Arlo Sinclair

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Arlo Sinclair

Nerd turned artist painting a blend of obsolete tech and today's digital dilemmas w/ a dash of humour

21/09/2026

On the surface, it sounds obvious. Of course AI beats stupidity. It can process more, remember more, generate more, optimise more. Very impressive. Gold star for the haunted calculator. ⭐️

But I’m not sure stupidity is really a data problem.

Real stupidity isn’t just not knowing something. It’s knowing exactly enough to be dangerous. It’s confidence without thought. Speed without wisdom. Progress without asking who it serves. It’s building systems nobody fully understands, then acting surprised when they behave like systems nobody fully understands.

Which is where the small print comes in.

AI might beat human stupidity in a straight fight, but only if we don’t give stupidity the login details, a venture capital round, and permission to update the terms whenever it likes.

That felt like a reasonable thing to put on an old computer.

Mainly because old computers, for all their flaws, were at least honest about being stupid. They crashed loudly, froze visibly, and asked you to insert Disk 2 with a kind of tragic sincerity.

Modern technology tends to smile while making the problem scalable.

AI may beat real stupidity, but only if real stupidity isn’t the one deploying it. 💾

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14/09/2026

Thoughts?

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10/09/2026

Halfway through the final week of MATERIALITY at Saatchi Gallery.

Still a slightly surreal sentence to type, even after several attempts and one small internal software update.

I’m showing two original 1/1 wall sculptures with BSMT Gallery:

Superman: Big Tech
100 x 100cm

Batman: Unresolved Trauma
70 x 70cm

The Batman piece has felt especially right in this show. It sits somewhere between childhood mythology and adult damage. A heroic symbol, but also a reminder that some heroes are really just unresolved trauma with excellent branding and a very committed lighting department.

That’s why MATERIALITY has been such a great home for these works. The show is about the physical presence of art: material, texture, weight, surface, process. In a world where so much is becoming digital, frictionless and weirdly unreal, it feels important to stand in front of actual objects. Things with edges. Labour. Scars. Evidence.

Huge thank you to BSMT Gallery for including me in such a strong show, and for creating something that feels generous, ambitious and properly alive.

The opening night was wonderful. Busy, warm and full of the strange magic that happens when people stop scrolling and actually look at things in a room together. Dangerous behaviour, really. Very analogue.

I wanted to do a shout out my fellow artists. A hugely talented, creative and welcoming bunch of reprobates. It’s been a joy to get to know so many of you. This also goes for Helch, who was also part of the show and sadly died on 29 August. I didn’t know him personally, but I respected his art and the mark he made. There’s something powerful about work that escapes the gallery and becomes part of the city itself. I imagine many of us will keep seeing him in London for a long time, on bridges, walls, routes, and remembered corners.

That feels worth saying.

MATERIALITY is free to visit and open at Saatchi Gallery until 12 September.

Go if you can. It’s worth it for the building alone, before you even get to the art.

And if you do go, please send me a photo of Batman looking emotionally unavailable in public.

BSMT SPACE Saatchi Gallery

02/09/2026

One of the first life lessons many of us absorbed from games was surprisingly bleak: the thing you want is almost never where you were told it would be.

The princess, as it turns out, is in another castle.

As a child, I accepted this with only moderate irritation. It was part of the ritual. Reach the flag. Clear the level. Enter the castle. False hope. Move on. Repeat until emotionally conditioned. Looking back, it feels like an extraordinarily efficient way of teaching delayed gratification, disappointment and the moving-target nature of desire before most of us had learnt long division.

What I like about this piece is that it takes one of the most famous lines in gaming and reveals just how broadly it applies. Because “another castle” is not just a game mechanic. It’s practically an organising principle of modern life. You hit the milestone, get the thing, reach the point you thought would solve everything, and almost immediately discover the goal has shifted somewhere else. Another job. Another house. Another version of yourself. Another update. Another horizon.

There’s a difference between saying the destination keeps moving and saying the journey is pointless. If anything, one of the more useful things I’ve learnt is that a lot of life is exactly this: false endings, new levels, fresh complications, occasional mushrooms. You don’t finally arrive and become complete. You keep going. Slightly more aware. Slightly more weathered. Hopefully with better timing.

