Not sure if this title is the best way to summarize what I'm about to describe but I can't seem to think of a better alternative and saying "traditional vs modern" has implications that don't relate to the subject.
Does anyone else ever get the feeling that you would love to live in a new, revolutionary world? "New" meaning wildly different, changed, reformed in terms of human consciousness. For example, I sometimes get ideas of worlds where sentient beings have moved past the need of identifying with any form of gender. It's hard to describe but when I imagine this world, I imagine it in funky colors with almost a retro pixel art aesthetic. Obviously existence wouldn't ever actually look like this but I feel like the way my brain visualizes this reality reflects how I'd view it as a sort of evolution of human form, the mix of colors probably representing the heaps of possibilities I imagine this new world would offer society.
My weird self-pseudo-psychoanalysis aside, this vision of the world I sometimes get is contrasted with my love of old aesthetics. The best example I can think of is my love for the 4:3 aspect ratio. It is often used in film to specifically target some sort of sensor in your brain that relates to the past, even if you haven't even necessarily interacted with said past. I love retro video game aesthetics and old buildings made from stone in a very specific Mediterranean style. I have a fondness for history in general.
This leads me to my actual issue. How can these two schools of thought coexist inside me? They seem incompatible, at least to me. Can anyone relate to this? If yes, does it bother you or do you believe these concepts are contradictory? An ideal world should theoretically move forward while acknowledging the mistakes and lessons of the past, but I find myself often fetishising the old. It's not necessarily a bad thing but it's giving me trouble when deciding what kind of message I want to send through any art I decide to one day create.
IDK, just sounds like you picked up a lot of formative utopian ideas in approx the 1990s to early 2000s, from or concurrent with media that looked like that, so now you associate the two. Most people will have a similar association for now, it's not like there's a terrible lot of boldly optimistic new pop media flying around in 2023 to impress upon.
Nothing about stone construction or a 4:3 aspect ratio innately reflects a "mistake of the past" anyway. To the extent they're "old" it's because they're not the aesthetic of a couple of fad-driven industries whose marketing revolves around constantly churning out expensive novelties and pitching them as innately, even morally, superior. It's not like there's a cutoff line where in the Before-Time people made Mediterranean houses out of stone but Now they know to make them out of PTFE with a carbon-fiber-print decal. 16:9 isn't an objectively superior new breakthrough in image-proportion technology (really the further you get from square, or I guess properly circular, the worse off you are for optical quality, and if you're trying to replicate the human FOV it's way too narrow) it's just driven by manufacturers' efforts to streamline screen production to a single display style that can gracefully handle a bunch of wildly different film standards from the midcentury. I was originally inclined to dismiss the recent revival of pixel art as just millennials getting nostalgic for the crappy videogames of our childhood but OTOH try telling that to the billion 10-year-olds absolutely obsessed with Minecraft.
These things all were deliberately designed the way they were for specific practical or aesthetic reasons that generally still apply, not just because the primitives who made them didn't know any better, and a lot of any thoughtful new future world is still going to look a lot like them unless/until the assumptions underpinning them change. The future (the real future, not some Silicon Valley elevator pitch for total market dominance through Disruption) is an elaboration on the past, not a discrete and opposed place.
While it's true that everything built in the new is an elaboration on the past and necessarily learns from it, it's also true that in the current cultural moment, there's a sense that only nostalgia is available and originality is punished. Movies and AAA computer games are full of remakes and sequels of remakes. The enclosure of the creative space channels the images available to culture into constrained paths.
Consequently, seeking a completely different basis is where people tend to go when seeking a better sense of the "new." This, paradoxically, often requires going further back into the old to find things to elaborate on which are outside the lens of corporate manufactured nostalgia. But moreover, I think the stylistic movement really counter to nostalgia these days is radical sincerity. In its best form, it's in this embrace of "I love this, share my irrational love of this," the style not only brings millennials and gen z and even the kids of the older zoomers together, and older generations too when they embrace it, but it has been a path for marginalized voices to be heard. It's a counter culture current where corporate calcified cynicism of the ascended Gen X former mall rats and their parents the Boomer former hippies, those who never were allowed to have dreams shaped by those who gave up on dreams, are rejected. And that culture being rejected is a fundamentally white culture, it's based on the White American Dream. With the new sincerity, it's possible to embrace a personal connection to the past which rejects the mythology of whiteness, and it's possible to connect with and celebrate even the ugly truths revealed by the lived experiences of people for whom the White American Dream was never real or even believable.
I think the new sincerity is not only a reaction against the recuperation of punk and the cynicism of the 80s and 90s youth culture, it's also in contrast to the corrosive version of it pushed by the right wing these days: personal responsibility. It allows a synthesis of personal responsibility with relationships and systemic existence. It can be, and again I'm speaking optimistically about the best versions of this style, a synthesis of stoicism and cynicism with their opposites. To come to the conclusions of Diogenes but for the reasons of Kondiaronk. It's also a way to acknowledge that the reasons matter even when the conclusions are similar. It's the "show me your work" of creative styles.
I think the creative commons is the only place the new can grow and flourish. I alluded earlier to how the corporate production of culture has a vise-grip on nostalgia and the gaze pointed at it. The difference in the commons from those enclosures is where you have millions and billions of individuals pursuing their own truths and styles. It's a more level field so that the poor, the non-white, the non-male, the queer, the disabled, etc. have some more chance to be recognized - not as the next profitable product for the enclosure, but for their own unique and beautiful traits.
In short, to obtain access to the new, we need to break down the system trying to keep a lock on it. The enclosures keep trying to recuperate and re-enclose the new from the commons. Something is too successful, and the money starts to ruin it, and you're happy for the favorite creator who made it big but oh no they stop making so much good stuff. The quality degrades or they get burned out by the attention or any number of other ways the mirror tarnishes and starts reflecting only the twisted desires of dead capital. So that system has to be dismantled and the commons protected, to secure the future as a possibility.