Alas, poor Macintosh OS 8; I knew it well

Artist Maskull Lasserre helps you bone up on the unlatest technologies -- and offers an impressive memento mori to Mark Zuckerberg and tech's other wunderkinder.

by Edward Moyer

March 29, 2012 9:30 AM PDT Follow @edatnews

Ever wonder how many years of your life you've spent learning new software (or wasted having to relearn supposedly improved programs)? Yeah, it's a grim thought, and one that Canadian sculptor Maskull Lasserre may well have had in mind when he conceived his piece "Incarnate (Three Degrees of Certainty II)."

For the work, Lasserre clamped together a collection of old computer manuals and used a hand grinder and a rotary tool to carve a frighteningly realistic skull from their pages.

A comment on the half-life of technologies? A memento mori for Silicon Valley's current crop of young programming gods (Mark Zuckerberg among them)?

We're not sure. Lassere says only that his pieces explore "the unexpected potential of the everyday through allegories of value, expectation, and utility. Elements of nostalgia, accident, humor, and the macabre are incorporated into works that induce strangeness in the familiar, and provoke uncertainty in the expected."

One thing's certain though: Lassere has found an impressive use for all those trees sacrificed on the altar of tech's ever-accelerating, ever-insistent rate of evolution.