folksonomy: A Review and Framework.” J. Digit. Inf. 10 (2009): 2-44.

Michele Zappavigna, Searchable Talk: Hashtags and Social Media. Metadiscourse. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018).

22 Lizardi. Nostalgic Generations and Media.

23 Thomas Vander Wal, “Folksonomy Coinage and Definition.” 2007. Accessed July 8, 2020. VanderWal.net.

24 Vander Wal,. “Folksonomy Coinage and Definition”.

25 Diego E. Vintimilla-León and Angel Torres-Toukoumidis. "Covid-19 y TikTok. Análisis De La Folksonomía Social." Revista Ibérica De Sistemas e Tecnologias De Informação (2021): 15-26.

26 Sergio Davalos, et al. “'The good old days': An examination of nostalgia in Facebook posts.” Int. J. Hum. Comput. Stud. 83 (2015): 87.

27 Davalos, et al. “'The good old days”, 83-93.

28 Han Lin and Lin Qiu. “Two sites, two voices: linguistic differences between Facebook status updates and tweets" In: Cross-Cultural Design. Cultural Differences in Everyday Life, Edited by P. L.P Rau (Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, 2013): 432-440.

29 Jan Plamper, “THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM REDDY, BARBARA ROSENWEIN, AND PETER STEARNS.” History and Theory 49 (2010): 252.

30 Plamper. “THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS”, 253.

31 Allison McCracken, “Tumblr Youth Subcultures and Media Engagement.” Cinema Journal 57, (2017): 153.

32 Helga Mariel Soto, “Estéticas en Tik Tok: entre lo histórico y lo digital.” Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios de Diseño y Comunicación (2022): 199-209.

33 Ellis cited in: Soto. “Estéticas en Tik Tok”, 200.

34 Soto, “Estéticas en Tik Tok”, 200.

35 Louisa Ellen Stein, Millennial Fandom: Television Audiences in the Transmedia Age. (Iowa: university of Iowa Press, 2015) 158.

36 Hallett and Kristen. “Ethnographic Research in a Cyber Era”, 306.

37 John Beattie, Other Cultures. Aims, Methods and Achievements in Social Anthropology. (New York: The Free Press, 1964).

38 Lucy Bennett, “The Ethics, Design, and Use of Surveys in Fan Studies.” In: The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, Edited By: Click, Melissa and Suzanne Scott 26-44. (London: Routledge, 2018).

39 Stowell and Therieau, Introduction.

40 Ibid.

41 See: Wes Hill, Art after the Hipster: Identity Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics. (London: Palgrave, 2017).

42 Soto. “Estéticas en Tik Tok”.

43 Mel Monier, “Too dark for Dark Academia”. Post45. (2022). Available at: https://post45.org/2022/03/too-dark-for-dark-academia/Accessed January 20, 2022.

44 Amatulla Mukadam, “A Touch of the Picturesque” Post45. (2022). Available at: https://post45.org/2022/03/a-touch-of-the-picturesque/Accessed January 20, 2022.

45 Mukadam, “A Touch”.

46 Stowell, and Therieau, “Introduction”.

47 It is easy to find publications from periods such as Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Symbolism, Pre-Raphaelite, as well as contemporary art referencing these periods.

48 Jameson. “Postmodernism And Consumer Society”; 6.

49 Min Kyung Han, and George E. Newman. “Seeking Stability: Consumer Motivations for Communal Nostalgia.” Journal of Consumer Psychology (2021): 77-86.

Soto. “Estéticas en Tik Tok”, 199-209.

Ralph Harper, “Nostalgia: An Existential Exploration of Longing and Fulfillment in the Modern Age”. The Press of Western Reserve University, 1966.

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Author Biography

Lara López Millán is a PhD student in Art History at the Universitat de València. Her research focuses on the field of visual aesthetics of social networks, film theories and posthumanism. During her career, she has published in the audiovisual field and has participated in several national and international conferences. The thesis she is working on focuses on a new subculture and its visual aesthetics that has gained popularity on social networks during the pandemic, the Dark Academia. She is also currently part of the editorial committee of Cuadernos de ALEPH.