(Roughly) Daily

German artist Ralf Baecker gives technology a life of its own. His new piece Irrational Computing, which debuts June 10 at the International Triennial of New Media Art, use semiconductor crystals (quartz sand) and connects them to interlinked modules to create a primitive macroscopic signal processor. In other words, he’s using quartz (a natural resource that’s one of the basic commodities for all information technology), to create a raw mineral computer.

Baecker used quartz crystals taken directly from nature and industrial waste products and connected them to the modules, which use the electrical and mechanical specifics of the mineral to form a visual display, of sorts. Simultaneously, the crystals work as sound generators, as the electrical impulses from the modules force the quartz to vibrate. Through speakers, gallery visitors can both see and hear these quartz crystals. They even appear to have an unpredictable, life-like “conversation” with the other materials in the installation set-up, as the impulse signals and responses are organically random (thus, the “Irrational” part of the installation’s title)…

See more, and read an interview with Baecker, via The Creator’s Project (a JV of Intel and Vice), at “An Artist Has Made A Primitive Computer Out Of Earth Crystals, And Little Else.”

* John F. Kennedy

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As we muse on minerals, we might spare a thought for a key intellectual ancestor of Hacking and “Making”: the Father of the Age of Reason and author (in Candide) of the immortal– and sardonically ironic– advice that each of us should “tend his own garden,” Francois-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire; he died on this date in 1778.

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