Nostalgia evokes warm and fuzzy memories; sci-fi movies depict technology as cold and inhuman. Nostalgia resists change; technology embraces it. One looks to the future; the other longs for the past.
And yet designers often cloak their bold inventions in familiar imagery, such as the fighter plane-inspired tailfins on the 1959 Cadillac, to make them more appealing. Marketers use nostalgia to sell new technology to consumers; witness Apple's iBook ads featuring black-and-white photos of Gandhi and Einstein. In these ways, a yearning for the past can actually promote change.
"We often can't take unadorned, naked technology. We need something to tell us how we should consider it," says Marc Olivier, an assistant professor of French at Brigham Young University. "If we are embracing technology, it's often because of the nostalgic aesthetic that's been applied to it."
Olivier is the curator of a new exhibition, "Nostalgia & Technology: Embracing the New Through Art and Design," at the BYU Museum of Art in Provo through May 13. Part art exhibit, part cultural history, the show contains more than 300 seemingly unrelated objects, from antique scientific instruments to a stuffed Nile River crocodile to the aforementioned pink Cadillac, that explore how past and future collide.
The idea for the exhibition sprang from a doctoral thesis Olivier wrote at the University of Washington. Olivier noted that nostalgia, or homesickness, was once considered a deadly disease, especially among rural people forced from their homes by circumstance. City dwellers, on the other hand, proved more resistant to nostalgia, a fact explained by their acclimation to a rapidly changing environment.
Technology, in the form of trains or cars, uproots people and makes them nostalgic for home. But communications technology - telephones and now e-mail - can cure nostalgia by connecting people with places they have left.
"In order to go back to the things we've lost, we need to propel ourselves even further into the future," Olivier says. Although he does not have a background in art, BYU Museum of Art Director Campbell Gray encouraged him to curate the exhibit after a conversation six years ago at the museum's café.
"It is an unusual show for us. But we draw on the ideas of faculty all the time," says Gray, who likes to mount exhibitions that combine art with other disciplines. Like Olivier, he believes art can be found in everyday household items and that cultural objects can be read like a text. "Our audience is starting to get used to the idea that an art object does not necessarily hang on a wall or sit on a pedestal."
"Nostalgia & Technology" is split into eight sections, arranged to lead the viewer on a historical, cultural and intellectual journey.
It begins with a re-created 17th-century cabinet of curiosities, in which wealthy Europeans displayed artifacts - instruments, fossils, art, taxidermy - collected on their travels. Upon viewing these items side by side, humans made new connections between art and science that encouraged experimentation and inspired further inventions.
The exhibition's next section showcases domestic items that found acceptance in the home only after they were adorned with familiar imagery. One example is an ornate 1850s sewing machine, decorated with gold-plated statuettes of cherubs that helped overcome users' fears of the strange new device. Later, designers built typewriters to resemble sewing machines and even pianos.
Another section shows how radios and TVs entered the home disguised as furniture. Designers housed the devices in decorative cabinets to downplay their futuristic looks and help them blend in with other wooden furnishings. As consumers grew comfortable with home electronics and these objects became status symbols, their makers embraced such space-age designs as the Panasonic Orbitel TV. This bubble-shaped set was made in 1969, during a year when the world was fascinated by space exploration and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
Visitors exit the show through a "media cabinet," a modern-day counterpart to the 17th-century cabinet of curiosities. Viewers will see contemporary items paired with older ones, illustrating how the past informs the present. Decorative cell-phone faceplates mirror seashells; a Palm Pilot resembles a cuneiform clay tablet; and a GPS device updates an equatorial sundial.
In this way, the exhibition demonstrates how nostalgia can sell the future, paradoxically, as a return to the past.
"It's an unconventinal show," says Olivier, who spent five years gathering items from museums around the country. "I don't want this to be a design show. I also don't want it to be a history of invention. I want people to make connections between these things for themselves. The goal is to make people aware that even today we encode our technology with [nostalgic] meanings that aren't necessary for its use. "
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Contact Brandon Griggs at griggs@sltrib.com or 801-257-8689. Send comments about this story to livingeditor@sltrib .com.
High-tech, warm fuzzies
l "Nostalgia and Technology: Embracing the New through Art and Design" will continue through May 13 in the Marian Adelaide Morris Cannon Gallery at the BYU Museum of Art
in Provo.
l The museum is on North Campus Drive, east of the Smoot Administration Building and north of the Harris Fine Arts Center. It is open Mondays-Saturdays, and admission is free.
l For more information, call 801-422-1140 or visit http:// cfac.byu.edu/moa.
Tick, tick, tick: "Atomic" wall clock, circa 1949.
