Sunday, December 11, 2011

Prehistoric Media

Floppius Discus

Detail
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:

Protagitron said...

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.

Pete Kohut said...

Did you ever see the even older floppy disks? The ones in "Wargames" with Matthew Broderick?

Protagitron said...

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.