Stone Computer

Stone computer is one of my most involved and time-consuming projects I have ever made.

The idea and early sketches first came to me around 2020 when I was thinking about what makes our electronic devices feel different from our other objects. Maybe it’s a screen, maybe it’s a button, maybe it’s nothing but a single blinking light and subtle whirring. Any of these indicators can shift an object’s perception from something that could be tossed across a room to something that is delicate and thinking; almost treated as alive. I started considering the smallest change needed to turn a thoughtless, solid object into a device, thereby changing how the viewer perceives and interacts with it.

It wouldn’t be until four years later in the summer of 2024 when I was finally in a place to start working on this project for real. I was back in my home state of Rhode Island reconnecting with my friends. The previous summer, we had worked on an ambitious project that included teaching ourselves to anodize aluminum and conducting dangerous experiments in our own backyards. I was inspired by the accomplishment of working on and finishing a project like that just through having a vision and an obsessive work ethic, and I wanted to make something new the next summer.

My friend Cooper and I work well together: I study art and design, he studies electrical and computer engineering, and we share a strange abstract wavelength of thinking. It was the perfect pairing to make the stone computer a reality. We started with sketches designing what we wanted our computer to do. We made prototypes and tests as we went starting with the form made of chicken wire, the exterior sculpted from concrete, and finally inserting the electronic components and coding the machine.

The final piece is an interactive sculpture that generates a combination of odd words fed to the machine by Cooper and myself. Pressing the button flashes an LED indicator light and shows a new cryptic message on the LCD display. The organic shape of the concrete rock and the unique words it spits out give the stone computer a personality.

It is a fun to use and completely non-utilitarian interactive sculpture, and it makes me happy every time I look at it.