New Update Available – Version 2.1 (VR installation)

Welcome to the computer hour for the elderly. Course leader Robert is here to support you with answers to all your questions about using the computer and the internet. Some of your fellow students are already at work, others are having trouble finding the right files or are getting lost on the keyboard. And you? You’re stuck in an update that’s going on forever. This gives you plenty of time to take in your fellow students and listen to how frustrating and incomprehensible new technology can be for the digitally illiterate.

New Update Available – Version 2.1 is a VR installation in which you attend a computer course for the elderly hosted in a metaverse type of VR network. The conversations you hear are audio clips from a real computer course (recorded in 2018-2019), adding an identifiable, funny and above all human layer to the experience. Through these conversations you experience how each of the participants deal with problems of digitalisation within their lives.

The VR installation is presented as a physical replica of a computer course. Through a realistic setting of office furniture and laptops, this one-person VR experience lets you take part in a single computer course session as people log on and eventually log out at the end, and so the narrative structure is more about documenting the communal process and relationship dynamics within this community, which is recontextualized by setting the time in the distant future.

The nine laptops in the installation are synced with the main VR experience and show what the other virtual participants are doing. This way the work offers two storylines: one main VR narrative and nine smaller individual narratives presented through the laptops which can be seen by those who aren’t wearing the VR headset.

New Update Available – Version 2.1 questions if we need better, smarter and more ‘high-tech’ technology to erase digital illiteracy, or, if there will always be a need for these computer courses, even in VR?