This is an odd story and only lightly ties into recycle and repair but it was very inspiring to me and this is my blog and I make the rules. Back in early 2023 I found a bunch of scrap electronics in by a dumpster. The scrap included several hard drives. On a 240GB CORSAIR FORCE GT SSD I found quite a surprise. There was over 500 design files many of which were labeled SKRILLEX. The files were last modified in late 2011. Almost all of the files were for TouchDesigner or some other design software. I did however find a handful of stills and videos of the graphics.
For a year I sat on these files and only pulled them out for the rare drunken party trick. Recently it’s been on my mind a lot and I decided to see what the internet had to say. I made a video showing the drive, explaining how I came into possessing it, and sharing some of the rendered images and videos. I also posted the video on Reddit.
Tik Tok Vidoe
r/EDM Post
r/DataHoarder post
Now I am not a EDM fam or a Skrillex fan but I do remember the 2011 boom in dubstep and Skrillex’s career. The video by no means went viral but the amount of people who were excited by it was really encouraging. A lot of people wanted me to share the files and shared with me how exciting it was to see the raw graphics “resurface”.
Now some clarifications.
Very shortly after posting the video I was contacted by Production Club, the production company that helped design the show and worked the tour. They were extremely nice and invited me to their studio for a tour. My partner and I went down to their studio for a few hours and learned a lot about the project. They showed us their render farm and explained the purpose behind some of the files I found. I really can’t thank them enough for the experience and their generosity.
I was also able to get in contact with Roboto who was a very important graphics designer for Skrillex at the time. He also was incredibly nice and informative about the files.
Now unfortunately I do not know anything about this type of design and I do not know much about that industry so I understand that this blog post is rather vague but for me it was an incredibly inspiring moment to keep learning computer science. My whole goal with this field of study is to keep technology from needlessly ending up in a landfill. While the files were not technically lost, and nothing was particularly gained, I did successfully keep some hard drives out of the trash and shared a unique perspective with an enthusiastic fan base. That’s a big win for me at this stage in my journey.
Why is this blog post called part 1? Because I am waiting to hear from the parties involved about the legality of archiving and sharing the files. At the very least I will archive them with a safe archive but I hope the enthusiasm around this video encourages creators to share behind the scenes looks like this more.