How to look at "The City of the Peaceful Atom" from the Perspective of the Social Network? Or: In Search of Lost Modernity

Abstract

On content, this article combines visual studies and digital ethnography of vision in order to investigate the local ways of seeing practiced by the participants of the Retro Obninsk network community when looking at old photos of the "city of the peaceful atom”. In terms of epistemology, the article captures the digital shifts in the work of a social researcher when using qualitative approaches: the need for joint distributed work, accumulation and analysis of enlarged data, saturation of qualitative research with data, increased sensitivity to the analytical use of zoom and scaling, interest in patterns, etc. The text consists of three parts. The first part describes an experimental design of a qualitative research training aimed at discovering the joint discursive and visual production of retro optics for Obninsk, emphasizing the importance of infrastructure for the organization of distributed digital research and problematizing the qualitative work with patterns. In the second part - centered around the logic of "zooming out” - Retro Obninsk is characterized by its specificity against the background of other retro-cities existing on the VKontakte platform, as an open hyperspectacular community. In the third part - centered around the logic of "zooming in” - the article explicates the optical patterns of Retro Obninsk from the collected data. These patterns include: bringing the lower boundary of the "retro” into chronological correspondence with the end of the Soviet period and searching for its visible markers; a preference for authentic "seeing something as something” over "seeing in comparison”, eliminating the discovery and discussion of affinity in the architecture of Soviet nuclear cities; a detailing view that protects an observer against immersion in the local nuclear history; the technological appropriation of "retro” and its adaptation to actual visual standards; a fascination with panorama-perspectives and a longing for the (nuclear) modernity embodied in the urban form.