Recycled Floppy Disk Art: Retro Technology Gets A New Life

Of all the creative artwork I’ve written about on Bit Rebels over the past two years, this is definitely one of my favorites. It combines technology, painting, recycling and a human touch, all flavored with that retro feeling we love so much. I remember when I first saw the works of Nick Gentry. It was on this Lost At E Minor post by @NiniBaseema back in January.

Since then, he continues to be recognized on blogs and in magazines all over the world. He refers to the way we live as a waste culture, and I agree. In order to increase our environmental sustainability, it’s important that we reuse whatever we can from our daily lives. We write about giving things a second life often on Bit Rebels.

Nick Gentry does that. He takes obsolete floppy disks, which seem useless and worthless, and creates beautiful artwork by putting them together and painting them. He also creates artwork from VHS tapes (wow… remember those?), cassettes, and other formats of outdated media. I really like how even though he paints on top of the disks, he leaves just enough of the original disk showing so you truly get a feeling of two worlds colliding. You get a glimpse of a time long ago overlapped with modern art. What a creative concept! Nick is constantly updating his portfolio, and his Flickr was updated as recently as today. You can check that out at Nick Gentry’s Photostream. You can also learn more about Nick at Nick Gentry.