"New Media Kills Nostalgia" is the title of a research paper of Klaas Jan Mollema and Willem van Vliet about the effects of new media on the creation of memories and the feeling of nostalgia. The research is part of the graduation procedure of the Master of Media Technology at the University of Leiden.

The "Digital Polaroid Camera" project is part of the research and tries to show the differences between digital and analog photography. With a digital photocamera you can take pictures without limitation and without concequences, while taking a picture with an analog camera costs money, because of the film and the development of the pictures. The project tries to show, that because of the "new media" aspect of digital photography, our behaviour changed.

The Polaroid camera is an icon of its time. The instant gratification you got when taking a picture and being able to have the photo ready within minutes, have triggered new types of photographers.

In recent years photography has become something of the masses. Everybody in the western countries owns at least one digital camera, also counting the mobile phone cameras. Taking pictures was never as easy as it is now, and digital storage makes it easier to store an endless stream of images with almost no costs.

Sharing of images is very easy

Having no original image and making it reproductable without loss of quality takes the value out of the original copy and makes every copy worth the same. Not only physical but also mentally.

People still have the urge to have printed copies of their digital images. This can be seen in the growing market of photobooks for example. Polaroid is developing a portable printer which can print photo's in creditcard format directly from a camera.

People do not think before shooting a picture. They do not even take the time to get rid of the bad quality images, so even if you take nice pictures. They either get lost between the bad ones or they get lost by the sheer quantity of images.

The Polaroid camera was a simple point and click device. The Polaroid paper is not very cheap, creating a treshhold before making a picture. Because pictures all have been thought through the have value. The picture gets developed instantly, creating a real original picture that can't be reproduced without loss of quality.

Polaroid pictures have a lot of whitespace around them. This gives the photographer the space for tags and other writings to remember the context of an image. Digital images have EXIF information but you need a computer and software that can write EXIF information to be able to tag your photo. This makes it much harder to descibe the context of a photo, so it is hardly done. This means we not only have more photographs, but they are also greatly untagged, thus lacking triggers for your memory to respond. More about triggers of memory and nostalgia can be read ...

"New media" can be used as an umbrella term to refer to a number of various concepts, used by designers to organize data and structure user's experience. Interfaces of "new media" objects are being shaped by three cultural traditions: print, cinema and human-computer interface. Lev Manovich, in his book "The Language of New Media" calls the new media revolution, the shift of all of our culture to computer-mediated forms of production, distribution and communication. New media represents a convergence of two separate historical trajectories: computing and media technologies.

The definition of "New Media" as proposed by Lev Manovich is very useful to look at photography. Photography itself is a media technology from early 1800 and developed itself rapidly over the years without the aid of specific computer technology. The first shift to digital technology was in 1981 when the Sony Mavica was introduced. This camera used a magnetic tape to store images and a tv had to be used to view the pictures. The digital images could also been transferred through telephone lines, making it possible to have instant footage of events. The 1984 olympics reporters and the US military were a few of the early adopters of this technology.

In 1990 the first real digital camera was introduced. The Dycam Model 1 was the first camera that did not only store the image on a digital medium, but could also code the image in standard JPEG, making the images readable when transported to the computer without processing afterwards.

Around the year 2000 the digital camera sales went up drastically. The camera's had reached a mature level and could compete with analog camera's offering everything an analog equivalent could offer in quality and the benefits of the digital camera. These benefits are for example:

• No costs for taking pictures
• Direct feedback through the build-in screen
• Copy digital photo's without loosing quality
• Ability to print your photo'sat home on your own (photo) printer
• Allmost limitless storing option of pictures because of the big memory space on memory cards
• Smaller camera's possible because of the lack of film
• More functions available, like shooting movies or digital effects
• Presentation of photo's on various media

The introduction of computer technology in photography meant that analog pictures had to be formalized. Digital photographs are structured and formalized in mathematic formats like JPEG, GIF and RAW and can be transformed to either of the formats. This makes photos numerical representable, transcodable and automatical processable. Lev Manovich states the principles of new media consists out of five general principles. Numerical representation, Automation and Transcoding are three of them.

Digital photography does not only belong to professionals but is very mainstream. Because of cheap and small parts needed to build a camera, other devices than photocamera's started to embed a photofunction. Taking pictures became a function for handheld devices like mobile phones, pda's and video camera's. The photo camera itself also became more than a machine to take pictures. Most camera's on market today have a video and sound recording option embedded and some of them even have games installed. This shift made photography even more accesable, but the photo quality of the photo enabled devices where a far cry to the the dedicated photo devices. This was a huge shift in howwe thought about photography. We went from quality oriented to quantity oriented photography. "It does not matter if the picture is taken professionally, just take it and make a couple more, just to be sure!"

The introduction of computer technology in photography also meant photo's do not by default have to exist in the material world. The process from taking pictures to watching them can be done completely digital. The thrill you could have, waiting for your photo's to develop, is replaced by instant gratification. There is no chemical process between making the picture and viewing it. There is no unexpected result and you can be sure the picture you took was wrong or right. You would expect the quality of pictures would get better, because of the new possibilities, but this seems not to be true.

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In the book "The language of new media" of Lev Manovich, the principles of new media consists out of five general principles: Numerical representation, modularity, Automation, Variability and Transcoding. Using these principles you can decide if media is 'new' or not. We have tested them against digital photography and state that in our context, digital photography is new media. Is dit essentieel? This is why: Digital photographs are structured and formalized in mathematic formats like JPEG, GIF and RAW and can be transformed to either of the formats. This makes photos numerical representable. The creation, modification, duplification and identification can be done automatically. Digital photos can be used on different platforms like the computer, the handheld or on digital photo lists, and in different media like websites, videos and collages. These characteristics make digital photography part of new

The setup consists out of a wireless digital camera, a computer and a photo printer. The wireless digital camera is a Nikon P2 which has a wireless module build in and can send images to a computer in stead of saving the image on the camera itself. Finding a wireless camera wasn't easy, because they only were popular for short period in the first half of 2006. The camera's where too expensive and people didn't need the wireless functionality so they stopped making them.

The computer contains a piece of software which takes care of the choice between delete or print. When Delete is pressed within 60 seconds or when no action is taken, the picture will be deleted for ever, else the picture will be printed with the photo printer and will also be deleted, so the printed picture is the only copy remaining, thus becomes the original.

The project has never been displayed until this day, so no reactions have been gathered. Please check back in the future to check for results.

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