What’s A Human-Powered Computer?
In the spring of 1993, my experiences as a hardware and software engineer collided with the art world as an installation in Kyoto benefitting from the educational direction of edutech pioneer Nobuyuki Ueda. Having worked for too long in the abstract world of electricity and cyberspace, I hungered to see it made real, in order to understand it better. Thus was born the Human Powered Computer Experiment, which was “performed” by Dr. Ueda’s graduate students in a two-day long workshop where human beings embodied the working components of a computer.
At the time computers still had disk drives, so the entire system started up by turning on a power switch, and then placing a giant cardboard disk into a slot through a partition. On one side of the divider sat the computer user; the other half was for the human-powered computation to happen. The performance area spanned two floors of empty space so that visitors could view what was occurring on both sides at the same time.
