Motherboard Project

The Motherboard project explores the architecture hidden within discarded computer parts. Conceived by the artist as a room-by-room experience, it conjures cities built from the inside of machines. Working in bas-relief, sculpture, photography, and installation, the work spans multiple mediums.

About

Nicolas Ruel (b. 1973, Montréal) is a visual artist whose practice spans photography, sculpture, and installation, which he uses as both documentation and transformation devices. His work investigates architecture, urban culture, and temporality through a precise visual language rooted in an in-camera double-exposure technique. Drawing on cubist aesthetics, Ruel combines two perspectives into a single image, challenging conventional perceptions of time and space.

Polychrome Cities

Color-shifting paint that changes color depending on the viewing angle. This effect is achieved through the use of pearlescent particles or specialized pigments that refract light, creating a dynamic visual shift.  As the viewing angle changes, the light reflects differently, resulting in a shift in perceived color.

RUINS OF THE FUTUR

Reconstructing the historic city through recycled computer components, ROMA explores the duality of time: the enduring weight of memory and history versus the impermanence and obsolescence of digital materials. The work reflects on how memory, culture, and technology intersect, collide, and transform our experience of the past.

Monochrome Cities

FUTURISTIC ARCHEOLOGY

SCULPTURE SERIES

Exploring technological residues and the afterlife of machines, the Sculpture Series transforms discarded technologies into sculptural narratives. Using computer components such as motherboards, heatsinks, CPU and GPU units, mobile phones, RAM, fans, relays, chipsets, and memory cards, the works reframe obsolete systems as a new artistic language.

"In my view, it is merely a question of scale, as motherboards are comprised of the same elements as cities — the large avenues and their monuments, the highways and their junctions, the malls and their vast parking lots, the stadiums, the train stations, the industrial and residential areas, and the green spaces that find their way, all at once safe havens and pockets of resistance to standardization."

- Nicolas Ruel

The Motherboard is the Territory

Their scale itself creates a form of discourse, as their material is sourced from a microscopic world that extends by multiplying and emulating an “ancient” order, that of cities and communication networks, infrastructures, roads, lanes, and channels. The occupation of space by this segment of the city creates a sprawl that extends beyond this space. A physical encroachment that turns into an emotional one.

Photography

BAS-RELIEF COLOR PRINTING

Lightbox

ANIMATED DOUBLE EXPOSURE PHOTOGRAPHY OF RECYCLED MOTHERBOARDS

NANO ARCHITECTURE

A Mosaic of Portraits to Depict the Souls of the Machines

"Motherboard: the digital world is built from the inside out, like our cities. This inspired me to create a new language, a new aesthetic presented in several mediums, with motherboards as its epicenter, whose territory extends further than we can imagine."

- Nicolas Ruel

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