Made On Earth

An actual Turing machine

An actual Turing machine

All joking aside, this thing may be the most beautiful piece of kinetic art I have ever seen. It has a Cartesian robot to draw 1s or 0s on the tape as needed, a rolling felt-covered drum for erasing symbols, a camera that can recognize what symbols have already been written, a bank of white LEDs to provide illumination for the camera, and a beautiful custom control panel.

Meticulously-crafted cell phone case by African “bamboobender”

Meticulously-crafted cell phone case by African “bamboobender”

No, they don’t call themselves that. “Bamboobender” is my hackish take on “sandbender,” which many of you folks will probably recognize as a term coined by arch-cyberpunk William Gibson in his novel Idoru. Very roughly, a “sandbender” is a craftsperson who makes a living by carefully hand-crafting ornate enclosures for mass-produced electronics. We don’t see a lot of that, at least in the first world (although mass-produced after-market “custom” enclosures and enclosure-decorations are common), probably because our personal electronics are still pretty ephemeral to us: we all know we’re probably going to be sporting a new phone and/or MP3 player next year. This example, however, comes from Cameroon, where, I presume, the device turnover rate is a lot lower. It’s the work of teacher and wordworker Lekuama Ketuafor, whose runs a sole-proprietorship cottage industry called Bamboo Magic. [via AfriGadget]