Boym Nostalgic for ‘Broken-Tech’

For most people, a broken printer is a nuisance. For Svetlana Boym, it’s inspiration.

Boym, the Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature, showcases her artwork for the first time at Harvard this month. In her experimental multi-media exhibit “Nostalgic Technologies,” on display in the Transit Gallery of CGIS South until April 10, Boym manipulates technology to reevaluate photographs from her travels throughout Europe and America.

Boym’s journey into what she calls “broken-tech art” began when she was printing photographs and her printer began to run out of black ink. When she hit the printer, vibrant versions of the original prints emerged, images she referred to as products of “the computer’s psychedelic unconscious.”

If there is continuity to Boym’s work, she says that it comes from its spontaneity.

“I look for the ordinary marvelous,” she says. “I like accident. I like co-conspiring with an accident. It shows me that I’m open to the world. It is essential to photography.”

Boym subjects her photographs to re-examination in terms of her idea of “broken-tech art.” She explains this concept in one part of her “Off-Modern Manifesto,” also on display as a part of the exhibit.

“To be human means to err,” Boym writes. “Yet, this margin of error is our margin of freedom. It’s a choice beyond the multiple choices programmed for us, an interaction excluded from computerized interactivity. The error is a chance encounter between us and the machines in which we surprise each other. The art of computer erring is neither high tech nor low tech. Rather it’s broken-tech.”

Boym adds, “I work with technology, sometimes in a violating way. I wanted to misuse it, to use it creatively. I find that it’s enabling.”

These ideas of error, accident, and broken-tech art are pervasive throughout the exhibit’s works. A projection loops a 16-second multiburst image of moving water, while distorted pictures of cities are suspended from the ceiling and the walls.

“I’m working through errors, interruptions,” she says. “I like the idea of looking again, of recycling. Every time you print out, you see a different poetic image. Each different mistake frames the photograph differently.”

The exhibition is also a study of movement and space. The titles of most of the pieces involve motion, such as “Leaving Los Angeles,” or “Leaving Saint Petersburg.” At the same time, Boym superimposes images on others, displacing them in location and time. Musing on this pattern, Boym suggests, “Maybe it’s a condition of modern life—an immigrant sensibility.”

Boym says that she prefers her artwork to float in space without constraint or definition. “I don’t like when images are framed. I like the dialectic of transience and framing.”

And like her work, artist, scholar, and writer Boym defies simple classification. “I think that being a serious scholar and being an artist are not opposed,” she says. “I’m not trying to be a professional artist. I like the idea of working against the division of labor, especially in Barthes’s definition—that what we need to do as intellectuals is unlearn. Learning something new and loving the process is important for me so I don’t become in essence, framed.”