Turning Electronics into Sculptures

Electronic waste often ends up in places where it isn’t appreciated. Sometimes, it ends its life cycle in fiery pits in China and other countries. MIT students have tracked urban trash and found that e-waste ends up in all kinds of unexpected spots.

Today, Electronics Takeback Coalition posted photos of another possible destination for our computer chips: an art exhibit in Berlin, Germany. At the Electronics Goes Green 2012+ conference, artists Muharrem Batman, Ayse Batman and Judith Brun displayed these gorgeous compositions of resistors, plugs, circuit boards, connectors, wires and other electronic fragments.

I paid for part of my college education by building electronics. During my first year working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s physics department, I thought the colors of resistors were attractive. I brought some of the discarded resistors home to add to art projects, but never figured out what I wanted to do with them.

Since then, I’ve seen electronics recycled in many ways – as jewelry, business card holders, bookmarks, coasters and clipboards. But the artwork above is the most inventive reuse of electronics I’ve found yet.

Have you seen any interesting reuses of electronic scraps? If so, what were they?

Subverting the plastic bottle

Trash Menagerie, a show in the Art and Nature Center at the Peabody Essex Museum, uses recycled materials to tell the story of our view of objects and our choices about what is disposable. If we saw these objects differently, what would happen?

The artists bring this question to life in many different media. On walking into the exhibit, I was confronted by a green-eyed dragon made of bundt cake pans and bicycle brakes. Each section of a pan was part of its body; each brake had become a leg. I can imagine how much welding it took to get that right.

Behind the dragon, visitors meet a pair of mechanical insects – built from drafting tools and sewing machine parts – and their sister sculpture, a squid made of small electronics.

Ironic uses of plastic are a central theme of the exhibit. A shimmering trout turns out to be a composite of layered plastic. An ethereal crowd of hovering jellyfish and other sea creatures reveal their past lives as plastic soda bottles.

A statement by Nnenna Okore, the artist who rolled magazines into a roving band of large spiders, says that seeing poverty in Africa gave her a different perspective on what reused materials are worth.

Seeing ways to reuse everyday items we throw away – magazine covers, plastic bottles, newspapers – is a creative act. When we reframe what a plastic bottle means to us, that’s when the sea creatures start emerging. Literally.