Chalk Art 2025: Relay Logic
Completed 2025-09-20. Available releases:
Direct Link This is a chalk art painting I made on my square for the Forest Grove Chalk Art Festival in 2025.
Consumed with my effort to build a relay computer, I decided to spread the joy of relays by drawing one. I used this AHL2/AHL2N 'ice cube'-style relay as a reference image, mostly just to get some of the mechanical shapes.
The best way to use chalk is to crush it up into a powder, mix with water, and apply like a paint. This covers a concrete sidewalk square more fully, and the result lasts longer. I was aware I was drawing the relay a bit small, as I was trying to finish quickly. Still, the outer space looked empty to me, and I filled it with some of the logic gates you can make out of relays.
I think my chalk art goal has become to be mysterious, yet also enticing to a larger world most people have never encountered. The ways people reacted to this piece generally fell into only a few categories:
- Most people didn't understand it and were too afraid to ask. One girl muttered something like "just looking at that makes my head explode". It's a little discouraging when passersby see my neighbor's beautiful and more accessible artwork, they're smiling and taking pictures . . . and then they move to mine and the smile just dies, to be replaced by mild horror. Alas, it is a price that must be paid.
- The second group didn't understand it and did ask. I gave a brief explanation, but the kids these days don't know what electromagnets, transistors, or logic are, so it was more of a challenge than I expected.
- The final group were electrical engineers in one form or another, who recognized—and in some cases checked—it.
See also my previous (2024) chalk art entry.
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