The Machine Doesn’t Care
I’m on the tail end of a generation for whom the look and sound of 8-bit video game systems has become intrinsically linked to notions of childhood and memory. We grew up playing these video games, some of us playing them everyday for many years. When you surround yourself with something so much as a child all sorts of circumstantial experience gets linked to it in your memory as an adult. When we see or hear anything 8-bit we are immediately reminded of our childhood homes, the sleepover parties we had with our friends, our mothers’ sandwiches, and a whole other mess of nostalgic half-memories.
Because of this phenomenon computer technology of the 1980’s becomes something highly exploitable from an artistic standpoint. Not only does it serve as a kind of aesthetic trigger for childhood, but it also calls into question the nature of our childhoods in relation to technology and technological progress. The fact that these devices have been technologically surpassed is especially important to consider. These objects that we loved as children are now being thrown away en masse to make way for the next generation of consumer electronics. It is not a gigantic leap of association to look at these heaps of discarded floppy discs, computers, gaming systems and toys as heaps of human memory.
