Hearing the ring of a clanging bell from a phone is perhaps an unremarkable sound to us today. But what is unusual, or perhaps even perverse, is when the sound comes from a cellphone. In addition to its unusual ringtone, this “cellphone” looks like none other.
Sparkfun Electronics’s “Port-O-Rotary,” is made from a derelict mid-century rotary desk phone; its original wiring has been removed and replaced with contemporary cellular technology, including a SIM card, miniature antenna, and lithium battery. Though weighing close to two pounds and obviously bulky, it can be carried and used as a cellphone.
What are we to make of such fetishization of the old and seemingly impractical? Of course the Port-O-Rotary is part of a consistent thread in contemporary design, one of housing new technologies in just slightly older yet already obsolete forms. Mashups of contemporary technology and retro packaging suggest how the past itself is “repurposed” for the present.
Certainly, the Port-O-Rotary is intended to amuse--as its advertising states: “The looks from family, friends, and even bartenders as the Portable Rotary Phone rings for the first time have given us endless amounts of entertainment.”[i] Beyond the mere sight gag, however, the Port-O-Rotary is part of a growing number of repurposed objects that constitute a new type of memorial in the information age.
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| MacAquarium |
Our addiction to consumer technologies that are ever more powerful, stylish, or high performing speeds the course of obsolescence; unlike Dodge’s tail finned sedans and Sears coldspot refrigerators, consumer products that we normally associate with mid-century obsolescence, the junked cellphones, computers, and media players of today are rubbish from the information society. And they are now being repurposed.
Broadly speaking, “repurposing” means to change uses, but also comes to suggest new type of recycling. Reconfiguring outdated Macs, for instance, creators of the MacAquarium repurpose old Macs by replacing their interiors with custom tanks that hold live fish. The MacAquarium riffs on the brief popularity of tropical fish screensavers in the early 1990s. Aquarium screensavers rode the wave of expanded memory and increased graphics capabilities, ostensibly preventing pixels from burning into screens but also filling offices and homes with colorful displays of electronically generated tropical fish.
While often amusing, retro refits today go one step further, bring technology’s past into the present even more concisely by placing updated technologies into older housings. These include the repurposing of obsolete computers, like the Mac SE 30 of 1989, whose innards are removed and replaced with motherboards, Ethernet, modems and all the devices commonly built into a new computer circa 2007. Another retro refit, the RetroPod, houses a contemporary mp3 player in the bright yellow plastic shell of the popular SONY Sports Walkman from the 1980s.
These items, and others like them, are the leading edge of an emerging approach to how we see the recent past in the present. Most of us, of course, aren’t willing to tote the bulky Port-O-Rotary or even the Retro Phone Handset, a top selling desk phone handset now equipped with Bluetooth technology. But the distinctively tinny “old style” rotary ringer is also available as a purchased ring tone in both European and American tones and has become part of today’s electronic soundscape.
Broadly speaking, “repurposing” means to change uses, but also comes to suggest new type of recycling. Reconfiguring outdated Macs, for instance, creators of the MacAquarium repurpose old Macs by replacing their interiors with custom tanks that hold live fish. The MacAquarium riffs on the brief popularity of tropical fish screensavers in the early 1990s. Aquarium screensavers rode the wave of expanded memory and increased graphics capabilities, ostensibly preventing pixels from burning into screens but also filling offices and homes with colorful displays of electronically generated tropical fish.
While often amusing, retro refits today go one step further, bring technology’s past into the present even more concisely by placing updated technologies into older housings. These include the repurposing of obsolete computers, like the Mac SE 30 of 1989, whose innards are removed and replaced with motherboards, Ethernet, modems and all the devices commonly built into a new computer circa 2007. Another retro refit, the RetroPod, houses a contemporary mp3 player in the bright yellow plastic shell of the popular SONY Sports Walkman from the 1980s.
These items, and others like them, are the leading edge of an emerging approach to how we see the recent past in the present. Most of us, of course, aren’t willing to tote the bulky Port-O-Rotary or even the Retro Phone Handset, a top selling desk phone handset now equipped with Bluetooth technology. But the distinctively tinny “old style” rotary ringer is also available as a purchased ring tone in both European and American tones and has become part of today’s electronic soundscape.
Bringing the information age’s past into the present, this phenomenon includes a host of music players, for instance CD systems fashioned like 50s jukeboxes or 80s boom boxes, Depression era radio cabinets rewired to play Webradio, and antique phonographs refitted as mp3 players. Some, like the Port-O-Rotary and MacQuarium, repurpose original objects; others like the Retro Phone Handset, which uses 70 year old phone moulds to manufacture new light weight casings, are closely modeled on older forms.
And then there are objects like the Speck Tone Retro, a portable iPod speaker system, simply emulate older designs. This speaker system echoes two design icons—Apple’s iPod and a generation of high-fidelity audio systems from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. They were inspired by the highly-acclaimed designs for Braun like the SK-4 “Phono super” record player. The Speck Tone Retro includes elements like a high gloss finish, control knobs, and compact, boxy shape (though dropping its grill speakers for the more conventional carpet covered ones). But the Speck Tone Retro also highlights the earlier player’s obsolescence, including an option for the speakers to play music in stereo or mono as well as a “retro” playback option that adds the hiss, pop, and noise of yesteryear’s record player systems.
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| Portable Rotary Phone |
With their self identified names, the Speck Tone Retro or Retro Phone beg to be examined within the rubric of retro. Our current obsession with this sensibility represents a pronounced undercurrent in even more commonly accepted forms, such as recent automotive designs like Chrysler’s PT Cruiser in the US or BMW’s Mini Cooper. A way of recycling history that emerged in the late twentieth century, retro casts a hesitant glance backwards to older but still Modern periods, looking partly nostalgically and partly ironically at the recent past. Paula Scher’s well known ad for Swatch from the early 1980s, for instance, exemplifies a retro sensibility in the way it recalls Herbert Matter’s 1934 Swiss travel poster. Its retro historicism remakes this modernist icon by replacing “Schweiz” with “Swatch” and adding a model’s hand and wrist, complete with multiple Swatch watches. By putting the icons and symbols of modernity in quotation marks, retro represents an unsentimental form of nostalgia.
[i] Portable Rotary Phone--User Manual, v1.1 (SparkFun Electronics, 9-14-2005) p. 5. http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=287 accessed August 26, 2007.
