"Fish in Technology," by visual arts junior Liliana Nunez, was the winning sculpture in a competition that evolved through a collaboration between OIT and the Visual Arts Department to find a good use for old computer parts.
e-Waste Not, What-nots
Art students sculpt objets d’art from old computers donated by OITMix some email spam with a dash of Art Department ingenuity, add a storage room full of obsolete PC and Mac parts and what do you have? A fun class assignment that evolved into a contest to build the best sculpture using recycled computer keyboards, hard drives, power cables, video monitors and overhead projectors.
The competition began in September and was the brainchild of OIT Help Desk supervisor Rebeca Stovall who thought it would be a novel way of giving new purpose to the many old computer parts OIT has to recycle each year. OIT project manager Ron Harvey loved the idea and asked to be assigned to the project.
"I began to spam our Art department, looking for a sponsor," says Harvey.
Dubbed "Art View," the project was to design a sculpture worthy of permanent display at the Help Desk reception area at Raymond Hall.
Art Department visiting lecturer Ilena Finocchi Wilson agreed it would be a fun, learning experience and terrific exposure for the students' intricate handiwork. She took the lead, setting 10 of her sculpture students loose to survey the room full of computer parts and see what would happen.
"There is a little bit of Franken-sculpture going on here," she said. "We've never done something of this magnitude, with this volume of material."
