How To Be Obsolete looks at how capitalist cyberspace has colonized our sense of what the present is and what the future could be. Using the format of a Windows 95 operating system, it engages with a sense of technological nostalgia to explore and question whether contemporary smartphones and tablets have produced a different type of presence, one that is simultaneously ultra-connected yet even more disembodied. The past thirty years have seen the rise and fall of many technologies. How to be obsolete embraces this spectrum of digitality and sides with the discarded, seemingly forgotten elements of information representation. It raises the question of what obsolescence means in a culture obsessed with production and consumption. As humans increasingly become replaced by machines, could an embrace of the obsolete be a rejection of the dominant extractivist cultural narratives? How To Be Obsolete can be considered a thought experiment aimed at disrupting an infinite growth paradigm, an attempt to discover new ways of intimacy and rest beyond the fetishization of the latest upgrade within a broken system.
The scene begins as a re-creation of the Windows 95 desktop. After a text file is opened and read, the viewer enters the desktop background image. The original photo, a rolling California hillside, is officially titled "Bliss" by Microsoft. Now a vineyard, the iconic hill came within four miles of the Nuns Fire in 2017. The viewer navigates "Bliss" by opening a series of text files. The soundtrack typifies a WebCore aesthetic, a music genre defined by elements of the 1990s and early 2000s internet culture. The era spans roughly from the introduction of Windows 95 in 1995 to the introduction of Windows Vista in 2007. The aesthetic is inspired by system and application sounds, pixelized graphics, and web design of the 1995–2005 era. How To Be Obsolete remixes the original Windows 95 startup sound composed by Brian Eno and the song "Good Times" by Edie Brickell, which shipped on the Windows 95 installation CD-ROM.
How To Be Obsolete premiered at the 2022 SUPERNOVA Digital Animation Festival hosted by Denver Digerati. In 2024, it was included in the Underground Art and Design exhibition "Matrix of the Not-Yet."
