No discussion of nostalgia can do without taking into account the media—the topic of the fourth panel. KATHARINA NIEMEYER, who recently edited a collection of essays on Media and Nostalgia, gave a paper on “Amateur Nostalgia on the Web: Remixing Vintage Media Technologies and Content”. Taking her cue from the carousel scene from the TV series Mad Men she discussed various forms and uses of nostalgia on the web, which she saw less driven by an interest in the past than by the creative anticipation of the future.

In the second paper, “Vilne Nostalgia in New York: Visual Memories of the Lithuanian Jews after the Shoah”, GINTARE MALINAUSKAITE presented a project to recreate the Jewish life in Vilne before the Holocaust through photographs and a documentary film. As a return home is impossible, the visual memories of it became nothing less than a “Vilne of the mind”. Far from sentimentalising a vanished past, the project turned the photographs into evidence of destruction and death.