Hardware and Software Art

Lupulack writes "Worried about where your discarded obsolete technology ends up ? If it's lucky it might be at electronic-ouroborus.com/, where broken - down electronics are transformed into eye pleasing sculpture. Recycling can be art." And yaxu writes "The runme software art repository is now open. Share your favourite piece of software art; whether it be an algorithm, an irc bot, a software app misappropriation, a virus or sendmail exploit..."

Comments

Tradeoffs

[Sneftel]

Interesting... the former site has captured aesthetic elegance yet not functional elegance, and the second site has captured functional elegance but not aesthetic elegance. IMHO, true "tech-art" would need both of these qualities. Any takers?

Re:Tradeoffs

[Sauron23]

Perhaps you want BEAM Solar art, robots, analog circuits.

From the inventor -

The science behind the idea stems from current concepts in artificial intelligence (AI), artificial life (ALife), evolutionary biology, and genetic algorithms. It seems that building large complex robots hasn't worked well, so why not try to evolve them from a lesser to a greater ability as mother nature has done with biologics? The problem is that such a concept requires self-reproducing robots which won't be possible to (if at all) for years to come. A solution, however, is to view a human being as a robot's way of making another robot, to have an annual venue where experimenters can let their creations interact in real situations, and then watch as machine evolution occurs. In other words, robogenetics through robobiologics.

Mark W. Tilden

Discussion:
http://www.serve.com/heretics/discus/index.html

Library:
http://www.solarbotics.net/
Purchase:
http://www.solarbotics.com. (amongst a few others)

random:
http://www.geocities.com/SouthBeach/6897/beam2.htm l
http://web.archive.org/web/20010312171116/turtlete k.botic.com/begin.html
Enjoy

Not recycled

[3ryon]

Many of these components are clearly new. Look at the long wires on the resisters. These have never been on a circut board.

This picture is especially revealing...
http://www.electronic-ouroborus.com/ assets/images/ newwbg%20creatures/ksaur-eating-blue-1=-DSC040.jpg

Hard Disk Platter Art

[mrs clear plastic]

I have seen some interesting stuff done with the
platters inside hard disk drives.

There is a computer recycling organization in town
where they take old computers, test the components,
make new computers for those in need, and then
recycle the defective components.

One of the things they did was to dissasemble the
discarded hard drives that do not work. They did
this for two reasons. One of them was to ensure
that the data on that disk remains confidential.
Who knows what personal information (personal
finances, surfed porn, love letters, etc) is
left behind.

The other reason they broke the drives down is
to make mobiles out of the platters. Those hard
disk platters were really beautifull. They are
very shiny; as if they were made out of glass.
In fact, I first mistook them for glass. They
also ring nicely when they hit each other. So,
a few of those hung on nylon fishing line swinging
in the breeze, make a wonderful sound.

I also heard a story where someone took a bunch
of these and fashioned a skirt out of them. He
attatched them together using monofiliment line.

When he wore that skirt and did a twirl, it would
be an awsome sight and the sound could be heard
from quite a distance away.

Mark

Three algorithms that got me into computer science

[Anonymous Coward]

10 years ago, when I still thought CS was all about programming, I came across three algorithms that really changed my view of the field. Each of them was relatively short, completely non-obvious to me at the time, and a really elegant way of solving a problem:

1) The merge sort solution to the closest pair problem (http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/~gurari/course/cis6 80/cis680Ch18.html#QQ1-50-122) which I found in Sedgewick's Algorithms (now available in modern languages like C and Java but I had the Pascal version)

2) The Knuth-Morris-Pratt algorithm for string searching (http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~lecroq/string/node8.h tml) which was demonstrated to me on a napkin and introduced me to this guy named Knuth whose books I later bought

3) Tarjan's linear time solution to the strongly connected components problem (http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~herb/cs410f99/scc.htm) that I found flipping through Cormen-Leierson-Rivest and led to an unexpected purchase just so I could read more

(Not that anybody is going to be reading this AC post but I thought I'd share)

Favorite one liners approximating art

[sawilson]

perl -MIO::Socket -e 'IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>"www.microsoft.co m:139")->send("bye",MSG_OOB)'

ping -p 2b2b2b415448300d rockwellmodemuser.internet.com

The source of the webpage for that NTY webpage hack
a while ago was art also.

Re:Ouch

[sephkunyui]

Ok lets learn to judge things on their individual merrit, art is art it doesn't matter if you like it. Personally I think its great that people are finding uses for old hardware.
Oh I love your term "buzzword-laden manifestos". I mean its not like we hear phrases like that from jargon spewing protestors daily.