Rick Prelinger: “The Romance of Obsolescence and the Promise of Hybridity”

In the last 25 years we have displaced much of our culture, labor and recordkeeping into the digital domain. While the digital turn has vastly enriched many lives, it has also amplified divides, accelerated inequalities, elevated the possibility of historical amnesia and brought us new and onerous forms of labor. But it is not irreversible. Digital emergence is feeding a renaissance of physical media, a revival of the handmade and an analog culture that consciously looks forward rather than to the past. The simplistic opposition of digital progress and analog nostalgia is giving way to a new vision of hybridity. Centered on the archival moving image record and the production of culture as models for social imagination, this image-rich talk by Rick Prelinger, Professor of Film and Digital Media, UC Santa Cruz, and founder of the Prelinger Archives and Co-Founder of the Prelinger Library, suggests how strategies that look beyond physical/virtual binaries can aspire to redistribute power and heal digital wounds.