Byte’s April 1986 issue had a focus on number crunching. Mr. Tinney painted a nutcracker with integrated circuits for jaws, crunching a 0 and a 1. I re-created Tinney’s vision as if it were real, and as if a photographer had been standing next to Tinney as he painted.
The nutcracker and integrated circuits are just Photoshopped together. That was straightforward enough.
For the zero and the one, I 3D printed the digits. But I didn’t use them for the photo. Instead I made silicone molds from them, then poured plaster into the molds. Those numbers crunched nicely.