Human Hardware

Hard drive parts including platters, spindles, heads, actuator arms, motherboards, parts from cases and all manner of bolts from a 1.8” hard drive, 2.5” hard drive and multiple 3.5” hard drives.

                This piece began with my exploration of Merleau-Ponty’s position on our experience of our senses. In particular the notion that what we can’t see is often what we can best describe. For example Merleau-Ponty states that it is easier to pick from a selection of walks, our walk that we can’t see than the back of our hand out of a selection of hands that we can see.

                I choose the platters as they offered a double reflective surface that would enable the wearer to interact with the world and be aware of it. The use of the hard drive platters as hardware, lead me to examining the notion of glasses as hardware. Therefore I decided to design a pair of wearable glasses completely out of hard drive components.

                The platters are 2.5 inches in diameter, the nose piece is a composition of two spindles, heads and actuator arms held together with a threader bolt and nut cut from a hard drive case. Four more nuts were cut from the cases to attach other pieces around the glasses. The arms of the glasses are made of motherboard parts whereby I tried to use pieces of motherboard where existing holes could be used to attach the ear pieces. The earpieces were made out of the case decoration of one of the hard drives. The arms are attached to the platters with two actuator axis bolts this allows the arms to spin almost 180 degrees, adding a new dimension to the glasses. The mother board pieces are attached to two plastic components with existing holes that could hold the actuator axis bolts.

                In my tests I had been able to successfully drill through the platters without them shattering. However I had only trialled on 3.5”platters as I only had one 2.5” hard drive. My fear of the thinner disks shattering persuaded me to use a two part steel glue to glue the actuator axis bolts onto the platters. If I would have had a back-up set of 2.5” platters I think I would have drilled the holes into the platters and found a way to attach them to the arms using only parts from the hard drives. Never-the-less in this piece I attempted to alter the hard drive components as little as possible to highlight the individual beauty of the machine made pieces and I think I have been successful in this sense.