The readings for this week made me think of a particularly famous rehabilitation of trash: the unearthing, auctioning, and formal display of ET cartridges (made for the Atari 2600 and buried, en masse, in a landfill in New Mexico) in 2013.
First, an article contemporaneous with the burial of parts and cartridges (paywalled):
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/28/business/atari-parts-are-dumped.html
Second, some contemporaneous reporting of the excavation and sale:
https://money.cnn.com/2015/09/01/technology/atari-et/
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/881-e-t-cartridges-buried-in-new-mexico-desert-sell-for-107930-15/
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/unearthed-e-t-atari-games-sell-for-108000-at-auction-46248/
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/atari-games-buried-in-landfill-net-37k-on-ebay-1.2837083
Third, Smithsonian’s take on their copy of the game:
https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/landfill-smithsonian-collections-et-extra-terrestrial-atari-2600-game
Julian Stallabrass, in “Trash” states “to inquire about rubbish is to ask what happens to commodities when they cease to be commodities, but which for a time retain their form as objects” (408) and “abandoned objects have crossed a great divide from which they can never return” (416). This divide, for Stallabrass, stretches between the object as commodity and “qualities of the thing itself” which “begin to appear in sharp relief” as an entanglement of the relationships “of a more poetic and intrinsic interest” (416).
What happens, then when the object, in this case the Atari ET cartridge regains commodity value through excavation? To put it another way, ET demonstrates that shovelware can regain its commodity value, in particular circumstances, through a process of shoveling.
What are the circumstances that lead to this particular rehabilitation of commodity value? Nostalgia? If so what kind?
The game, though, is still bad (you can check for yourself here: http://2600online.com/et.php )
Works Cited
Stallabrass, Julian.
“Trash.” The Object Reader, edited by Fiona Vandlin and Rainford Guins,
Routledge, 2009, pp. 406–424.
Interesting! This reminds me of electronic waste dumping grounds such as Agbogbloshie in Ghana. It makes me think of some of the earlier course readings, such as the Gomez-Pena piece that interrogated the framing of the digital as a semi-utopian space, particularly when it comes to oppressed groups.
ReplyDeleteAlso makes me think of how Black and Latinx communities are usually disproportionately affected by such waste in the U.S.
This makes me wonder about how trash and privilege can operate together with rehabilitated technologies. Specifically, I am thinking about how people (individual buyers), groups (nostalgic gamers), and institutions (like the Smithsonian), construct their curations of nostalgic objects off of the backs of minoritized groups and communities.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the gap, for example, between the buyers of ET cartridges and the workers that are exhuming them? How does this gap shape, for example, the commodity function of these games/objects/materials and their lasting effects?