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PN 190
“Twin Peaks Lives on. In Our Minds. As a Thought, a Mood, a Feeling”. The Process of Nostalgizing Within the Online Community
“Welcome to Twin Peaks”
G. Sapio
1
1
University Paris 2, Information and Communication, Paris, France
The website“Welcome to Twin Peaks”was launched on January 20
th
2011, in order to gather the fan community of David Lynch’s TV drama Twin Peaks and
share all kind of news or stories related to it. Since 2011, this online community (51,201 members) increased also thanks to social networks such as Facebook
(119,606 followers) and Twitter (28,500 followers). In my proposal, I aim at exploring the reasons why people engage in nostalgic remembering about Twin
Peaks through a website and I suggest to analyze this process of nostalgizing not just as a matter of “fan community”. I will argue that “Welcome to Twin
Peaks”allow people to negotiate their individual life experiences by sharing a nostalgic mood about a past they did not necessarily live, but they dreamt of.
In order to study the relation between nostalgia and media, I will analyze the project launched by the website“Welcome to Twin Peaks”consisting in asking
followers to take the cover of their Twin Peaks soundtrack album and try to blend the image into the surroundings of their city. Then, they take a picture
of the spot and share it on the“Welcome toTwin Peaks”Facebook page,Twitter or Instagram, using the hashtag #welcomtotwinpeaks and mentioning their
location (city and country). The way the project is described is noteworthy in relation to the nostalgic practice that we propose to explore: “Twin Peaks is
not only a‘90s television show. It is not just North Bend and Snoqualmie, WA. And it’s not limited to what David Lynch and Mark Frost created. It transcends
all that. Twin Peaks lives on. In our minds. As a thought, a mood, a feeling. And to prove that it is very much alive and out there, we’re inviting fans around
the world to discover Twin Peaks in their own towns and cities”. The community depicts Twin Peaks not only as a TV show but as a place where people yearn
to get back to and the“mood”they talk about is a nostalgic one. According to Niemeyer,“nostalgia would be not only an expression of a feeling, but some‑
thing you do, an act of speech that can potentially turn into a pragmatic creative process”.Thus, the“Welcome toTwin Peaks Project”seems to be an attempt
to act on the fleeting present by performing an idealized past. That being said, the (creative) process of nostalgizing is visible in the website layout (wood
texture), the merchandise (the tape recorder case for iPhone named Diane) and the older aesthetic forms of some media production. I think that this“digital
return”of an analogue aesthetics, also based on the digital reproduction of some objects or textures represents a way to bring the present back to the past
and to compensate some models of offline communities and some past models of experiencing the fiction. Giuseppina Sapio holds a PhD in Cinema Studies
at the University of Paris III (Sorbonne Nouvelle). She teaches at the Pantheon-Assas University, Paris II.
PN 191
The Heritage of Live Popular Music Making in Merthyr Tydfil 1955 to the Present Day: How Do Musical Memories, Mediated Through
Technology, Impact Identity and Nostalgia?
P. Carr
1
1
The University of South Wales, United Kingdom
The relationship of popular music to memory, identity and nostalgia is now well established in popular music studies, with academics such as Schulk‑
ind, Hennis and Rubin (1999) outlining how music, in particular from ones youth, can have strong nostalgic impact – evoking both general and specific
memories of life events. Most importantly, the research of Schulkind et al. found a correlation between more general emotions and memory: suggesting
the more emotion a song produced, the greater the likelihood it has to trigger associated memories. As I have documented in other published materials
(for example Carr 2010, 2013, 2016), the relationship between music and emotion has been long contested from the time of Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904),
with the polysemic nature of music meaning that a song with great emotional significance for one individual, will have little attachment for another, even if
both individuals are from the same generation. Additionally, recent research from the likes of Janata,Tomic and Rakowksi (2007) and Barret, Grimm, Robins,
Janata et al. (2010) have attempted to understand the means through which music can evoke memories and the conditions through which nostalgic re‑
sponses occur.This paper proposes to build upon this research, although from a distinct methodological angle. As opposed to incorporating an ethnographic
approach, where the researcher uses an often-anonymous community as the focus of their research, this project will overtly position the participants as
`prosumers’ (consumers and producers) of a heritage based digital archive, which aims to establish an online collaboration and co-authoring space with
the local community to accommodate and nourish collective musical memories in the town of Merthyr Tydfil, between the years 1955 to the present day.
This multifaceted project, currently in its early stages of development, aims to investigate how memories of engagement with local, national and interna‑
tional popular music activity in the town, facilitates audiences and artists to negotiate their individual and shared identities and emotional responses, while
also attempting to understand issues associated with articulating it. As the digital archive project develops, the community will learn how to engage with
their musical history and locality, in addition to preparing their own digital stories and materials (such as music files, newspaper cuttings, visual footage and
photos). This emphasis on the interrelationship of emotion (including nostalgia) and memory, mediated through technology and musical activities such as
performing, attending concerts and listening to music, is the focus of the project and the paper.