Those artists who work with obsolete technologies, from old video games to the cathode ray tube

Art has always had an ambivalent relationship with technology. On the one hand, it has embraced it as a tool to expand its language; on the other, it has questioned it, problematizing its effects on our living and thinking. In this dialectic, some contemporary artists have chosen to work with obsolete technologies, objects and systems that the world has now relegated to the past, to construct a critical narrative about temporality, memory and our relationship with progress. Among them, the works of Cory Arcangel and Penelope Umbrico offer profound insights into what it means today to create art with what is “old.”

There is something irresistibly poetic about obsolete technology. Every VHS, floppy disk or old software carries with it a load of memory, a fragment of the past that is not only technical but also emotional and cultural. Obsolescence, in this context, is not an end but a starting point. It is a lens through which to view the world, a means to interrogate the future, and a way to remind ourselves that what we consider innovation today will inevitably be forgotten tomorrow.

U.S.-based Cory Arcangel (Buffalo, 1978) has built much of his career around a dialogue with obsolete technology, particularly that associated with the pop culture of the 1980s and 1990s. His work, often ironic and conceptual, reveals the contradictions of our obsession with technological progress. In works such as Super Mario Clouds (2002), Arcangel manipulates a cartridge from the Nintendo game Super Mario Bros, eliminating everything but the sky and flowing clouds. The result is a minimalist digital landscape, a fragment that is freed from the original function of the software to become pure aesthetics. But behind the apparent simplicity lies a deep reflection: Arcangel’s artificial sky, with its pixelated aesthetic, invites us to contemplate the beauty of a time when technology was less sophisticated but more tangible, and perhaps more human.

With its use of “glitch” and digital manipulations, Arcangel celebrates error as an aesthetic and as a critique of technological perfectionism. As technology ages, it reveals itself to be fallible, imperfect, but in that very fact it becomes material for the imagination. Glitch, often seen as flaw, becomes instead the language of art, a way to transform technological ruin into poetry.

If Arcangel explores glitch and obsolescence as aesthetics of the fragment, his countrywoman Penelope Umbrico (Philadelphia, 1957) moves into different but equally fascinating territory: that of visual overproduction and technological redundancy. In her Sunset Portraits series, Umbrico collects thousands of images of sunsets downloaded from Flickr and other sharing sites, reworking them to create photographic compositions that reflect both the natural beauty of the phenomenon and the alienation of its digital hyper-portrayal. But what makes his work deeply connected to obsolete technology is the way he refocuses our attention on objects and devices that have lost their technological status.

In other works, Umbrico works with discontinued television screens, cathode ray tube monitors and other outdated devices, turning them into surfaces for reflection on consumption and technological abandonment. Through repetition and accumulation, he emphasizes not only the obsolescence of objects but also that of meanings: what remains of an image or object when its original function vanishes?

To work with obsolete technology is, after all, to question the very concept of progress. If every innovation brings with it a temporal acceleration, relegating to the past what came before, then obsolescence is its inevitable counterpart. Arcangel and Umbrico, each in their own way, invite us to look at this dialectic not as a failure but as an opportunity.

Their works reveal how art can reappropriate the technological past to create new spaces of imagination: Arcangel recycles code and technological media, finding beauty in their limitations and decay; Umbrico, on the other hand, uses redundancy to reveal the visual saturation of our time, transforming what is outdated into something new.

Reflecting on obsolete technology opens up profound questions that lead us to reconsider our relationship with time, progress, and collective memory. What drives us to idolize the new and relegate the old to the realm of the useless?

Perhaps it is a matter of cultural identity: in an ever-faster-paced world, the new becomes a symbol of vitality, while the obsolete reminds us of our finiteness and aging. Yet, art that feeds on what has been discarded suggests to us that what is outdated is never really lost, but continues to live on in different and unexpected ways. Is obsolescence really a failure or can it be seen as an evolution?

If what is technologically obsolete stops being functional, it does not necessarily lose its symbolic or cultural value. On the contrary, its disuse transforms it into an object of contemplation, a fragment of history capable of telling the story of the world in which it was born. In this light, the work of artists such as Arcangel and Umbrico becomes an exercise in contemporary archaeology, where art does not merely document the past but revives it, making it resonate in the present. This reflection confronts us with a question: what role does the artist play in an ever-accelerating technological world? Is not the artist the one who, by slowing down the pace, creates a space for reflection and meaning?

If technology drives us to consume images and experiences at ever-increasing speeds, art that focuses on obsolescence acts as a pause, an invitation to look carefully at what we have left behind. This gesture is not only a critique of unbridled progress but a proposal for a different way of living and thinking, where value is determined not by novelty but by depth of experience.

Finally, art that uses obsolete technology asks us a fundamental question: how can we reconcile our thirst for innovation with the need for roots, memory, and continuity? This dialogue between past and present is not just an aesthetic exercise, but an exploration of what makes us human. Perhaps, in this dialogue with the obsolete, we find not only a critique of modernity, but also an invitation: that of looking beyond the surface of things, discovering that, among the rusty circuits and grainy pixels, lies an image of our own future.

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