If you are in Bengaluru, there is a chance that the radio or the television set you bought 20 years ago, and which you discarded last year has landed in eco-artist Vishwanath Mallabadi’s upcycling store in Rajajinagar. He carefully dismantles them to create various 2D and 3D art works, murals, or even a hat—he proudly donned it during his recent online interaction with TMS. The beige hat, adorned with colourful wires and lights, represents Vishwanath’s love and mastery of creating sustainable artwork from electronic waste. “My artworks embody a blend of form, texture and functionality bringing out the creative potential of e-waste,” says the 61-year-old, who moved to the southern Indian city from Delhi in 1993.
At Vishwanath’s studio, a magnificent “sustainable cow” is being built with the keys from keyboards of discarded desktops. It is his most “prestigious and challenging project” so far and “it will be ready in a month from now”. Though Vishwanath has no specific venue in mind for its display, he envisions the installation in places such as airports or shopping malls that have significant foot traffic. “The goal for this is to capture the attention of a broad audience, inspiring a commitment to preserving nature,” he adds.
The cow is 5.1 feet (height) x 6.3 feet (width) x 2.2 feet (depth). In its embellishment, special adhesives are being used to stick the keyboard keys and fibre-reinforced plastic on the 3D sculpture. Discarded electronic components such as resistors, PCBs, capacitors, SFPs, copper coils and colourful wires all go into Vishwanath’s artwork. “I also experiment with materials such as plastic, scrap denim, metal and wood to further enrich the creative repertoire,” he says.
Vishwanath tells us he procured around 400 white-colour keyboards, extracting 104 keys from each one as his requirement for creating the cow were 40,000 keys. “Acquiring a white keyboard posed a challenge, but discovering that 60 were available at a recycling centre in Mysore, I felt compelled to make the trip. As I don’t have a team, I extracted the keys from all the keyboards by myself. Overall, it took me over four months to collect 40,000 keys,” he says.
Discovering his calling
Vishwanath grew up in a creative household, watching his father, the late DM Shambhu, a renowned painter and sculptor, at work. His older brother is a landscape designer; a younger brother is an animator. Originally from Chitradurga, a city in Karnataka, Vishwanath was raised in New Delhi and earned his Bachelor in Fine Arts in Applied Arts in 1987 from Delhi University. He started his career as a videographic in the media industry. He worked for a handful of IT companies in various capacities before joining Wipro Technologies as a software design analyst in Bangalore in 2004.
“Working in mobile development as a UI/UX designer for one of Wipro’s clients, I came across various captivating and colourful electronic parts, and it just gave wings to my vivid imagination. I dismantled over one lakh electronic devices out of curiosity to get vivid textures, colours and shapes and also to understand their functioning,” says the artist. Soon enough the scrap piled up in his studio. The first thing he made was a spider. Over the years, he has created various creatures, human sculptures, and 2D art. However, his favourite artwork is the Future City or the Smart City—crafted from upcycled aluminium heat sinks, it is valued at Rs 10 lakh.
Passion project
The end-to-end process of creating a 3D sculpture from e-waste can be exhausting. He says age never comes in the way of his ambitions. “On various occasions, while dismantling the electronic products, I come across dead and alive insects, cockroaches, and lizards. Usually, people freak out, but not me. I have risen in the middle of the night to work on discovering suitable solutions to challenges,” he says.
Vishwanath also delivers talks, participates in seminars on sustainability, and conducts workshops on creating art from e-waste. In a 2018 ASSOCHAM report, India was among the top five countries in e-waste generation, he says, so he is doing his bit, he adds.