BENGALURU: Imagine Vincent Van Gogh, the Dutch post-Impressionist artist, seeing his magnum opus ‘The Starry Night’ rise from e-waste. Well, graphic designer and eco artist Vishwanath Mallabadi has turned e-waste into objets d’art especially this classic artwork among other 200 pieces that he’s created. He shares, “If you look closer at Van Gogh’s painting the basic elements are brush strokes with fine balance. And when you look at a resistor which is used to register current and voltage, it bears similarity to the sweeps done by the artist. I visualised it. Resistors usually is a cylindrical component, which comes in the base colour of yellow, red and blue. I used them to recreate the painting which is the size of an A3 sheet.”
Vishawanath, 57, works for an MNC in Bengaluru. He displayed several of his works at the International Data Science Technology Conference for Sustainable Development Goals in Hyderabad, which included creatures, robots, jewellery, wall art and decorative pieces created from e-waste such as motherboards, CPUs, EPROMs, SMD Radial Capacitors, Laptop’s LED Display Boards, discarded sugar checking meters, PCB boards and other items.
But if he’s in the software industry, what kindled the love of art in him? The answer is simple. He studied Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) from Delhi College of Art. “I have basic knowledge and experience in art. User Interface and UX (User Experience) is what brought me to the software industry,” he shares, adding, “I have been creating art objects from e-waste for the past six years.” By now he’s created more than 200 pieces. Among his creations are butterflies made from keyboard membrane, opus from surface mounting device, tortoise made from telephone wire, buttons, and clutch plate. He signs off, “The unused e-waste needs to be recycled and with the human touch the same can come back to us in different and better forms.”