Technostalgia and tangibility II

In early November I attended the 23rd annual CHArt conference, which this year bore the title Digital Archive Fever – as precise a diagnosis of my own current condition as any. For me, the most interesting contribution came from Doireann Wallace, a PhD student at the Dublin Institute of Technology, who is doing some important work on the dissemination and exploitation of stock photography through online image banks à la Corbis and Getty Images. Focusing her paper on a close reading of Getty’s online operations, Doireann touched on a section of this website which utterly fascinated me and which I immediately wanted to explore in more detail.

The section is question is called Change Me and it is accessed from the so-called Creative area on the main site. As far as I can make out, Change Me was set up as a kind of feelgood time-wasting feature for bored ‘creatives’, where people were invited to select an image from the Getty Images collections, make some sort of comment on it and submit it for dissemination on the website. You can see a particularly toe-curling example of the sort of thing it produced here.

For each submission, Getty Images would donate USD10 to something called Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, a lobby group which, according to its own website, ‘works to educate, engage, and mobilize Americans in the fight to end the worldwide burden of AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria’. Once the donations based on image submissions had reached USD250,000, Getty Images ‘donated’ a further USD250,000 by granting a number of image licences totalling this sum – presumably for images to be used in campaign material by the Friends of the Global Fight – thus, in the words of the website, ‘enlisting the power of imagery in the battle to end the worldwide burden of these three diseases’. Without commenting further on this slightly nauseating piece of rhetoric, suffice it to say that Jonathan Klein, the co-founder and CEO of Getty Images, sits on the Friends’ board of directors.

What really fascinates me about this entire enterprise is not its political or charitable merits but rather the visual methods by which Change Me seeks to attract and retain its audience. In my opinion, the feature is as pure an expression of technostalgia as you’re likely to come across anywhere. It is a digital simulacrum of analogue art direction, bringing together every conceivable signifier of pre-digital ‘creativeness’: scribbles in pencil and felt-tip; typewriter-esque type; yellowed crumpled paper; peeling stickers; stained and faded paper surfaces; polaroids; large format transparencies; piles and piles of paper stuff with torn edges; scissors; bits of string (or is it hair?), and in the change-overs between screens always human hands touching, moving, fingering the material displayed on the simulated worktop.

As with all simulations, the virtual studio environment of Change Me is like an over-egged pudding: the elaborately haptic imagery of the screen environment completely drowns out the allegedly ‘powerful’ images it is meant to support.
The Change Me feature exemplifies what the design critic Rick Poynor has called ‘luxurious frugality’, a concept he associates primarily with so-called bobos (‘bourgeois bohemians’). Bobos ‘have a lot of money, but they identify with anti-Establishment, countercultural styles’, writes Poynor, with ‘styles’ being the operative word as far as I can tell. For through the elaborate simulation of ‘primitive’ design tools (paper, pens, photographs) the Getty website offers its designer clients a nostalgic image of earlier, less affluent days – their time at art college, for instance – and thus of authenticity, which, as Susan Stewart has noted in her book On Longing (1993) is always the ultimate referent of nostalgia. This fabricated authenticity, yoked to the bobo self-image of counter-culturalism, is clearly intended to put visitors to this part of the site into a frame of mind where they will feel interpellated by the appeal to support the Friends of the Global Fight – a name which conjures up revolutionary struggles and anti-globalisation movements, yet which turns out to be an office-based lobby group in Washington, DC. Much like the papers, prints and stickers so luxuriatingly displayed on the computer screen are mere mirages of tactility, protesting rather too much their material difference from the binary digital code that they actually are.