Boomboxtalgia

There was a moment when music had weight, too. Boomboxes, Walkmans, and portable players were not simply devices for listening. They were carried on the body, occupied a room, accompanied a journey, or brought several people together around the same song. Their scale, their buttons, their speakers, and even the wear on their surfaces gave the experience of sound a physical form.

Boomboxtalgia begins with these objects and the moment when they start to lose the function that made them indispensable. When they fall out of use, they do not necessarily disappear. They change places: from everyday tools, they become collectors’ objects, images, memories, or signs of an era.

I am interested in that shift. The watercolors reproduce these devices at close to life size, with an almost excessive attention to their surfaces. Marks, reflections, buttons, speakers, labels, and traces of use emerge slowly, layer after layer. Watercolor, a fragile medium built with water, thus reconstructs machines designed to be durable, portable, and reproducible.

But what remains in them is not only their design. Each device seems to retain something of what happened around it: songs heard many times, tapes recorded and rerecorded, places, people, and ways of sharing music that belong to another technological moment.

Nostalgia emerges, then, less as a desire to return to the past than as a way of recognizing how much of that past continues to operate in the present. Many of these devices have disappeared from our everyday lives, but the images, gestures, and forms of relationship they produced continue to circulate.

Technology changes.
The memory of having lived with it remains.