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?

subjective

[selectspec]

eye pleasing sculpture

If you find old computer junk glued together eye pleaseing. Don't sell your Picassos yet.

From the site

[jcoy42]

I will be away from my studio from Feb 7 to 20 ...

Which makes this a nice time for a /. front page link. :)

I wonder what he'll make out of the puddle of muck his server is likely to be when he gets back?

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

Does this count?

[Peterus7]

I went to a halloween party as a crazy tech junkie scientist type and I had a motherboard strung around my neck. Well, it looked cool, and it was really functional.

For some reason, all the girls there couldn't get their hands off my motherboard, and they kept on fawning about how it was so big and hard. A friend commented about the reason it was green was I had that string tied around it.

But anyhow, that motherboard was how I met my most recent girlfriend. That's pretty damn functional, if you ask me.

I wonder if I'm the only person who uses old hardware to be functional as pimpware...?

The Only Eye-Pleasing Computer Art...

[Quaoar]

...is when a Windows machine is cleaved in twine with a battle axe.

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)

winner, best algorithm

[frenetic3]

/* inspired by chris rock */
void get_home_from_work_talk_to_gf( void )
{
say( "how was your day?" );
while ( 1 )
{
switch ( rand() % 10 )
{
case 0: say( "Get out of here!" ); break;
case 1: say( "Go on." ); break;
case 2: say( "I don't believe it!" ); break;
case 3: say( "You don't say..." ); break;
case 4: say( "Really?" ); break;
default: say( "I told you that bitch crazy!" ); break;
}
}
}