The cursed universes of Dana Sibera #Art #Design #Computers @nanoraptor @mwichary
The Landscape PowerBook G4 joined the G4 Cube as a one-off classic in the early 2000s. Well-kept examples fetch high prices on eBay.
At first, Dana Sibera’s explorations might feel like just strange hypotheticals, visual madlibs, bored evenings in Photoshop. The #1 adjective others seem to put under her creations routinely and casually shared on Mastodon is cursed. Sibera seems to think likewise. “They are terrible for the most part, but better out of my head than in,” she wrote when asked by Marcin Wichary for the Shift Happens newsletter.
The more you look at those strange concoctions, the more they are hinting at fascinating alternate universes that perhaps aren’t cursed at all.
Zip Disk
Some of those explorations are beautiful and enthralling, like this imaginary IBM PC 5150 in a tower case that matches the angular visual language of the rest of the machine’s components:
Some of the images might be cursed, but one of the enduring qualities of Sibera’s work is also how clever a lot of it feels. These “mock-ups that mock” all feel great to me, a perfect antidote to the pretentious Jonny Ive white-room videos of the previous decade.
See all the wonderful designs in the article here.
Ed. note: Dana’s work showing screens embedded in a floppy and MO disk (below) inspired my embedding an Adafruit PyPortal in a 3D printed case resembling a floppy as an open source design. Thank you for your inspiration!!
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