RADAR 2 Publication Date: September, 2002 The New Improved Nostalgia When my MICA-student neighbors eschew Aphex Twin in favor of Poco (or even Bread!), when I see silent films and a tale extolling the virtues of '60's elevator music at the Maryland Film Fest, or hear young fogies at CHELA rediscovering, not real Appalachian Music, but sanitized versions cooked up by the likes of John Jacob Niles in the 1950s—it piques my interest. The nearly universal ho-hum reactions to this year's Whitney Biennial and the Euro tech-art showcase Documenta only adds to a sense that something's up: can the modern be finally running out of "posts?" Forget (if you can) "nostalgia as marketing tool"—we may be seeing the real thing. Those who'll eventually carry us forward seem to be even more actively mulling, tasting, rejecting, trying things of the past against their own internal furniture for good fit. Will they dismay us by prizing gold we'd relegated to fools? Will they treat us to a new Renaissance, or march into the future with moist thumbs hovering near their mouths? Perhaps, facing polluted futures, they see "the digital revolution"for what it is—loss in the name of portability, or know that though you can learn to live with it, synthetic is still irreducibly synthetic. Perhaps they've figured out—a realization more Kafka-esque than simple—that there can now be no such thing as "posthuman."So, once again, we look back. David Crandall