Snowflake Circuitry

Joe Liles, standing next to the cupola on top of Watts Hall.

Snowflake Circuitry

1988

Way back in 1982, a junior at NCSSM by the name of Michael Lefler approached me in the Art classroom on fourth floor Bryan with an interesting proposal. He had learned from a Scientific American article that a circuitboard could be made to go into your personal computer (they were primitive back then) that would soup up your computer’s graphics abilities. The article had a picture of the raw circuitboard pattern and a list of all the components that needed to be installed on the board. Michael told me that it was possible to use screenprinting to print the image of the circuitboard pattern in oil-based ink on a copper coated fiberglass board, then etch the board in sulfuric acid, and last, clean off the ink with paint thinner. Presto! You would have the base circuitboard. We printed the image on a blank circuitboard, and after etching, we cleaned off the ink. It was a moment of Nirvana to me! The golden copper image that was revealed was breathtaking. Michael got his circuitboard, and I got a new direction to explore in art. A local company gave me all their scrap cutoff pieces of copper material and I, along with some of my students, started applying the methods I learned with Michael. The first circuitboard print I made was “Snowflake Circuitry.” The printing and the etching produced a copper image, but I thought the coldness of silver would be appropriate, so I coated all the copper with solder.