Yesterday, in addition to moving mattresses we also shelled out some dough and bought two new iPhones. I got the 12 Pro and Anne got the 12 mini. Our venerable previous iPhones (a 6 and 5S respectively) were too old to reap any of the rebates that were being offered, so we had to pay full freight. They had the Pro in stock, so I picked mine up at the store, but they were out of the mini. No problem though, because later that day an AT&T rep came by the house to drop off Anne’s new mini and set it up for her too. She even found and removed enough excess charges in our phone plan, the savings from which should pay for our new phones. Win-Win. We had backed up our old phones and I used my backup to restore my new one, but the rep showed Anne how to directly clone her new phone from the old one. Even with my backup, I still ended up spending hours logging back into all the many myriad of accounts that I have. I think that I prefer the older phone’s fingerprint reading scheme over the newer phone’s facial recognition one. I have a lot yet to learn about the iPhone.

We went to Laumeier Sculpture Park today and I downloaded the virtual reality app Time Fork. Created by media artist Van McElwee, this app wouldn’t run on the old phones. I wouldn’t say that I bought the new phones just to use this app, but it did contribute to the decision. Time Fork, organized as a walking tour of the Park viewed through the lens of technology, entertains a playful fiction: roughly a thousand years ago, time branched to create a parallel world. In McElwee’s installation he will use Augmented Reality to reveal features of a settlement that exists in that parallel or even future world, overlapping what we know as Laumeier Sculpture Park. Now that I’ve tried, I’ll delete the app now.