Before the second half of the 19th century, Nostalgia did not exist. The term was used to describe a peculiar psychological condition that spread among soldiers away from home. Italian artist Riccardo Benassi coined the term morestalgia accordingly, so to update its meaning to the time of the internet. Affections, migrations and familiarity, phenomenology of contemporary interfaces, psychoanalysis, history and psychology—everything contributes to defining this type of “augmented nostalgia”, a hypermodern feeling that triggers a sort of pain similar to envy, as a sense of lack that becomes loss.

Saturated with memories from immersive web browsing, morestalgic beings want a life experience that was once promised to them, but never really fulfilled. This artist book poses questions underlying our contemporaneity, such as: how do social networks and online communities contribute to the unification and normalization of different subjective pasts? Can digital empathy become a useful tool to reshape the future, rather than proposing an alliance around a supposedly shared past? In other words, how can we today transform this subjective sense of belonging into a collective becoming?