the outmoded in contemporary digital culture Wes Hill Culture today is infatuated with the styles of the past. We can see this not just in music, music videos, advertisements, ilm, fashion and a huge array of social media platforms, but of course, in art as well. The artworld’s preoccupation with the nostalgic past has been characterised by some key commentators over the last few years as a kind of return to modernism, in part as an attempt to address the perceived inadequacy of postmodernism as a theoretical concept, and the widespread scepticism over the new. in turning one’s attention to digital art, which is a relatively recent area of concern for art historians, the proliferation of retro aesthetics and outmoded forms is particularly apparent, defying the future orientation often expected of new media. Digital photography applications such as instagram, with its ilters that imitate the period-look of photographs taken by old ilm cameras, are emblematic of the nostalgia permeating today’s creative disciplines. We could also think of lana Del Rey’s National Anthem (2012) music video as a popular representative of this; a video in which rapper A$AP Rocky plays Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy to Del Ray’s own Jackie Kennedy and Priscilla Presley persona, ilmed in retro settings through Instagram-type colour ilters. Del Ray emerged a few years ago at the peak of mainstream interest in 1950s and 1960s music, associated with singers such as Adele and Amy Winehouse, as well as the intentionally derivative work of lady Gaga, who draws heavily from the 1980s. it is easy to think of a plethora of visual artists who could be similarly placed within this Instagram mentality of contemporary culture; choosing to speak to the present moment through obsolete technologies or through retro-looking imagery and materials. This was the subject, in a roundabout way, of a 2012 Artforum essay by Claire Bishop, the renowned art critic and associate professor of art history at the City University of New York. Titled “Digital Divide: Whatever Happened to Digital Art?”, the purpose of Bishop’s essay was not to show how contemporary artists are uninterested in digital media, but rather to relect on what she sees as a shortage of artists who really capture, or intend to capture, what it is like to live in a world that has been reshaped by digital media. The essay focused on the mainstream art world, arguing that artists are less interested in confronting digital media directly, and are more interested in the analogue, the archival, the obsolete and pre-digital modes of communication. in focusing on the mainstream art world, Bishop’s essay—which provoked much criticism over its narrow view of digital art—sought to diagnose why artists working with the latest technologies and digital tropes are still very much the fringe dwellers in the dominant discourses and institutions of art. Here i will discuss the essay at length in order to take this argument further than Bishop. i will try to show that the prevalence of outmoded aesthetics and outmoded technologies does not so much highlight a division in the representation of digital or new media art, but instead indicates that the outmoded is the most effective language to communicate something of the speed, chaos and uncertainty that marks life in the internet age. Bishop begins her essay with a well-grounded passage that is worth reproducing here at length. she writes: 53 contemporary visual art+culture broadsheet 43.2 2014 Above: Image created by Flash “make your own Jackson Pollock” program created by Miltos Manetas