  Aluminum disk art.
Some time in the early 1990's, for reason that remain obscure to me, I purchased about 1200 pounds of aluminum hard disk platters from a local scrap metal dealer. They came from a local hard disk manufacturer (since gone out of business) and would have gone into 4" computer disk drives, had they not had some kind of flaw that relegated them to the scrap heap.
Years later, my colleague Chris Carlson started coming up with reasons why he'd like to have a stack of them, which of course I quickly agreed to since I still hadn't yet come up with any reasons for keeping them, let alone for buying them in the first place. (Still haven't, by the way.)
Then something quite unexpected happened: For several years in a row on my birthday I started getting these amazing, intricate geometrical constructions made out of, you guessed it, hard disk platters.
They are bent, cut, and riveted with great precision, and in later years started coming with chocolate imprisoned permanently inside. Of course Chris knows how much I love chocolate, which means he either thinks I'm a philistine who would destroy such fine works of art just to get to some chocolate, or he's teasing me. Of course I am a philistine, but even I have my limits, and besides the way these things are built, it's a lot less work to go out and get new chocolate.
They are listed as being acquired in 2006 only because that's when I finally realized that they are obviously good aluminum samples, as well as great works of hard disk art. They actually came into my possession in the late '90s and early '00s.
Source: Chris Carlson
Contributor: Chris Carlson
Acquired: 13 July, 2006
Text Updated: 15 July, 2006
Price: Donated
Size: 5"
Purity: 95%
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