Mario, absurd little man that he is, understood it early.

This piece is a joke about endless postponement, obviously. But it’s also a small nod to endurance. To carrying on despite the repeated discovery that the neat ending you were promised was mostly a narrative convenience. The castle is not the end. It’s just another room in the game.

Historical Context:
“Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!” became one of the most recognisable repeated lines in early video game history, closely associated with Super Mario Bros. and the structure of its staged progression.

30/08/2026

Try explaining to a kid today what a cheat code was, and how it felt to discover one.

What’s your favourite ever game hack? 🤓💾

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26/08/2026

When you have a problem with a keyboard key… maybe the real problem is you. Or, in this case, me 🤓💾

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23/08/2026

Game manual: necessity or waste of paper? 💾

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20/08/2026

Back to the Future: Mother Fluxxer (2026)

Wall Sculpture: Hand Painted & Aged, Acrylic, Aluminium, Somerset 250 gsm paper.

Released in 1985, Back to the Future became one of the defining science-fiction comedies of the decade.

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One of the things I admire about childhood is its willingness to accept complete nonsense as long as the energy is right. This movie runs almost entirely on that principle.

A teenager. A time machine. A scientist who appears to have survived on caffeine and electrical accidents. A plot involving temporal paradox, family romance panic, and enough butterfly-effect chaos to make philosophers lie down in a dark room. And yet it all works because the film believes in itself so completely that you have no choice but to follow.

As kids, we didn’t ask whether the premise made sense. Back to the Future belonged to that category of stories that made time itself feel playful. Malleable. A thing you might trip over, alter, and somehow survive if you were quick enough and had the right soundtrack.

The sort that feels harmless in childhood and then becomes more interesting once you grow older and realise how many stories are built from impossible assumptions we accept without complaint. Time travel is obviously one of the louder examples, but it’s hardly alone. 80s and 90s culture is full of ideas that collapse under scrutiny and still manage to carry emotional truth. In a way, that’s part of the bargain.

What Back to the Future reveals, I think, is our fascination with revision. The fantasy that if we could just get hold of the timeline, we might straighten a few things out. Fix an embarrassment. Save a mistake. Understand our parents differently. Become the person we think we were meant to be. It’s a ridiculous premise with a surprisingly human ache sitting inside it.

This piece is about that deeper impulse: the desire to go back, reroute, improve, and return triumphant.

17/08/2026

1.15 Rubber Duck: Programming

One of the discoveries that came from coding is that sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to explain it to something incapable of helping. Ideally out loud.

At university, we were encouraged to talk through coding issues with each other. Not because the other person always had the answer, but because the act of explaining forces your own thinking into a more coherent shape. You hear yourself say the problem properly, and somewhere around sentence three you often realise you’ve been the issue all along. Which is humbling, but efficient.

Eventually, programmers realised there was no real reason the listener needed to be human. Enter the rubber duck.

There is something wonderfully absurd about the whole thing. Someone surrounded by expensive hardware, highly specialised software, and years of technical training might still get the clearest result by carefully explaining their code to a bath toy.

This piece imagines taking that already ridiculous concept and pushing it one step further: what if even the duck got automated? What if instead of an inanimate object silently absorbing your confusion, you had a virtual program whose sole purpose was to nod along, emit the occasional affirming quack, and provide the simulation of support without the inconvenience of actual feedback?

One of the things technology is exceptionally good at is commercialising things that didn’t need commercialising. Taking a simple, effective, almost comically low-tech solution and wrapping it in software, branding and the suggestion of innovation. The plain rubber duck solves the problem perfectly well. But somewhere, inevitably, someone is pitching Duck-as-a-Service (DaaS).

Clarity often arrives not through smarter tools, but through slowing down and articulating the mess properly. A reminder that for all the sophistication of our systems, some of the most effective problem-solving methods remain stubbornly primitive.

Talk to the duck. Hear your own nonsense. Fix the bug. Progress. 💾

12/08/2026

Was there a movie you rented more than once? 📼

Ps. Be Kind, Rewind ☺️🙏

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