Hasta La Ideas

In my early ID days I juggled a corporate design gig with one working for a now-famous avant garde designer, and because I took work home with me for both jobs, I carried 2.5″ floppy disks containing the latest CAD revisions back and forth. I always knew which disk was for which gig because the corporation provided the standard blue or beige ones, while the funky designer supplied cool translucent purple or green ones he’d picked up in Japan. Those disks were crucial, absolutely the most important thing I had to carry around; if I forgot one it meant I had to turn around and get back on the subway. But nowadays, of course, I haven’t seen or touched one in years.

I was excited to recently come across UK-based artist Nick Gentry’s “Blink” series of paintings, which uses our long-forgotten floppies as canvases:

[Gentry’s] portraits use a combination of obsolete media formats, making a comment on waste culture, life cycles and identity. Using old disks as a canvas, these artefacts are combined to create photo-fits and identities that may draw connections to the personal information that is then forever locked down underneath the paint.

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