Last month I was lucky enough to hear the acclaimed author and critic Laura Mulvey (author of Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema 1975) give a talk in Minto House, Chambers St on ‘Rear Projection: the work of contemporary artist Mark Lewis’. She discussed the film and the photo in the context of ‘the essential medium of time’ and the new preciousness of the technological device as a result of time passing. Memory of film is all that remains as its inscription is disappearing even from avant-garde. Mulvey then went on to discuss rear projection, where the separation between studio and setting come together; ‘the estrangement effect’. Within early film there was a disassociation between two times and two places, a layering effect, montage of scenery and a portable nature eroding the unity. Mulvey then asked the question, “What does it mean to use old technology within a contemporary context?” Walter Benjamin discusses in ... a new life within outdated objects. Obsolescence allows an altered aesthetic when a use value is transferred to a cultural value and becomes a point of reference. In the age of mass consumption when technology is expanding at such a rate that an item is obsolete before it hits the mass market, turning our attention to their second life beyond their original context is a fascinating topic. Technology becomes a sign for times already past. Rear projection is now being employed within contemporary art to different effect. Rather than nostalgia for times past it becomes a signifier for the pace of life itself.