3.5 inch Floppy Discs Used in Portraits #ArtTuesday
Where in Space is Carmen San Diego?. CD-ROM Utility, Mouse Mate Driver Software, Adobe Photoshop 3.0. Those are just some of the 3.5 inch floppy discs that Nick Gentry uses to create portraits. What vintage floppy discs would you use to create your portrait? Here’s more from COLOSSAL:
In Skin Deep, Nick Gentry probes the “chasm between real and online personas.” Working on painted backdrops of outdated technology like floppy disks and VHS tapes, the artist invites questions that are uniquely contemporary, asking about performance and presentation on the internet, increasingly artificial standards of beauty, and the instability of memory over time.
Diverging from his earlier portraits that were more faithful to a subject’s likeness, Gentry’s new body of work is deeply influenced by the virtual. He often paints his figures in grayscale, leaving them devoid of defining characteristics, and uses the tape’s plastic reels to highlight their eyes. This melding of human and machine elicits the cold, detached feeling associated with a cyborg and emphasizes the synthetic, masked nature of online identities. Given the irrelevance of the once-groundbreaking technology, the portraits also speak to the inevitable shifts in importance and how information is stored, shared, and remembered.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
