For my Undergraduate Honors Thesis, I dissected four laptop computers (all of them very old and very broken) and replaced their backlights with LED’s. I used acrylic paints mixed with a gel gloss medium to paint Windows 98 defragmentation imagery on acetate, and I installed this acetate in the screens of the laptops so the LED/diffuser assembly lit them evenly and gave them the appearance of being the image on the computer screen.

My project addressed the file fragmentation map of a Windows computer as a portrait of the shared lives of computers and their users. I created a (woefully undocumented) life story for each user as I painted, keeping each one to a different life’s usage patterns. Each also expanded the imagery a bit more, adding more colors and in one even changing the shapes.