Introduction

Abstract

Despite its insular qualities, nostalgia, in its essence, is an attempt to connect. Firstly, with a time and space, lost or imagined, but also to one another. As Charlotte Wells notes in her own nostalgic, biographically inflected, feature debut, Aftersun (2021), “memory is a slippery thing”, each visit to the event “framed by a new feeling.” Its potential for nostalgic expression, and further creative expansion, is rich through visual technology. This can be encountered in Wells’ “language of cinema”, and of course through the videogames, creative practice, and online visual cultures considered within the articles in this special issue. These participatory screen cultures range from the “low-poly horror” games of the Haunted PS1 community, considered by Patrick Dolan and Dr Andrew Bailey, to the nostalgic aesthetic communities identified in Lara López Millán’s study of Dark Academia on Tumblr. Yet, in each of the wide-ranging incarnations explored in this issue, we find Wells’ reminder that nostalgic technology offers “room for you”, created with the hope to “take it, fill it, in order to feel it.”