Aging and Obsolescence: A Roundtable Conversation with Marisa Cohn & Jacob Remin
What have you learned to forget in order to keep up?
In a time shaped by constant updates, upgrades, and quiet disappearances, obsolescence is not only a technical condition, but a lived experience. We are asked to remain current, adaptable, and in motion, often at the cost of discarding skills, habits, and ways of knowing that once mattered.
This roundtable invites you into a shared space for reflecting on what it means to age alongside technology. Together, we will explore how memory, forgetting, and time shape our relationship to digital life, and how experiences of obsolescence are felt in the body, in work, and in everyday habits.
Through guided reflection, storytelling, and discussion, participants are invited to share lived experiences, thoughts, and unfinished stories. You might recall a technology that shaped your coming of age, a skill you were encouraged to leave behind, or a moment where you felt out of sync with the pace of change.
Join us for an afternoon of collective reflection, conversation, and story telling. No preparation is needed, and sharing is always optional. Silence, listening, and half-formed thoughts are welcome.
Marisa Leavitt Cohn is an interdisciplinary researcher with a BA in Anthropology from Barnard College and a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from UC Irvine. Cohn combines ethnographic and research-through-design approaches to explore the chronopolitics of computational media and labor. Her work examines cultural dimensions of infrastructural decay, software maintenance, and technological obsolescence. She is an Associate Professor of Anthropological Approaches to Data and Infrastructure at the IT University of Copenhagen, member of the Nordic Critical Fabulations network, and a founding co-director of the ETHOS Lab. She is currently on sabbatical and a visiting researcher at Art Hub Copenhagen.
Jacob Remin is a Copenhagen based artist and composer. Remin experiments with performative and sculptural manifestations of alternative algorithmic logics. Central to Remin's work is collaboration and infrastructural critique.The intention of his praxis is to create other worlds and narratives, which are more expansive and plastic.Remin is part of the danish composers society, the society of artists and danish visual artists. He holds a BA in design engineering from DTU and an MA in interaction design from CIID.