In post-digital culture, tools themselves convey meaning, and failure has become Zion for artists. Post-digitalism emerged as the promises of a technologically driven better future began to falter. Technology, once expected to simplify life and create a brighter world, often yields glitches, bugs, system crashes, and artifacts like distortion and quantization noise. These imperfections have become the raw material of post-digital composers, who incorporate these “failures” into their work, transforming them into expressive devices.
From this ongoing present, retrofuturism seeks to recapture the experience of imagining the future. Rooted in nostalgia, retro-futuristic art revisits the aspirational visions of past eras, exploring whether a renewed utopian imagination is still possible. By dreaming better, we may see further. Yet as we wake to our digitally saturated environment, our creative potential is shaped and even limited by the constant bombardment of multimedia stimuli and screens. This dissertation investigates post-digital retrofuturism, as an artistic movement that merges past technological dreams-like imagery with contemporary digital realities. It examines how artists leverage retrofuturist aesthetics to reshape our understanding of temporality, materiality, and the human-machine interface.
Traditionally associated with visual art and design, retrofuturism evokes the nostalgic visions of future possibilities from past eras, such as mid-20th-century science fiction and early electronic music aesthetics. In a post-digital context, however, these aesthetics are reimagined through the tools and philosophies of digital media, forming a hybrid in which past and future coexist in layered complexity. Artists increasingly use outdated or analog technology—early synthesizers, VHS tapes, CRT monitors—as both medium and material, embedding historical artifacts within contemporary multimedia works.
To frame post-digital retrofuturism within theoretical discourses on time and memory, this study draws on theorists such as Fredric Jameson, who examines the cyclical return of retro aesthetics, and Mark Fisher, whose concept of "hauntology" addresses how past cultural forms reappear in the present. I argue that post-digital retrofuturism not only revisits but reconstructs and critiques these past imaginaries, functioning as both a commentary on digital culture and a speculative reimagining of future potentials. By returning to a “future that never was,” retrofuturist multimedia works highlight contemporary anxieties around technology, ecological crisis, and digital disconnect.
The dissertation includes case studies of multimedia works that exemplify the post-digital retrofuturist ethos, focusing on new compositions and installations that evoke temporal layers and create multisensory experiences bridging digital and physical realms. Through detailed analysis, it explores how artists use visual and sonic motifs from early digital technology—glitch art, pixelation, and synthesized sounds—to mediate the interplay between human perception and digital memory.
Furthermore, this study examines the significance of site-specificity in retrofuturist art. Many of these works are installed in spaces with historical or technological resonance, like decommissioned industrial sites and former cinemas, which add layers of cultural memory to the artwork. Theories from Lucy Lippard and Miwon Kwon provide insight into how such installations engage audiences, enabling a reimagined spatial-temporal experience that bridges history and speculative futurism.
Finally, I consider the broader theoretical and social implications of post-digital retrofuturism in the Anthropocene. The “post-digital” suggests a time when digital technology is omnipresent yet mundane, provoking a yearning for tactile and material experiences. Retrofuturism resists digital uniformity by reintroducing analog warmth and unpredictability, fostering new forms of material engagement in an age dominated by screens and virtual interactions.
This dissertation ultimately proposes that post-digital retrofuturism is not merely an aesthetic trend but a conceptual approach with potential to reshape contemporary art’s relationship with time, technology, and memory. By recontextualizing past imaginaries, it invites audiences to rethink the future in embodied, multisensory, and temporally layered ways. In synthesizing past and future, material and digital, retrofuturist art offers pathways to envision alternative temporalities and materialities in contemporary multimedia practices.