Try New ThingsSE26Room 4 · The future▶ The whole walk, on film

An installation in SE26, the connected city

Recycling

Pick an old gadget on the iPad, and feed it to the scrap monster. It chews, swallows and burps out the metals inside.

Where
Room 4 · The future, Skellefteå Museum
You
Choose. Feed. Watch it burp.
Built with
iPad · Raspberry Pi · Custom Python application · MQTT

01 The idea

What’s in your drawer?

Boliden recycles more electronics than almost anyone in the world. Old phones are full of copper, gold, silver, cobalt and lithium.

So we made a pet that lives on them. A rainbow-striped pixel monster, a bit like a Tamagotchi, that gets fuller and levels up the more you feed it.

02 How it works

Two screens, one meal

  1. On the iPad, swipe between a phone, a game controller, headphones and a camera. Tap one.
  2. On the monster’s screen, it wakes up and starts to drool.
  3. It chews. It swallows. Then it burps the metals back out as chemical symbols: Cu, Au, Ag, Pd, Co, Li.
  4. Change your mind halfway, and it spits the thing back out.

03 Under the hood

Chunky on purpose

  • The monster is drawn tiny on purpose, then scaled up for big chunky pixels and an old-TV glow.
  • Its blirps and burps are made live, not played back.
  • Every meal sends pulses along the threads, and a bird sings in the climate corner.

Got something big to say? Let’s make it a place.

Linus Johansson · linus@trynewthings.fail · The whole exhibition, room by room