Tech-tonic shifts

Nostalgia for old tech

Both Lam Pok-yin's multi-channel video installation, An Increasingly Difficult and Futile Task (2021), and Wong Ping's video film, Dear, Can I Give You a Hand? (2018), look back with love and longing on the old technologies that have fallen by the wayside as we race to develop and adapt to newer gizmos. Lam puts a series of outdated mobile phones under bell jars — awarding them the dignity akin to precious objects in a museum collection. The phones continuously ask viewers to verify if they are human — the irony being that the footages, playing on a loop, is sourced from an American e-commerce company that employs humans to conduct the data identification and processing, as their wages cost less than machines.