Justin Poulsen is an artist, and I don’t just mean that in the sense that he takes photos for a living. He’s also an artiste who spent hours painstakingly moulding and delivering thumbdrives that are exact replicas of his own thumbs.
Poulsen, who is based in Toronto and seems to specialises in dark, visual slights-of-hand, created these literal thumbdrives as part of a batch of promo materials he was sending out to potential clients. And what better way to get peoples’ attention that forcing them to plug your bloody, severed thumb into their computer?
Of course, it wasn’t real blood — it was red paint, painstakingly applied to silicon moulds of Poulsen’s thumbs. This is high-level visual effects handicraft — though digit-drives have been around for a minute, this is by far the most realistic specimen I’ve ever seen. Maybe he’ll start selling them, and we’ll all be able to horrify our bosses and potential clients with the same move.
Check out the making-of video that Poulsen uploaded to Vimeo to illustrate the process, it’s well worth a watch. [Justin Poulsen; h/t Designboom]
