The PC is alive

Here's an absolutely spectacular photo-essay: This Insane Case Mod Looks Like a World War III Fever Dream.

Ikeuchi spent the better part of the last year building this incredible machine, a creation that isn’t so much a case mod as full-blown diorama. It’s a deliriously detailed little world that just happens to take place in and around a functioning computer. It also redefines the idea of what it means to have a cluttered desk.

Ikeuchi, a designer by trade, likes to call it his “secret base.” Inspired by mecha anime like Gundam and Macross, every surface is packed with something to discover. Soldiers tend to intricate, forbidding machinery. Mechs await repair. The work seamlessly blends plastic toys, gizmo components, and scraps of other materials with the computer itself.

Ikeuchi is quoted as saying: "The most important thing is to think of the computer as a living thing."

My aunt names all her inanimate objects: her computer, her car, her coffee maker, her knife sharpener.

And certainly I'm known to have conversations with my 20-year-old mini-van with some regularity: "please start! please start! please!!"

We invest much of our own selves in the objects we create, both hardware and software, and Ikeuchi's magnificent artwork makes that vividly clear.