Mosaics made of wire

Upcycling wires in mosaics

Wire mosaic inspired by the picture Mode by August Macke

Inpsired by the picture Modefenster by August Macke

The idea

In 1995, a box of used multicore cables seemed to be to valuable to be sorted out, so I decided to make something artistic of it. Influenced by some artwork I found in books, I decided to try a mosaic.
The bits and bytes formerly transmitted via the cable now translate into the small pieces of a mosaic. You don't know whether the artwork visualized with the mosaic was really transmited via the cable but it may be possible. The transmission took place as electrical impulse, as a sequence of "on" and "off". Imagine a picture disassembled in a large set of small points, the pixels. The color of each points is represented as a number and the number is represented by bytes which are represented by bits, by 0 and 1.

Work in progress of a wire mosaic which is inpsired by Vincent von Gogh

Inpsired by the picture "The Starry Night" by Vincent van Gogh

The 0 and 1 are translated into electrical impulses that were running through the wires of the cable. The one who reads the impulses may assemble them back to the initial information. The small pieces of the mosaic represent the disassembled former information of an image. While information is flowing in, piece by piece, the initial information re-materializes.
Making the mosaic takes hours and you need a lot of patience and staying power to follow the changing colors, its curves and changes of direction. While the transmission of such information with electrical impulses happens in a second or less, the process of glueing all the pieces to a mosaic is the opposite: it slows down everything and makes each point of the picture very conscious.

The raw material

Some years ago, cables were the main type of connection between devices. Today, they are often replaced by Wifi, Bluetooth or other wireless technologies. Nevertheless, there are a lot of cables around, with thin and thick wires that can serve as raw material for wire mosaics.

The mosaic pieces

After removing the wires from the multicore cable, they are sorted by color. There are more colors in cables than you would expect. This is because a red wire in one cable may have a different tone than a red in another wire. In addition, some wires are bi-colored ones.
Now, the wires are cut into 2 mm - 10 mm long pieces which are collected in appropriate boxes.

Gallery

Some of my pictures are only studies of color or glueing techniques. Other are inspired by masterworks of famous peintures.

If you are interested in buying one the mosaics or if you're a gallery, feel free to contact me. Contact data can be found in the imprint section below.