Steam Powered Internet Machine.

In a field near Sandwich in Kent, UK, local model maker Alan Gibbs fires up his steam engine which then powers an Apple Mac computer:

At a table, curator Rob Tufnell is using an Apple Mac powered by the engine. For this is the Steam Powered Internet Machine: the latest deeply eccentric project from Turner-prizewinning artist Jeremy Deller and his collaborator Alan Kane. "We were thinking about something that connects the industrial revolution and the digital revolution," said Deller. Kane added: "They are worlds apart but there’s also a proximity. The steam age and the digital age are not so far apart."

There’s a marvellous impracticality to the machine. But it does work – unlike the disused Richborough power station, whose cooling towers loom, and the abandoned wind turbine at the end of the field. "We like inverting economics," said Kane, adding, perhaps unnecessarily: "This is a very uneconomic way of having a portable computer."

Link | Jeremy Deller’s website – via Fortrean Times