We’re excited to announce that next week (beginning Sept 29th, 2025) we will release a curated drop of Arlo Sinclair’s latest works on our Shop, available for direct purchase. This capsule will spotlight his witty, digitally inspired paintings and sculptural studies of obsolete media—from floppy disks to game cartridges—each work reimagined as a contemporary relic of the screen age. If you collect at the intersection of technology and pop culture, this is one to watch; demand for Sinclair’s work has been rising steadily across galleries and platforms, and these pieces have the immediacy and humor that make them compelling centerpieces in any post-digital collection.
Who is Arlo Sinclair
Arlo Sinclair is a London-based contemporary artist whose practice transforms the material culture of late-20th-century computing into sharp, playful commentary about the present. Born in South Africa and raised in the UK, Sinclair comes to art with a background in programming, a detail that informs both his subject matter and his meticulous, system-minded approach to making. He is a programmer-turned-artist with a deep fascination for the functional beauty of magneto-digital storage and early peripherals. Sinclair treats the artifacts of early computing not as props of nostalgia but as carriers of memory and meaning.
The Art
Sinclair is best known for oil paintings and small-scale painted objects that center around obsolete storage formats—3.5-inch floppies, game cartridges, cassette tapes, failed consoles—rendered with clean edges, luminous surfaces, and delightfully deadpan captions or visual twists. In many works, the media object becomes a stage for cultural critique: corporate logos get re-scripted, tech tropes are gently skewered, and familiar icons are reframed as artifacts of belief systems we scarcely questioned while they were new. The result is a body of work that looks candy-bright and approachable while smuggling in a surprising amount of cultural analysis.
Why obsolete tech?
Because dead media never quite die. Sinclair’s subjects are the shells that once held our photos, saves, notes, and mod files; they’ve slipped from cutting-edge to kitsch in a single generation. By isolating these forms at portrait scale, he asks us to reconsider what they carried: not just data, but aspiration, identity, and a very specific promise about the future. His works land between nostalgia, humor, and critique—pieces that reward a first laugh and then a second, more reflective look. They function like visual essays about how we consume culture and discard its hardware, how corporations mint mythologies, and how quickly yesterday’s miracle becomes today’s landfill.
Practice and process
Although Sinclair’s imagery is pulled from code and media history, his technique is staunchly painterly. Surfaces are built with patient layers of oil, the kind of finish that makes plastic gleam and paper labels feel touchable. Precision matters: kerning, bevels, and injection-mold seams are treated with the loving exactitude of product photography, then nudged off-axis by a line of text or an altered icon that flips the narrative. The discipline of a programmer—modular thinking, versioning, iterative refinement—shows in the way series evolve. Even his online presence leans into this metaphor, presenting the artist’s world as an interface that loads and initializes before you enter.
Inspirations
Sinclair’s inspirations span three overlapping zones. First is the industrial design of storage media itself: the geometry of floppies, the tactile elegance of early cartridges, and the vernacular typography of labels and warning stickers. Second is the culture that grew around these objects—arcades, shareware disks, catalogues, and bedroom PCs—where identity was formed in the glow of CRTs. And third is the contemporary stack of platform capitalism, algorithmic feeds, and AI anxiety, which his work addresses through satire and sly rewordings. Nostalgia provides comfort, but Sinclair’s titles and tweaks expose the corporate and cultural machinery behind that comfort.
Tone and titles
Part of Sinclair’s appeal lies in his titling and text fragments. He has a knack for the phrase that feels like a command line crossed with a punchline—snippets that could be sticker slogans or patch notes, except they carry the sting of recognition. The most effective works land a cultural reference and a moral ambiguity at the same time, turning the floppy into a tiny billboard for how we rationalize our digital habits. Language about memes and ends, saves and sins, memory and forgetting, runs through his most recent series. If the earlier pieces charted the romance of dead tech, the latest add a note of present-tense absurdity as we all negotiate life under the algorithm.
Where the work is landing
Collectors who gravitate toward pop, post-internet, and design-forward painting have been quick to embrace Sinclair. His market presence spans reputable online art platforms and brick-and-mortar spaces in the UK and abroad, with consistent curatorial language across partners: UK-based, programmer-turned-artist, focused on the cultural memory of obsolete tech. That alignment suggests a stable narrative and an audience that understands the work’s crossover appeal—equally at home in a design-led interior or a more conceptually driven collection. For those building a focused grouping, Sinclair pairs naturally with artists who rework brand codes, packaging, or interface motifs; he also offers a tight, modular scale that rewards serial collecting.
Why it resonates now
We live amid constant software updates and hardware churn; our devices are sealed, our data invisible, our feeds endless. Sinclair’s paintings slow that cycle down. By returning to the physicality of cases, screws, slots, and spools, he puts the body back into the digital. The objects are rendered with such care that they feel newly precious, but the text keeps them honest—reminding us that culture is coded and recoded by companies, fans, and accidents of history. In a climate of AI-generated everything, it’s telling that Sinclair’s most biting works are unmistakably hand-made, with brushstrokes doing the work of both mimicry and critique. Seen together, the pieces read like an annotated field guide to our collective OS: funny, a little haunted, and unexpectedly tender.
What to look for in next week’s drop
Expect a concise selection that captures the breadth of Sinclair’s concerns: classic 3.5-inch disks with razor-sharp wit; game cartridge portraits that channel playground bravado; and a handful of works where corporate marks are bent just enough to reveal their mythmaking. Watch how the language sits on the object—whether it intensifies the nostalgia or undermines it—and pay attention to surface quality, edge crispness, and label detail, which are key indicators of the artist’s best examples. For collectors building a mini-series, consider assembling by media family (all floppies, all cartridges) or by thematic thread (corporate satire, gaming lore, memory and loss). And if you’re new to Sinclair, start with a standout floppy: its square geometry and iconic shutter read instantly across a room, and the scale makes it perfect for anchoring a column of smaller works.
Arlo Sinclair, in brief
London-based artist with a programming background, focused on obsolete tech as portrait and parable; oil on panel or object with meticulous craft; humor as an entry point, critique as a throughline; and a growing audience across galleries and reputable platforms. His work is a reminder that the things we once used to save our files can still save our stories—by showing us who we were, how we got here, and what we choose to carry forward. Next week’s drop will make that clear, one beautifully painted byte at a time.
