[NOTE: Visit the website for this event for archives from previous symposia in the series. –Matthew]

Call for Papers:

Retrofuturism 4.0: Materiality
Online Symposium
August 27-28, 2026
https://musicalretrofuturism.wordpress.com/

Deadline for submission of abstracts: July 20, 2026

Since 2022, we have held a series of online symposia addressing ‘retrofuturism’, a term we use to denote the ways in which internet aesthetics invoke visions of utopia and nostalgia. From vaporwave and hauntology to chiptune and frutiger aero, music, sound and audiovisual media have been central to these present-day entanglements of past and future possibility. Our past symposia have looked at microgenres, nostalgia, and anemoia. For our fourth symposium, held in association with the Nostagain Network, we turn to the issue of materiality.

As a term primarily associated with internet culture, retrofuturism’s questions of materiality often recede into the background. Although retrofuturism has come to the fore through digital media, the nostalgia that structures this aesthetic is inherently rooted in material experience. As Svetlana Boym (2001) argued, nostalgic imaginaries are inherently social in that they bind people to places and things. In the case of retrofuturism, affect coheres around a tangle of iconic material objects, heirlooms, embodied experiences, and communities of practice (microgenres). In the process, these aesthetics trouble established boundaries between online/offline, digital and analogue.

To re-center materiality, we ask:

• Which material objects are adopted for retrofuturist aesthetics? What affective responses do they evoke, and why?
• What are the platforms, media, and communication processes through which retrofuturist ideas are disseminated?
• What forms of artistic media are used to create retrofuturist music, games, films and videos? What is the role of intermedia art in retrofuturism?
• How does retrofuturism change the way we interpret representations of the future imaginary in our recent past?
• How does retrofuturist media sustain these future imaginaries in the present, project them to the future, and generate new versions of ‘old’ futurity?

We are interested in papers on topics including but not limited to:

Media archaeology

• Digital heirlooms
• Unconventional archives
• Forgotten, lost, obsolete technology in media
• Remediation

Materiality

• Tactility and haptic experience
• Embodied practices and performances
• Relics, artifacts
• Intermedia, multimedia practices

Genre

• Development of style/aesthetics
• Platform studies
• Synthesizer organology

Nostalgic embodiment

• Nostalgia, Retrotopia, Hauntology, Heterotopia
• (Transition between) Online and offline scenes
• Ritualized engagement
• Fan communities and communities of practice
• Affect

We welcome proposals for individual papers (20 minutes, with 10 minutes for questions after each paper). Please submit an abstract (c.200 words) via THIS LINK by 20/07/2026.

We aim to communicate the programme decisions by 31/07/2026. If you require more information, please email the organizers, Michiel Kamp (m.kamp1 [at] uu.nl) and Ross Cole (r.cole [at] leeds.ac.uk) or musicalretrofuturism [at] gmail.com.

ORGANIZATION

Organizers are professors Ross Cole (University of Leeds), Michiel Kamp (Utrecht University), and co-organized by the Nostagain Network (Concordia University).