Okay, so it may not look like one but this is a laptop and it works just like one should. Even when it is turned on with an anti-clock winding key and it is on. Twenty year old artist Richard Nagy spent hundred of hours tinkering in his New Jersey basement workshop and to make it work that way on purpose.
“My retro feature is I think, by heart so I like to take in a modern tech and I am technofile and just sort of, imbue it with a little bit more of class and elegance. You know, just a sense of permanence.”
Nagy is one of the growing number of techiks turn amateur product designers who are part of the phenon known as steampunk. That is where modern gadgets are re-imagined as if build using the technology and the aesthetic of the Victorian era. That is the time when state of the art met steam power, steel and lots of gears.
“Hours of e-based grounding, and hunting and searching.”
The steampunk idea has roots in the futuristic visions of writers Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. And more recently, modern fantasy writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Now, Nagy and other technofiles are drawing on a literary imagery to create real life objects and show them off online.
Nagy maintains a website under his online alias Datamancer where he chronicles his homegrown projects like this flatbed scanner modified to resemble an old book and a fully functional computer with an old under wood typewriter for a keyboard, a CD drive hidden inside the porthole and an antique wood case or as he calls the device.
“The Nagy magical, movable type, pixel load, Dyna-Medtronic computation engine or the computation engine for short
Making modern gadgets look so old is not easy. For his laptop, Nagy started with a standard model from HP and crafted pretty much a new case for it.
“The wrist rest are leather and these are all hand filed copper rivets to go in here. The brass boarders are all handmade. All the copper pieces are hand cut.”
Much of a challenge though for this and other projects has been in scavenging steampunk style parts like the laptop’s claw feet.
“I found this on a clearance at some craft store and I like it so much, I bought two.
Restyling computer started out as a hobby to fill the time for Nagy but now it is starting to fill his wallet. After generating online attention, he is filling orders for customize keyboards from seven hundred to a thousand dollars each, each one taking about a month or so to bills.
“This is an example of what the keyboard start of looking like and then I stripped those down, take out the electronics, trim down all these key skirts and that time it is about 400 and I got all my keyboards.”
Nagy has been long ‘do-it-yourself’ for another passion is restoring old cars and seizes retro looking gadgets as a way to honor an era when tinkers dreamt big and build things to last.
“A Victorian era was about the last time in history, that year average high school graduate had a full mastery of the technology available at the time. So, you can have you know, your average guy working hard and applying technology and building some grand contraption or amazing product.”
“On the today’s work: Dynalife with Datamancer”
For The Wall Street Journal online I am Andy Jordan.
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