VW Think Blue Beetle ecofashioned from trash …

On display at the Kala Ghoda Art Festival in Mumbai, Indian artist Haribaabu Naatesan (Hari) applied mukti to embody the Think Blue VW Beetle. The project is part of VW’s new Think Blue eco awareness campaign.

Hari applies the Indian religious concept of ‘mukti’, the liberation from the cycle of reincarnation, as a metaphor for his craft. While at the same time reusing and re-adapting physical materials, Hari notes, ‘what I do is give the material mukti. Whatever material I use, it remains art forever; (on the conceptual level) it is not recycled again.’

Hari transformed over 2805 pieces of scrap metal in the life-size ‘think blue beetle’. The car utilizes 800 spark plugs, 200 bottle caps, 60 mother boards, audio cassettes, speakers, cans, keyboards, typewriters, and hundreds of other materials.

The scrap material was collected by VolksWagen over the course of various cleanup drives. Hari then dismantled each object and segregated it by shape. ‘I see all objects as forms,’ the artist explains in an interview with the Asian Age newspaper. As Hari says, ‘so my mind is always open to thinking I can create this out of this form. In the ‘think blue beetle’ you’ll see that I have used old speakers for the headlights, a mouse for the indicator light. For the wheel caps, we sourced old gramophone records … the function (of the discarded object) isn’t important, I work according to the form.’

photo credit: Rushlane

via: designboom.com