In Star Wars: Equation (3.5” Black), Arlo Sinclair reimagines the most iconic of sci-fi sagas through the fragile medium of a floppy disk, fusing pop-cultural myth with the absurdities of technological obsolescence. The hand-painted disk features a distressed label reading: “Luke, use the Mass × Acceleration!”—a tongue-in-cheek parody of Obi-Wan’s famous line, grounding the mystical “Force” in the rational physics of Newton’s second law.

The use of the floppy disk as canvas is crucial to Sinclair’s irony. Once a vessel of innovation and imagination, the 3.5” disk now appears comically inadequate for containing a galaxy far, far away. Its scratches, worn edges, and faux patina emphasize the ephemerality of storage media, even as they become enduring fossils of digital history. By framing such a grand narrative within a now-defunct technology, Sinclair collapses epic myth and banal memory, elevating the ordinary into the iconic.

The parody’s humor masks a deeper critique: just as Star Wars has been endlessly remixed, reinterpreted, and commodified, so too have the technologies that once carried our digital lives. By casting physics as the “real” Force, Sinclair highlights the tension between imagination and pragmatism, spectacle and infrastructure, belief and materiality.

Signed and individually finished, Star Wars: Equation sits comfortably within Sinclair’s broader practice of resurrecting obsolete media as satirical monuments. Like Warhol’s soup cans or Lichtenstein’s comic frames, the work repurposes mass culture with Pop-inflected wit, transforming nostalgia into both homage and critique.