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| Floppius Discus |
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A sculptural exercise using post-consumerism as a theme. It is made out of the recordable parts of 5 1/4" floppy disks . . . a type of media that hasn't been used for about 10 years. Hard to believe that when I was in design school, you could fit a smallish sized assignment on one of these. Hehe, the image sizes of these image are greater than the combined space of all the discs used in this piece combined.
When I was thinking about this piece, I began with thoughts about dinosaurs and extinction. The idea of a proto-dinosaur (a bird-like thing) was very appealing but then I thought it might be too literal. I wanted to go further, more basic. I then thought about evoking a trylobyte (a prehistoric invertebrate found in the most ancient of sea-bed fossils). So I started working on the form and then found that the material isn't too flexible with shape etc so it morphed into a more bacterial-type tube worm thing. I thought this appropriate because of the presense of floppy disks in early personal computer set-ups: the foundation of "memory" in a sense (I remember carrying around a boot-up disk in first year university . . . 1993!) Which leads me to a danger with using this type of material: nostalgia factor. I tried to circumvent that by making the form not immediately recognizable.
3 comments:
Interesting- I really like this, but as you pointed out that may just be the nostalgia factor talking, because I have a lot of fond memories of floppy disks.
Did you ever see the even older floppy disks? The ones in "Wargames" with Matthew Broderick?
Oh yeah, the really big ones? I remember seeing a case of those at my school library, held on I suppose just in case all computers manufactured after 1985 suddenly died. They may still be there.
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