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Obsolete appliances of the past — like rotary telephones and hand-crank electric generators — have largely disappeared from everyday life, and may now seem dated and unremarkable for our time. But in “Technostalgia,” an exhibition on view at the Museum of American Heritage, these technologies are given new life as whimsical kinetic sculptures that viewers can touch and “use” directly.
They’re all made by Nemo Gould, an assemblage artist who welds, sands, cuts and melds together found materials to form a composite whole.
“Nemo is an artist, but he’s also a collector and a tinkerer, an inventor and an engineer,” said Lauren Adams, the Museum of American Heritage’s executive director. “His work just encapsulates the imagination that is inherent in innovation.”
Gould works with all kinds of salvaged appliances. It’s what made his work a natural fit for the museum, which started from the private collection of Frank Livermore, a Menlo Park accountant who loved to collect antique mechanical and electrical devices. The collection was then built up by others who also collected and “hoarded” such appliances.
“Nemo’s pieces are artistic renderings of the very impulses and preoccupations that started this museum,” Adams said.
But his sculptures are always whimsical, not intended for practical use. In a similar way, while the exhibition engages with practical themes of technology, progress, and memory, the sculptures aren’t all serious and bleak.
“I take ‘silly’ very seriously,” Gould said, a principle also reflected in the way that his sculptures, many of which have faces and happy facial expressions, personify the human form in a friendly, relatable way.
“Growing up, I had this dream that one day our technology would resemble us, like the fantasy of the world to come, involving these humanoid robots,” Gould said. “I liked that naive view, before it had become practical in any sense, when technology was very much just up to the imagination.”
One such example is his sculpture of a black metal robot, with a rectangular jaw that closes and opens mechanically, and gears inside its transparent box-shaped torso continuously turning.
Another kinetic sculpture resembles a mechanical head, with colorful spiraling wires and LED lights visible inside its transparent bulb-like dome. Viewers can turn a hand crank to make the lights flicker, as if the robot were deep in thought.
Elsewhere, Gould transformed an upside-down composite of a guitar and violin into a face, with round gauges serving as eyes. Rotating a dial causes the instrumental-shaped head to bob rhythmically back-and-forth.
“My palette is a warehouse full of parts, and I’ll draw objects until some composition suggests itself,” he said. “Every piece has its own story and suggestions, and will often trigger memories for the people who recognize those parts. It’s like a cheat code for vibe, and I love that about it.”
But Gould never solely depends on the history or recognizability of the object to make a piece interesting. He always transforms the original object in some way, such as making changes to the object’s structure or combining two or more objects together to make a composite.
“In my early years I had a real hang-up about that. I wanted to make sure that my sculpture was actually mine and not that of the original craftsman,” Gould said. “I wanted to feel like I ‘deserved’ to use these things, so that I could then take ownership of them without feeling like a fraud. It’s really motivated me to become a better craftsman.”
Through his craftsmanship, Gould transforms the original objects so extensively that they’re often not fully recognizable anymore.
“What I hope happens is that people see the work, don’t recognize all the parts, but still recognize the ‘rightness’ of the final thing,” he said. “They recognize the completeness: how well-assembled, durable and functional it seems.”
It’s what the exhibition’s title, “Technostalgia,” suggests — evoking the ethos of an older past, through pieces that act as nostalgic triggers. It comes at a time when people are reminiscing about, even romanticizing, the past.
“The AI moment is pushing a lot of us into ‘Oh, remember just last year?’” Gould said. “Back when our feeds weren’t full of AI-generated nonsense confusing us as to what’s even real anymore. It’s funny that the scale has shifted so dramatically, so quickly, so recently.”
The sculptures may elicit a deep sense of recognition and nostalgia for older viewers who’ve grown up with those very technologies, but they can be equally compelling for young viewers who may be seeing older appliances for their first time.
“Nostalgia as a term usually refers to many decades in the past,” Gould said. “But if you look back on an era in which you didn’t live, using a rosy frosted lens, you may tell yourself that life used to be so much better, when you don’t actually know because you weren’t there.”
Gould doesn’t require that the viewer possesses specific memories of older technologies. The physical sensations of touching and using the sculptures alone can create a new kind of attachment that’s rooted more in the more tactile qualities — touch, movement, and even sound — of the objects.
In that way, Gould is less concerned with faithfully reconstructing the past, by being as literally accurate to history as possible. Rather, “Technostalgia” evokes the more sensory, tactile relationships that people once had with technology.
“I don’t care about your specific nostalgic trigger,” he said. “It’s these little moments of connection to the physical world — that were just a completely taken for granted foundation for daily life — that now, for the most part, are niche experiences that people don’t have any access to.”
“Technostalgia” is on view through Sept 27, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Friday-Sunday, at the Museum of American Heritage, 351 Homer Avenue, Palo Alto. moah.org/current-exhibits.
