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Twin Towers a symbol

I have been working professionally with computers for a long time now and in my early days as a system administrator I was involved in a lot of hardware maintenance. Setting up new machines, replacing parts and replacing entire server parks etc. What struck me already then is the amount of capital that is involved in these so called professional environments. The average write-off period of the hardware was between 3 to 5 years and in those days technological development (Moore's law was still alive) was at a break neck pace.

I got my hands on a lot of hardware that was tossed out and used the parts, motherboards, processors, memory chips, harddisks and the likes as a sort of mosaic stones (although a little bigger) and tried several ways (with color and composition) to re-use these once beautiful, powerful and coveted parts in two dimensional 'painting' constructs.

I call these works part of my Twin Towers series because it all started when I tried to create a Twin Towers piece based on a photograph a friend if mine brought back from his trip to New York**. This first piece consists of over 50 pieces of computer hardware, each piece manually painted in different shades of grey and industrially glued to a hardboard of 120 x 160 cm. I never had the courage to measure the weight the piece hoping to this day that my wall will keep holding it.

Although the computer part in itself is an interesting object I still struggle with the compositional restrictions I have with just working with squares and rectangles. I have filled many sketchbooks with experiments trying to escape these limitations in one way or another. Still searching though.

** When the towers were destroyed in 9-11 I almost changed the series name but decided to keep it.

Jeroen Vesseur, Schiedam, The Netherlands, 2023