Memory is a strange and fickle thing—more fragile than we realize and more subject to our will and thought than we like to admit.
Time is analog and infinite. As it passes by us, we encapsulate it, we categorize it, and we re-contextualize it to make sense of the complexity of it all. We rarely meditate on the present way of thinking or prevailing aesthetics while we are experiencing them. They simply are. It is only as we look back or are presented with something from the past that we start to associate time with things—that a certain look, a specific sound, or a special way of thinking was part of that time.
I experienced the uncanny nature of time’s passage when house hunting. I came across a house owned by an old couple for decades, where nothing inside had changed. It was their dream home from the 1970s, full of things that, when viewed together, suddenly seemed bound up in that time, though I had never thought of them before. The house had plaid carpet in places, wood paneling, and dark wallpaper. There was a sunken game room with a wall of angled windows. Yellow ripple glass. Big CRT TVs with wood printed plastic on the sides pointing at fluffy lime green couches. Lamps everywhere. There were no computers in an office that had a big dark wood desk and a bell telephone sitting in one corner. Beside it were bookshelves of oak filled with bestsellers that nobody remembers.
I lived in such a house, too, though it had been updated to take out some of the best things from the 1970s and 80s. The kitchen still had the weird electric stoves with rotisserie attachment, brown tile, and of course, angled windows and skylights. Lots of details like that you only remember when you see them. “Oh, I remember that from my childhood!” What I find interesting about the uncanny experience is how it changes my perception of time as well as invokes nostalgia.
We don’t remember the past accurately. We can’t. What we think of as a time category (like the 1970s) is an amalgamation of comparative experiences. It’s an abstraction of what was different from one time to another, not quite recognizing that time itself is analog, not digital. Everything is always in transition. Our memory is best approximated as a bunch of little snapshots, most of which have been doctored, being fed into a computer to create a composite image. We create, or write, memories more than we record them.
That curious method by which we remember produces an effect I am calling, for now, Retrovision, where we look backward at a time that never really was.
If you check out Brian’s comparison above, you’ll get the idea. The 1980s tend to be thought of aesthetically as a time of wild teased hair, bright colors, puffy sleeves, colorful make-up, and triangular cars. The truth is that people wore t-shirts and jeans, had permed hair and bangs more than teased metal locks, and drove boxy cars that were typically rather drab. The interiors weren’t the slick white styles seen in American Psycho but wood-paneled, jumbled living rooms left over from the 1970s.
The abstract aesthetic of the 1980s is inspired by Tron and merged with period pieces like American Psycho and some snapshots of hit shows like Miami Vice and movies like Wall Street. My trapper keeper from 1991 is the most 80s object I have ever owned (btw, they are bringing them back). TV shows are, of course, a flawed way to understand the aesthetics of a time because they are an idealized version of the current styles. They may point in the right direction, especially with sitcoms with decorated domestic interiors, but they are themselves a kind of abstraction. Small Wonder isn’t quite what an 80s house looked like but is more like what an interior designer’s vision of a modern house should be in 1985. You can say the same about Friends or Home Improvement for the 1990s. The real 1990s were very flowery and mauve.
The same effect exists in music. When you listen to something like vaporwave, there is an active attempt to play to the aesthetics of the 1980s, but consciously in the abstract and in an unrealistic manner, more like a hazy dream of sounds from the 1980s than something truly emulating them. It is a reimagining of what we thought the 80s ought to have been, or what a fellow musician SoundEngraver called “imagining the future the 80s promised” (you can find her YouTube here). On that level, I love it – it’s comfortably uncanny.
There are certain sounds we associate with the 80s, particularly if we haven’t been listening to 80s music recently. One paradigm is the ubiquity of synthesizers. This idea was floating around in the 2000s that the band Rush had a “synth phase” where Alex Lifeson was barely audible on, for example, records like Power Windows from 1985. I remember several critics writing about it when Vapor Trails came out in 2002. A quick listen with fresh ears will let you know that such a phase did not exist. Power Windows is a guitar-heavy album; it just had a Yamaha DX synth in there and wasn’t using the “wall of sound” popular in the 1970s.
1980s music production was squeaky clean, with the ideal of every instrument being clear and separate in the mix. This leads to the bad memory that there was no guitar, or the guitar never used overdrive, or that Prince wasn’t a great guitar player. The guitar was huge in the 1980s, and not just in metal. We just remember the FM synthesizers of the day as being special and different than what came before (analog synths like the Moog, which sound “1970s”) and after (samplers in the 1990s), then use that as the base of the aesthetic. Recently, I’ve seen more guitar players on YouTube trying to find “the 1980s guitar sound” using chorus, reverb, and harmonizers. This is awesome, but it was really an approach to production more than effects that made the 80s clean pop guitar what it was.
With something like vaporwave, the emphasis was on what was easily understood and special about the period. The visual element highlights this as well.
Large Language Models (LLMs, or ai) in art are useful for exploring Retrovision. On the one hand, they are controlled by human language and fed by human work, including our own art which is itself plagued by Retrovision. On the other, they aren’t human and don’t misremember things or boil them down to abstracts. Take a look at a few of these images:
“Grainy faded 1960s photograph of teenagers outside”
This looks remarkably like the childhood photos of my father, taken in Texas in the 1960s. Notice there are no hippies! Hippies were not a thing in the 1960s except at the end and, as a small subculture, only made significant by what I called elsewhere the “Three-Year Myth” of the lefty Baby Boomer. Most boomers weren’t hippies and hated them. To get hippies, I have to ask Midjourney to draw hippies specifically:
Keep in mind that this isn’t what hippies really looked like; finding real photos of the time will show some different details. Instead, we’re seeing something closer to the Retrovision ideal of the hippy, no doubt fed by decades of movies and art (which are idealized, not real) in addition to period photographs and documentaries. Even period photos will be selective; the photographer chooses the images that are most exciting and best represent the zeitgeist of the moment, and what is not shot may be the more realistic vision.
