Man, this is perverse and cool. They’ve gutted an old Commodore, soldered together a green, UV-lit wireframe teapot, and stuck it in the monitor on a set of rotating motors that can roll it on three axes. Use the numeric keypad and the teapot rotates, as though someone had written an “advanced” Commodore BASIC program to draw a rotating 3D teapot on the screen (back in the old days, making virtual rotating 3D teapots was a kind of fetish for computer graphics wonks).
Graphics Demo is a modified Commodore CBM 3032 computer. Its inner life was replaced by a mechanics.
A wireframe model of a teapot, soldered out of silvered copper wire, is gimballed inside the monitor cabinet. The model is varnished with green uv-active paint and lighted by four blacklight tubes, which are installed invisible inside the cabinet. The teapot can be rotated in any direction by using the numeric keypad. During the rotation, you can hear the electric motors and feel their vibrations.
1.5MB Quicktime Link, Link to artist’s site
(via JWZ)
Update: Dan sez, “You may not know it, but that’s exactly how the ‘wireframe animations’ were done for 2001: A Space Odyssey.”