I recently completed this wall decoration for the lobby area of the Shore Foundation. Shore provides refurbished computers to non-profit organizations and recycles/reuses/recovers material from the computing equipment that is not up to standards. I volunteer there on a regular basis and we get a lot of old hard drives that have no real value (plus we are obliged to destroy them by the equipment donor). So here is one way to use them.

That’s 96 hard drives in various states of disassembly. These are usually taken all the way down to individual components for resource recovery. We have recently acquired access to a x-ray fluorescence machine and its pretty amazing to see how many metals are actually in some of the small parts.

Instead of XRF analysis I just needed lots of steel wire and some spacers to put this together. Since the strands are hanging from wire the shiny discs cause moving reflections when something brushes the front of this display. Which will be pretty cool until the wires break and the strand falls on someone’s foot.