SOBER.

Phia Sky presents us with a thinkpiece-cum-manifesto on repurposing obsolete technology, to create forward-thinking art in a meaningful way, beyond the limited parameters of simple nostalgia.

I want to preface this by saying that nostalgia is a dangerous, toxic drug - a vastly overrated emotion. At best, it’s an indulgent crutch for directionless art. If in doubt, slap on a kitschy UwU pastel Windows 98 aesthetic - don your bootcuts and glittery lipgloss to match - and call it a day. We’ve all been guilty of it once or twice, there’s no shame here babes.

But at worst, misplaced nostalgia drives greed and has ultimately birthed some of the most heinous political decisions of modern history. Perhaps a healthier outlook is to study and build upon concepts that have plainly NOT worked historically, and use this to inform tomorrow’s world.

Anyone remember Tomorrow’s World, the tech show on BBC 1? I don’t, as I was 4 when it ended. My mum tells me it was fascinating, especially in the pre-Internet (for most) era. Watching clips on YouTube of the clumsy advent of digital graphic design, CGI and of course good old MIDI, is cute. Delightfully dweeby.

There I go again - reminiscing about a past I barely experienced. No-one is safe from the allure of the obsolete. It does make you wonder; is the progression of technology actually led by unique human volition, or is the dance of the digi-dudes inevitable? Has the dreaded Singularity™ actually always existed, simply as a facet of nature? I’m a musician, not a philosopher, so I don’t have the answer.

One thing we can safely say is that we’re creating an alarming amount of waste on this journey. In 2020, a record 53.6 million metric tonnes of e-waste was produced globally - 7.3kg per capita. Yikes indeed. I know we all desperately needed Nintendo Switches with Animal Crossing at that time, but did you really have to bin the poor old Wii in a fit of rage?

Last year, I explored this in my AI-assisted music project for Brighter Sounds’ DREAMING WITH MACHINES residency, led by incredible sound artist Vicky Clarke AKA Sonamb. My piece, memory mess/mass, explores a future where our wasted digital potential, misused for evil, has led to our extinction. Less a “robots taking over the world’ story, but more “the consequences of putting idiotic tyrants in charge of tech giants”. A fantastical scenario - similarities to real-life occurrences being purely coincidental. Elon stans, thanks for stopping by.

All that outlasts us is our e-waste. Mountains of needless adapters and perfectly functional televisions lay waste to the land and are in turn re-integrated within nature. Birds have created castles in the crap, sanctums in the silicon. Sorry I’m still in PR mode even now.

The irony is not lost on me that, to help produce this, I connected via cloud to someone’s very powerful GPU somewhere in Russia to train the algorithm used to generate my sounds - a carbon-intensive activity. This was via SampleRNN, an AI synthesis project from the Royal Northern College of Music (where else). The visual is also created with Pollinations.ai via text prompt. For me, this was at the tail end of that fun era when AI image generation was still seen as a playground for surrealist experiments, less so the genuine concern of fraud and copyright theft it now is, one year later.

The point of the work was, hopefully without having too much of a Banksy “we live in a society” moment, to warn against needlessly throwing away our gadgets before we actually have to. If something still works, it should be used. Again, I am only human and there are contradictions here too - I’m writing this on my 2021 MacBook Pro, not the 2007 ThinkPad it’s stacked on top of.
How can we repurpose our old toys?

In my opinion, the constraints of these devices are liberating within their own self-contained worlds. You are forced to make choices, deliberate or otherwise, that you simply wouldn’t on modern platforms due to paralysis of options. Would you rather be faced with potential hundreds of hours spent looking for a decent xylophone sound, or just choose the “XYLOPHONE 1” preset on a shitty keyboard and plinkety-plonk the hours away with kitsch glee? Perhaps you would genuinely prefer the former option, but anything that makes the decision-making process less tedious is a plus for me.

This isn’t really nostalgia then, is it? It’s simply a matter of process. Inspiration borne from constraints is an artistic practice as old as art itself. The trope of iconic pop lyrics hastily scribbled on a receipt in the back of a taxi comes to mind. Maybe we should all experiment with this mindset a bit more, if nothing else, just for sheer enjoyment of process?

After all, on that day in 1987 when Adobe Illustrator came along, did everyone wake up and burn their inks and canvases, never ever to look back? In many cases, no. Because great artists, “gifted” or not, are able to pull from the past and future simultaneously. They also love and appreciate the process. Fake artists don’t - and can’t.

So next time you’re in your parents’ attic (maybe grandparents’ by this point), why not dust off that beige box and see if it still works? It’ll be too vulnerable to go online at this point, so don’t even bother. Try to resist immediately selling it on eBay - we need to disrupt the “vintage” market and make old stuff as accessible to everyone as it rightly should be. If it’s not useful to you, consider giving it away.

Who knows, you might even like it - and if you don’t, you can at least say you enjoyed some of that sweet sweet screen time, for once free of relentless advertisement, cookies and paranoia.