Physical traces carry aura that digital content supposedly lacks

Evidence

In a video titled “My Childhood Bedroom,” from November 8, 2021, Emma Chamberlain takes us on a banal tour of forgotten objects from her past in the video’s eponymous childhood bedroom. From a closet, Chamberlain pulls toys, earrings, a Blockbuster Video coupon, a plastic recorder from an elementary school music class, old artwork, and a multitude of other nostalgic personal remnants from her upbringing. Digital culture is often characterized by a tendency toward memorialization through hoarding. However dated various critiques of a “digital dualism” are today, physical objects are still prized in their seeming resistance to the ephemerality of the digital, the persistence of a Benjaminian “aura,” especially through their registration of physical traces. These traces come to signify people, experiences, memories of the past and thus saturate the material with the metaphysical. The trace inscribed is evidence for the continued presence of what is otherwise no longer. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 213

Categorization

• XREF: The Chamberlain video is a concrete case useful for the reader’s four-infrastructure analysis of a real creator — the warehouse of decaying personal objects turned into content. — connects to: Recorded crackle foregrounds the digital era’s loss of tactile materiality and mortal fragility — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 332