San Jose Recycler GreenMouse Helps Transform e-Waste Into Techno Art

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--One person’s e-waste is another person’s art.

“By partnering with GreenMouse Recycling, Anna is giving a second life to these discarded gadgets. Such familiar, mundane materials are ‘hooks:’ she transforms them into abstract components with oddly fetching texture, shape, and color”

San Jose-based e-waste collector/recycler GreenMouse Recycling reinforced that truism after officials from the San Jose Museum of Art approached owner Evelyn O’Donnell to provide a selection of collected e-waste among other “raw” materials in commissioning “Beta Space: Anna Sew Hoy ,” an exhibition at the venerated Silicon Valley institution.

Set to run until February 2012 as part of the museum’s on-going experimental gallery, “Beta Space,” the project focuses on new, interdisciplinary and creative uses of non-traditional media and materials by internationally acclaimed artists, such as Hoy.

Using San Jose’s GreenMouse Recycling contributions, artisans from the Bay Area Glass Institute (BAGI) under Sew Hoy’s direction created a new group of sculptural works in large custom-blown, glass vessels containing the electronic detritus.

“By partnering with GreenMouse Recycling, Anna is giving a second life to these discarded gadgets. Such familiar, mundane materials are ‘hooks:’ she transforms them into abstract components with oddly fetching texture, shape, and color,” said JoAnne Northrup, the museum’s chief curator for the exhibition.

Upon selecting the artist, the Museum asked Sew Hoy to visit and respond to San Jose and Silicon Valley’s technology culture as she conceived her new work.

Sew Hoy said it made sense to look at e-waste as Silicon Valley start-up companies go boom and bust, offices are equipped with old keyboards, monitors, and printers, and then must be cleared out.

GreenMouse’s O’Donnell didn’t hesitate when contacted for a contribution of e-waste: “We always say ‘yes, we can help.’”

She noted GreenMouse already hosts a permanent display of obscure and early computer technologies that illustrates the history of obsolesce in both industrial design and computer technologies.

“Besides the mini-museum in our offices, our fundraising work with community collections and arts organizations is well known here in the valley. It’s just one way we distinguish ourselves from other, more industrial collectors,” O’Donnell said. “Now we have another.”

GreenMouse Recycling is a San Jose-based company that provides free computer-recycling services to businesses, community and residential consumers throughout the Bay Area. Founded in 2004, GreenMouse uses recycling to help support community jobs programs and fundraising for arts and theatre groups and other non-profits. Visit http://www.greenmouse.com.

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