“Mauritian Sunset ” by UK-based artist Sandy Smith uses hundreds of obsolete PCs to create a wall-size gradient effect in order to mimic a “sunset” emanating from their monitors. Pretty cool effect as a way to bring the real into the “virtual” of sorts.
18 thoughts on “Old PCs make a sunset on the wall”
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You can definitely keep the whole gallery warm during winter with all those CPUs running… it’s a great ambient might even work well if you happen to get an occasional Windows blue screen of death.
Pretty soon you will be able to do this with all of the hundred-million obsolete TVs (Feb.’09) when digital is mandated here in the US and people start chucking their old sets to the curbside.
Looks like it’s almost entirely composed of old Macs! You have to wonder if those monitors will overheat with all their top ventilation holes blocked like that and presumably left switched on all day.
It must use a lot of power
soooo beautiful.
You could use an arduino (or any other mcu) to generate VGA for the monitors, less power used, and just a few tlc5490’s.
Why even have the PCs/Macs functional at all? You could easily output a different single color to 40-ish monitors with one computer, and have the boxes just be structural. Having everything cabled up (click through to Sandy’s site) makes no practical sense.
sorry… I couldn’t help counting the monitors. Unless I missed a small one that was off (as a couple are) or double counted, there are 42 monitors, and I guess roughly the same number of system boxes.
I’m not saying that they needed any more in there, though. :-)
-Snorbert
Hundreds? I think that’s a bit of an exaggeration.
did everybody see the picture of the olympics opening bash with that guy running around the inside of the dome on a wire against that background which in one spot was displaying a blue screen of death?