The 30 Computers Sculpture Project

The objective of this project is to make sculptures out of all of the parts of 30 personal computers.  The table below lists the sculptures completed to date along with the parts of the computers that were used and a brief description of each sculpture.  Click on the title name to see photos, videos and a more complete description.

In 2003 a nationally known economic consulting firm whose headquarters was located in Washington, D.C.  was upgrading its computers.  In doing so it chose to discard their older PCs, but for security reasons, the hard drives were removed and smashed with hammers.  Neither the monitors nor keyboards were being tossed. As I watched these piles of computers grow outside my office and being prepared for the dumpsters, my initial reaction  was to see if they could be refurbished and put back into service at a local elementary school.   However, after several attempts to rebuild a few of the computers, it became clearer as to why the PCs were simply being discarded.  There were bad power supplies, blown motherboards, in operable floppy or CD-ROMs.  Given that there were no monitors or hard drives, it was neither a simple nor inexpensive task to bring these computers back into service.

After coming to this realization, their next best use was quickly apparent: make some sculptures.  The motherboards were the first component that I chose to focus on. It took a while and a few nights of thinking before I thought about cutting the boards diagnonally. This way each board could be decomposed into two 45-45-90 triangles. Combining three of these triangles could then be used to form a pyramid. The vertex of the pyramid would be just like the corner of a box or cube. The base of the pyramid would be an equilateral triangle. With 20 of these pyramids an icosahedron could be formed. 

After experimenting a bit, I realized that I was going to need a frame to hang all the boards onto. Given my concept of the object, I did not want it to be a heavy, massive structure that would come from using a steel substrate, for that reason I choose to use aluminum.  However, to weld aluminum require using a TIG welder  and it was clear that this was a challenging skill to master.  After some initial failures I turned to working with steel and in the process I constructed Bones (2004) and Skin (2005). Only after completing a couple of steel sculpture projects did I become  comfortable enough to return to working with aluminum.