West African Inventor Makes a $100 3D Printer From E-Waste
Kodjo Afate Gnikou, a resourceful inventor from Togo in West Africa, has made a $100 3D printer which he constructed from parts he scrounged from broken scanners, computers, printers and other e-waste. The fully functional DIY printer cost a fraction of those currently on the market, and saves environmentally damaging waste from reaching landfill sites.
Discarded electronic equipment is one of the world’s fastest-growing sources of waste, as consumers frequently replace “old” models that become more obsolete each year. However instead of letting e-waste sit them on the scrap pile or head to the landfill, Kodjo Afate Gnikou decided to utilize spare parts in order to create a cheap, DIY 3D printer.
Gnikou is part of WoeLab, a hackerspace in the city of Lomé, and has big plans for his recycling project. According to his crowd funding page, he is working with FacLab-France in the WAFATE to Mars project, which aims to make machines from recycled e-waste to prepare for missions on Mars. Systems like the 3D printer could become a crucial part of missions on the Red Planet should they ever go ahead.
Gnikou’s 3D printer was mostly made from materials he obtained from a junk yard in Lomé, though he did have to buy a few parts. The entire system cost about $100 which is a bargain considering current models on the market can cost thousands of dollars.
According to his fundraising page, Gnikou aims that with his project, he will “put technology into needy hands and give Africa the opportunity to not only be a spectator but to play the first role in a more virtuous industrial revolution.”
All photos by Ihsaan Haffejee
Glenn Ligon, Give us a Poem (Palindrome #2), 2007
“Glenn Ligon made this neon piece […] in 2007, and I saw it a little while back on the wall of the Studio Museum in Harlem, where it’s part of the permanent collection. The work is built around an incident that occurred at Harvard in 1975, when Muhammad Ali had just finished a speech and a student in the audience asked him to improvise a poem: ‘Me/We’ was the pithy verse Ali offered. Even then, at the height of the Black Power movement, it was an intriguingly opaque statement that could have been read as a gesture of solidarity between the black boxer and his white audience, or as an underlining of their difference. In Ligon’s work, the two words become a visual palindrome, of sorts – symmetrical top and bottom – and alternate being lit (white) and unlit (black), which just increases the tension inherent in them. In 2014, in a museum in Harlem, it strikes me that the tension is between the artist and the audience he addresses – with the issue of race still there, but now wrapped up in larger issues of aesthetic communities and the class, and color, they imply." Blake Gopnik, The Daily Pic
Fulani Boys, Jos, Nigeria in the early 90’s by Mike Blyth
What is exactly is African Electronics?
Artist Serge Attukwei Clottey views ‘African Electronics’ as a call for African empowerment, and a celebration of the innovation and energy which has been flowing through the continent for centuries. This film follows Serge in his studio and at Chale Wote street art festival as he explores how creative young Africans are taking charge of their future by embracing the cultural and natural richness…
View On WordPress
Isuama Ibo. Isu tribe. ‘Okorosie’ masquerade. Masks called ‘Nwanyioma’ and ‘Akatakpuru’ 1931 Vintage Nigerian photos
RAMM:∑LL:Z∑∑
yes
"Of whom and of what are we contemporaries? And, first and foremost, what does it mean to be contemporary?" Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est-ce que le contemporain?, Paris, Rivages, 2008. Photo: Icarus 13, Kiluanji Kia Henda
201 posts