Great fun article, Colin.
I love it when people can think outside the norm and embrace something just because they like it. Why be like everybody else?
They are NOT thinking outside the norm!
They are simply using what was the norm 30 years ago under the guise of being different.
Do YOU remember the rooms full of manual typewriters hammering away? The secretarial pools? The "auditory experience" was terrible.
Those were the norm and, frankly, they were awful.
It's a quirky article but is romanticizes and makes nostalgic processes that were dreary back then. Writers used to justify their romance with the typewriter even though the hated the damn things and saw them as a necessary evil.
The economics of this is 100% funded by the fact that the equipment is dirt cheap salvage which consumers, businesses and government now find inefficient to use. Using Super 8 for example, is staggeringly more expensive than other mediums and it is ONLY made possible by the cost differential. The funds to process are only there because of the rock-bottom salvage costs of the cameras. This is why it is artists using disposable income are the ones gravitating to older technology. They are using the detritus of past economic and technological cycles can calling it an expressive medium whereas once it was blood and guts, money-making enterprise. Let's not put on rose coloured glasses. If she makes a terrific film, excellent. That's what counts. Making the process itself an artistic statement is a personal choice, one made possible by prior economic subsidy.
And this quote from the article makes me laugh:
"In a sense, the digital world can only deal with things that can be quantified, says Milne, 38, who has an engineering background. "So things like experience, even spirituality and religion -- all that stuff that we can't push into a rational, logical framework, sort of drops off the map."
You have got to be kidding me.
When personal computers came out they were seen as a means of humanizing ("Hello. Welcome to Macintosh") what for most was a deeply dehumanizing experience, and that was white collar analog information management. People went blind loading fonts into prepress machines. Hard hammering typewriters contributed to deafness. Computers were seen as liberating. Less so in hindsight, but that takes nothing away from the sheer drudgery beforehand.
And an engineer should know that analog is just as much about quantification as digital.
I have no problem with using analog devices in "new and creative ways", but to assert nonsense about some sort of spiritual connection is absurd. It was never that way in the past. In fact, corporate managers were the ones who tried to "liberate" the workplace in such ways against the average person who used the equipment. The guy in the corner suite dictated to a typist.
It's like people romanticizing haystacks but they would never get in a field themselves and pitchfork one into being to foster a greater connection to the land. It's always better when someone else, preferably in another country or our hard working farming ancestors, had to do the really hard work.
These hipsters have not only short memories, but they are creating their own media-infused ones that are fundamentally inaccurate compared to the historical record. There's also no shortage of lo-fi elitism. Instead of just appreciating the image, we get this:
"With film, "there's a lot more communication between photographer and subject," he says. "I find it can be more of a collaboration."
Prove it by looking at the image. Prove it. Because the next day, no one will be able to tell. Nor will they in 10 or 100 years. Therefore it's not about the art, it's about the artist's self-justification. Each to their own, but at least have the courage to call it what it is.