Take a look at the 1970s:
Leaving the artifacts of the AI aside, it catches a few details idealized in the 1970s. Tall heels, the plaid couch, and, of course, the brass lamps. The hairstyles are caricatures but not far off. The clothes are odd because they look inspired by magazine ads from the time, not what people wore day to day (which was, like other decades, t-shirts and denim). The images are something between Retrovision and reality, an amalgam of media of the time rather than personal photographs.
How about the 1980s? How about a mall?
Retrovision! Ignoring the AI weirdness, malls and people did look like this – sort of. Throw in a dark arcade, and you get the vibe of the mall in the 1980s. The mall is its own center of 80s feelings and nostalgia. They were nascent in the 70s, dominant in the 80s, and then gave way to strip malls and outdoor shopping experiences in the 90s before declining heavily in the 2000s. The mall is a vibe as well as a place for what people think of as the booming 80s. Notice that there was color, but it wasn’t something like this:
You might have seen a cool fashion poster like this at the mall, but probably not. Real world didn’t pick up the Tron aesthetic.
Take a look at the 1990s:
I find all of these rather uncanny. First, the living room is spot on. It’s furniture left over from the 80s, just as the 80s was stuff left over from the 70s. People don’t just redecorate according to design trends; they hold onto their durable goods for a long time (which is the point of durable goods). The cluttered room is a weird crossover of reality (houses got messy at times) and clothes catalogs. Models in the 90s often had this empty look that wasn’t quite real.
The same goes for the teenagers. They look like they are posing for a band photo or for the Guess catalog. Very eerie.
What also gets me is that none of the images show anything past 1997. Even the robot seems to know when cultural ground zero was. The teens all look like early to mid-90s types. Denim, a bit of flannel, some red hair (big in 1995), leather (I never ditched mine), some long-styled hair… but no baggy jeans. If you want that, you have to ask for it specially. Even when you do, you get early 90s kids whose pants are too big. No vans or other skater gear, but instead stonewashed jeans, basketball sneakers, and tucked shirts (hilarious):
I find the AI so compelling because it’s a distillment of things we tell ourselves about aspects of the past, part truth, part abstraction, part fiction, to make the whole thing distinct and containable in our limited memories. In order to grasp some decade, we have to have some idea of what it is and what was special about it compared to other times. That’s retrovision in a nutshell – the distillment of the idea of a time period more than the lived experience.
We need separation, too, in order to qualify the time. It’s only recently that I’ve seen people start to codify a feeling to the 2000s, such as they were. It’s odd because by 1993, we all had an idea of what the 80s were and how they were different from the 90s. Now, over 10 years later, it’s difficult to define just how the 2000s were special. For me, it’s an extension of the 90s aesthetically and culturally, but thrown into chaos by two wars and long occupations on the political front. It was special because of very specific things, like the exploding internet and online games, not because the music had a certain sound, or the movies looked a certain way, or the clothes went in a particular direction. If you boiled 2000s media down, you’d get Halo, Lord of the Rings, and World of Warcraft… Maybe Iron Man? But all of those are still active in some form in 2023.
I have elements of retrovition in my work. If you have read Eyes in the Walls, I lean heavily on the feeling of things at the close of the 1980s (clever readers have found out that the story took place in 1991), when Baby Boomer parents were hitting their 40s and there was no internet yet. There was a feeling of isolation compared to today, of loneliness, and of cozy, messy spaces that felt secure and warm in a world that was breathing after the end of the Cold War.
Afterglow: Generation Y is a collection of stories that emphasize the feelings of the times of my generation, abstractions placed into aphorisms, a kind of portrait of nostalgia. The closing piece, Middlebury, uses the haziness of temporal memory for story purposes. The characters are… somewhen, experiencing life in the 2000s before the rise of social media when things like World of Warcraft were still novel experiences. It’s an experience of limbo to dive back into those times… times you didn’t understand them while you were experiencing them.
You can find more of this in Generation Y: the New Lost Generation, a book with JD Cowan, Brian Niemeier, and myself. The point is not to look past the retrovision to what formed us, truly, beyond the mere nostalgic.
I remember talking to my dad about this before, while we were watching old home videos he'd taken from the late 80's/early 90's after Stranger Things kicked the 80's nostalgia into high gear. He was in college in the late 70's, grew up in the 60's, and he kind of had a moment where he was like, "You know, it feels like everything we associate with one decade really came around at the very tail end of it, and most of that decade felt a lot like the one that came before it." Like, we associate the 70's with Saturday Night Fever, but that came out in 1977, which is pretty late into the decade all things considered. Around that same time (I understand it, at least), KISS was at the zenith of their popularity, and that always kind of shocks me into realizing how close all those cultural moments were to one another despite being so vastly different.
The most schizophrenic decade about this is definitely the 1990s. Every nostalgia piece (and I use that term VERY loosely) made by Hollywood is so incredible inaccurate in just about every way that it eventually gave me the motivation to write something like Y Signal. Every stereotype about the time is either misapplied, misunderstood, or reinterpreted incorrectly. I'm thinking things like The Simpsons '90s episode, the terrible failed Everything Sucks Netflix show, or that movie Mid-90s. It feels like these people heard about the 1990s third hand from an uncle during a drunken rant and were never actually there themselves.
I think that is the first real fracture point where we both clearly grew up and lived in different worlds. We now have separate mythologies.