Where to see it and where it’s been..
October 2015
Werkleitz festival. Halle, DE. Finished version.
January 2015
Transmediale. Berlin, DE. First prototype.
Prototyped at Werkleitz in Halle as part of the EMARE (European Media Artists in Residence Exchange), further work done in Canada.
Still in a somewhat experimental phase, though getting closer to completion.
Nostalgia for a Myth. Robyn Moody.
Nostalgia for a Myth is a kinetic sound sculpture designed to be set on the edge of a river. It is a combination of a water mill and a variation of a Polyphon (an automatic music box disc, produced in Leipzig in the late 19th century). The flow of the river determines the rate at which it performs popular nostalgic songs (Yesterday, The Way We Were, and Those Were the Days), while also creating its own light show.
This is partly rooted in my interest in clever mechanical devices from the past (my own nostalgia), but even moreso in current popular movements of nostalgia for a simpler time that did not actually happen.
Think “organic food”, and “alternative medicine” and you can see that this nostalgia is largely manifested in food fears and obsessions about naturalness, chemical phobias and mistrust of medicine. While these may seem mere eccentricities, they have a rejection of knowledge at their core.
These fetishes, being anti-science and technology, are ironically perpetuated by the fast sharing of (mis)information that technology has allowed.
