‘I like the narrative of curating what we watch’: The curatorial worlds of retroconversion artists

Abstract

This paper reports on findings from semi-structured interviews with thirteen retroconversion artists. Navigating emerging and outdated technologies, retroconversion artists resituate contemporary media onto obsolete formats. Retroconversion artists often navigate murky legalistic territories with a keen awareness of the limitations of contemporary license-based digital media management. Focusing on the curatorial impetus for such work, the paper highlights how retroconversion artists engage in a series of curatorial acts that help reconsider questions of media consumption and ownership in an era of streaming-first media distribution. The paper explores how retroconversion artists curate media to foster brand building, ensure content preservation, and help respond to personal and communal nostalgic desires. The paper also contextualizes the work of these artists against an era in which the use of video and other analog medias contradicts is cultural notion of easy and immediate access and contends that the work of these artists intentionally demands slowing down with and utilizing media within the constraints of former media paradigms. The paper highlights the theoretical implications of taking retroconversion art seriously as an act of archival preservation and argues for embracing the curatorial practices of retroconversion artists in institutional media archeology settings.