Name: Technostalgia. Afterlives of 80s-90s’ Digital Technologies
Start: 2026-06-19 09:30:00
End: 2026-06-20 12:30:00
Location: Les Rotondes

This international conference is organised by the CD-Hist team (in parallel to the “CD-ROM. One Click, One Story” exhibition). It seeks to explore how digital and computing pasts are remembered, revived, and reimagined. Technostalgia stands at the intersection of personal memory and collective practices, intertwining affects, communities, cultures, heritage, markets and ideologies. Whether through the emulation of obsolete systems, the storytelling of early computing experiences, the maintenance of vintage hardware, the emulation of videogames and dead formats, the aesthetic strategies of retro interfaces and design, a market of “geek” artifacts, activities of communities related to retro-computing or the demo scene, technostalgia opens a fertile ground for analysing both “restorative” and “reflective” relations to past IT technologies (Van der Heijden, 2015). It invites us to discuss the role of “techno-melancholia” (Fickers, 2009), memories, different expressions of contemporary nostalgia (Fantin, Fevry and Niemeyer, 2021) and digital nostalgia (Niemeyer in Becker and Trigg, 2024), maintenance and heritagisation, remembrance and restoration (Van Dijck and Bijsterveld, 2009), as well as some “desired return to an ideal past” (Pinch and Reinecke, 2009).

Programme

9.30

Welcome and Introduction by Fred Pailler, Valérie Schafer and Alina Volynskaya
9.45

The Politics of Nostalgia

Chair: Benjamin Thierry (Sorbonne University)

Jesper Verhoef (University of Groningen), The Golden Age Myth: How Technostalgia Obscures Neoliberal Histories

Antonino Sciotto (University of Piemonte Orientale), Overcoming technostalgia. Archiving practices and social movements

Anastasis Fintzos-Vavlis (University of Athens), “There was magic back then”: Meanings of Nostalgia in Youth Nerd Life-Stories in 1980s and 1990s Greece
11.15

Break
11.30

Practices of Reconstruction

Chair: Andreas Fickers (University of Luxembourg)

Mario Tirino (Universiteit Gent) and Giorgio Busirizzi (Università di Salerno), Posting Memories, Playing Machines: Digital Community, Media Heritage, and the Affective Archive through the case of Computer Love Records

Till Heilmann (Ruhr University Bochum), Networking images: Historical and Nostalgic Practices of GIF 0.0
12.30

Lunch
13.15

Web Memories

Chair: Susan Aasman (University of Groningen)

Johanna Arnesson and Evelina Liliequist (Umeå University), Generational Memories of the Internet: Digital Nostalgia for Early Swedish Web Communities

Natalie Fridzema (University of Groningen) and Anya Shchetvina (Humboldt University), Longing for Autonomy: The Vernacular Web as Technostalgic Activist Imaginary
14.15

Break
14.30

Re-Enacting and Sharing

Chair: Katharina Niemeyer (Université du Québec à Montréal)

Julien Mailland (Indiana University) and Kevin Driscoll (University of Virginia), Old Tech, New Tricks: Rebuilding Minitel and Creating New Communities

Bruno de Paula and Alison Croasdale (University College London), Blowing into the cartridge (even though you really shouldn’t): a walking encounter with international shared playing histories and contemporary reselling

Aicha El Waqf (Social Science Lab_MENA), Technostalgia in Moroccan Newsrooms and Classrooms: Afterlives of 1980s–1990s Tools at Morocco’s National Journalism Institute (ISIC)
16.00

Followed by a visit of the CD-Hist exhibition “CD-ROM. One Click, One Story” at les Rotondes, and drinks until 18.00.

11.00

Nostalgia at Play

Chair: Sandra Camarda (University of Luxembourg)

Thibault Le Page (University of Geneva and HEAD–Genève), Nostalgia as a Driver: Maintenance and Archiving Practices of Video Games in Japan

Jack Pocaluyko (University of Oslo), The GUI Repertoire: Performing Desktop Histories in Let’s Play Majerus G3

Sergio Minniti (Mercatorum University), From Arcades to Heritage and Back: Grassroots Platformisation in the Reappropriation of Arcade Games in Italy
12.30

Concluding comments by Susan Aasman, Sandra Camarda, Benjamin Thierry, Stefan Krebs (tbc) and Sebastian Giessmann (tbc)
13.00

End of the conference