In Valentina Vuksic’s Harddisko, defective hard disks are collected from various PC shops, companies and institutions. Each of the 16 hard drive’s casing is being removed and a special sound pickup is mounted on the drive’s read head and connected to a sound mixer.

As soon as a drive recieves power, it conducts an initialization procedure with the heads moving in a specific pattern and generating sounds. These patterns vary throughout different manufactors, models, production series, firmware versions and the disk’s history. The drives of the exhibit are placed within several individually controllable power circuits using interval switched power supplies.

Harddisko is exhibited at Aarau in Switzerland, through April 2.

Via neural.