Personally, I like my out-of-commission hard drives mangled to death. Not because I keep sensitive information there, far from it. I just really, really like seeing things get bent out of their wits. As long as I’m watching it happen, of course.
Miguel Rivera’s hobby, on the other hand, is a little less severe. In fact, it’s very creative. Rather than shred those piles of useless metal and throw them in a heap, he turns them into beautiful works of art.
His gorgeous hard drive sculptures use nothing but decommissioned storage units, along with the occasional extra computer part (such as cable arms) when necessary, to build his creations. The concept, from the start, was to build metal sculptures using every salvageable part of gutted disks of all models and sizes.
According to the artist, who spends days working as a systems administrator at a US Air Force Base (thus, the access to piles of throwaway storage units paid for by your tax dollars), he built his first sculpture out of 33 3.5-inch hard disks, turning out a robotic car of sorts. After that first success, he was hooked.
Pieces he has done to date include a mini-car (made up of 29 malfunctioning hard drives), a “fat boy bike” (which uses 36 of them) and his masterpiece, a battle robot he put together using two full weeks of his life and a total of 32 hard disks. Rivera said that he considers the sculptures his therapy “after a five-day, 12-hour-shift work week” at the military installation. That sure sounds a heck of a lot more productive than binge-drinking at bars, eh?
[via Wired]