The Long Shadow of the 80s: Rebranding Exclusion for a New Generation

80s Cool?! is an ongoing critical artwork series that examines how nostalgia—particularly nostalgia mediated through design—can function as a powerful mechanism of cultural forgetting. In Installment One, Brett draws on the visual language of 1980s popular culture and early internet aesthetics to stage a confrontation between aesthetic pleasure and historical accountability.

The work employs fluorescent colour palettes, beveled typography, looping animations, and animated titles that reference both commercial graphic design of the 1980s and the legacy of early net.art. These stylistic elements evoke a sense of familiarity and optimism often associated with the decade’s promise of digital progress. The interface appears playful and visually inviting, encouraging viewers to linger in a mode of engagement shaped by recognition and pleasure.

Brett deliberately mobilizes this visual comfort as a critical strategy. Beneath the surface of nostalgic design, 80s Cool?! embeds hyperlinks to a raw archive of historical documents, news reports, and artifacts. These links trace the coordinated promotion of reactionary sexual politics by influential figures who defined the era’s conservative turn, such as Jesse Helms, Jerry Falwell, and Ronald Reagan, alongside earlier architects like Anita Bryant and John Briggs. The project collapses the distance between “retro” aesthetics and the social conditions that accompanied their emergence, exposing the tension between how the 1980s are often remembered and what they materially produced.

The work highlights how contemporary nostalgia acts as a selective filter, demonstrating how iconic design—once used to frame exclusionary rhetoric as moral or patriotic—now serves to sanitize the past. By stripping the 1980s of its political friction, this aesthetic “rebranding” allows modern consumers to enjoy the decade’s visual energy while remaining comfortably detached from the state-sanctioned discrimination that defined the era.

Presented as a web-based project, 80s Cool?! echoes early internet structures while engaging contemporary modes of attention. Rapid navigation and affect-driven consumption are central to the work’s critique. In this context, nostalgia operates as a filtering mechanism: a means through which complex and violent histories risk being reduced to background noise beneath style and spectacle. The work asks viewers to consider how easily harm can be aestheticized, and how quickly critical awareness can be displaced by visual pleasure.

Brett’s use of net.art references situates the project within a longer history of online critique. By leveraging hyperlinks as both formal and conceptual devices, 80s Cool?!makes visible the infrastructures through which information circulates—and through which histories are either accessed or ignored. Clicking becomes an ethical act: a choice to move beyond surface appeal and engage with the fragmented and contested conditions that nostalgia often obscures.

The project speaks directly to the present moment, examining how exclusionary rhetoric is often rebranded within contemporary politics. It insists on historical clarity, arguing that these renewed pressures cannot be fully understood without attention to how fear was manufactured and harm aestheticized in earlier decades. Brett positions nostalgia not as a benign cultural impulse, but as a potent force that shapes memory, perception, and responsibility.

Ultimately, 80s Cool?! challenges viewers to reconsider what it means for the past to be “cool.” It asks how design participates in the construction of collective memory, and what is lost when aesthetics are detached from their social and political contexts. In doing so, the work underscores a central claim: nostalgia may be visually seductive, but it is never neutral.

T.E. Watson