Over the past couple of years I’ve been trying to keep an old Apple Laptop alive by doing things like replacing hard drives, upgrading ram and clearing out dust. However, it finally stopped working in a final way in September. I’ve since bought a new laptop thats better in almost every way but it feels kind of empty. I had my old computer through college and for the start of ITP so there was tons of weird crap on it; my home folder was filled with torrent files, uninstallers, one off episodes of tv shows, games, papers I had written, versions and and more versions of resumes. It was like a playroom with toys scattered all over it.
My goal for this Readymades assignment is to give my computer this kind of appearance/personality with sound. My plan is to collect a bunch of system sounds, tv clips, and sound effects from games I’ve played and play them through the dead computers speakers if I can. I’m thinking about joining it with a few other dead computers that have accumulated at my parents house and doing the same. These sounds will be triggered via various means; Initially I want to work with accelerometers so that if the computer is moved or interacted with it begins spewing out these seemingly instinctual sounds it remembers from it’s past life. On the other laptops may make simple sounds when they detect movement via a PIR sensor. Ideally this will appear as a pile of zombie computers each with their own characteristics but all abandoned and not useful, made for you but no longer able to fulfill its purpose.
I’d like to to look like a cross between these two images ^
I also started working with Max MSP and strung together some sounds from a video game I spend a lot of time playing (Railroad Tycoon 3). 
Right now I’m thinking the sensors will be mapped to increase the computers level of “excitement” which will accordingly play more sounds it “remembers” and maybe at a faster tempo. Overtime this excitement level will cool down and the computers will become quiet again. I think the metronome will be useful in controlling when the different sounds fire so that they don’t all just overlap into unintelligible random sound. I picture the user picking up or sifting through the laptops and noticing that one or more of them seems to respond to stimuli. If the computer with the accelerometer is picked up for instance it might get really excited and start making all sorts of fast and crazy noises, but when its put down the speed and number of sounds its making fades until it goes quiet again.
More coming soon.