Italian born, London based designer, Leonardo Ulian has created something spectacularly cool with his latest work, “Technological mandala 02 (The beginning)”. At approximately 47 inches square, the mandala is an intricate technological lace of meticulously soldered circuitry, microchips and other electronic components all encased within a simple black wood frame. While the piece shown above (completed in June of 2012) is Ulian’s largest and most complex mandala to date, he has several smaller mandalas in his portfolio. Ulian describes his work as follows…
“With the Technological Mandala series I combined the suggestive and spiritual meaning of the Indian Mandalas with something that has been perceived as far from that sphere of influence, technology. The search of perfection as necessity within the electronics industry has stimulated my curiosity to produce this series of pieces in order to evocate that specific need. I wanted to show what has been hidden from the eyes of the consumer, representing electronic circuits as extraordinary objects where the perfection of the design can become almost something ethereal. The shapes and colors of the single components intrigued me for pure aesthetic reasons with the consequent loss of the actual functionality of the component itself. My circuits/ Mandalas do not activate lights or do other complicated function, but they simply function as stimulus to produce simple questions like: what will happen if a real electric current flows through the Circuit/Mandala?” – Leonardo Ulian via Colossal