ABOUT
BIOGRAPHY
Mike Silverman makes intricate wall sculptures from the components of discarded technology — hard drive platters, printed circuit boards, the physical remnants of our digital lives. His practice finds an unlikely beauty in hardware built for obsolescence, transforming it into work that is alive with reflection, movement, and meaning.
Silverman came to art as a second act. His background is in religion and business — an undergraduate degree in the former, a master's in the latter — and his formal art training amounts to a single stone carving class taken decades ago at the Pratt Fine Arts Center. Everything since has been self-taught: the design process, the fabrication techniques, the vocabulary he's built entirely on his own terms.
Based in Palm Beach County, Florida, his work has been shown in solo exhibitions and at major art fairs including Red Dot Miami and the International Symposium of Experimental Art.
Artist’s Statement
I build wall sculptures from reclaimed hard drive platters and motherboards. The combination of materials, the use of light and reflection, and the conceptual territory this work explores form something genuinely singular. Other artists work with e-waste. Others work with reflective surfaces. Others make conceptually driven figurative sculpture. No one is doing all three at once
The work explores the relationship between technology, humanity, and the inner life — how we see ourselves, how we connect with others, and what we're becoming as technology becomes inseparable from who we are.
A Living Surface
The reflective quality of the hard drive platters is central to everything I make. They don't just reflect the designs cut into them — they reflect the room, the light, and the viewer, casting intricate forms onto surrounding walls. The work changes with every shift in angle and light. It's never the same twice.
Every Piece Has a Story
I want the work to resonate beyond the visual. Each piece has an accompanying text at the bottom of its page — an invitation to go deeper into what the work is asking.
Process
Design
Ideas come from personal experience and the questions I'm sitting with — and it often takes a year or more to get from an idea to something I can actually build. Some concepts start as sketches; others begin with AI image generation as a rapid ideation tool, arriving at something close enough to a working outline. The final composition always takes shape during fabrication, not before.
Fabrication
My fabrication process is the result of over three years of self-directed experimentation. I source discarded motherboards and hard drives from online resellers and dismantle every component by hand — harvesting the platters, stripping the circuit boards, prepping materials with heat and wet sanding. Each piece is precision-cut on a scroll saw, fit-checked on a grinding station, and mounted on cut-to-fit sheet aluminum.
Every sculpture is one of a kind. There are no editions.
Exhibition History
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2026
Persistence of Matter, Cornell Art Museum
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2026
Kinetic Energy, Cultural Council for Palm Beach County
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2025
Red Dot Miami, Miami Art Week
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2025
Tech Soul: Art from Digital Detritus, GallerRE
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2025
Perspective Beyond the Surface (Boca Museum Juried Show at BRiC)
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2025
Innovations 2025, International Society of Experimental Art
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2025
Big and Bold, Carteam USA
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2025
Art of the Heart, Cugini Gallery
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2025
Waste to Wonder, Resource Depot Gallery
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2024
VAILED! AI in the Arts, The Box Gallery
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2024
Hopeless Romantic, Arts Garage