During this year’s Milan design week I will be spending 6 days at the Making Together event in Ventura Lambrate. The theme of the event is participation and collaboration and I was asked to come up with an idea of what I could make there.

My project is titled ‘Between your thoughts and mine’ and attempts to symbolise the connection between two people sharing their knowledge and ideas. It is inspired by the knowledge that our mind holds all the things we’ve ever seen and experienced, and ideas come about by linking these apparently unconnected things together.

My plan is to attempt to build a tree like network of sticks and stick shaped, everyday objects, attached to two chairs using duct tape. The public (that’s you my friend) are invited to bring sticks that can be added to the structure including brushes, walking sticks, a flute, a tennis racket in fact anything that has a stick shape is welcome.

This completely improvised method of making has an unpredictable outcome, it will start by me attaching a stick to a chair leg with some tape and then continuing to build upwards, connecting stick to stick. My aim is to try to connect the stick networks of two chairs together to create a bridged ‘conversation’ between them. The only parts touching the floor are the chair legs.

I asked the organisers to find two chairs and some sticks to get started and then ask the public to bring their own sticky things to add to it. I have no idea what this will turn out like in reality but something will happen. If you are in Milan pop in and say hello (and bring a sticky thing).

Edit. The idea was influenced in part by my earlier door stop extension idea I did during my Speed Creating project.

Making Together: Milan Design Week
April 17th – 22nd 2012.
Milano,
Ventura Lambrate Spazio Logotel,
via Ventura 15
Website

A couple of months ago I tweeted that ‘I want to race a Rapid Prototype Machine (a 3D Printer that makes objects) to make the same thing’. It was just one of those things you can say quickly on twitter as an ‘off the top of your head’ idea.

It turned out that curator Beatrice Galilee had been made aware of my tweet by a colleague and she then asked me if I would like to make my tweet become reality. She was organising an event called ‘Hacked’ based inside a large department store called La Rinascente during the Milan design week.

What I find interesting isn’t just the speed of making things but the simple idea of making an object with my hands competing against a computerised 3D Printer making the same thing. I will start with a block of clay, I’ve not made anything from clay since primary school and I know that my creation, no matter what happens, will definitely have the hand made human touch (imperfections are good!). The machine is controlled by the computer file used to create the model.

I remember hearing about the Kasparov vs Deep Blue chess match where the world champion took on the super computer.

I decided that the thing we both will make is the Duomo, a large cathedral only ten metres away from the department store in Milan’s Piazza del Duomo (a large square). The Duomo has a long history in Milanese life including, bizarrely, the fact that a model of the Duomo was thrown at the italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi not so long ago.

So the plan is simple, I will sit at a table making a model of the Duomo in clay and a 3D Printer will sit opposite me working away on making it’s own Duomo. A large clock will countdown for 1.5 hours.

The 3D printer is a Thing-o-matic MakerBot and will be controlled by WeFab.it
The ‘match’ event is on 19th April, 5 pm till 6.30 pm, in the basement floor, La Rinascente, Milan.

The details of the ‘Hacked’event are below
.
Milan, MONDAY 16 APRIL – SATURDAY 21 APRIL 2012 – ‘Hacked’, 100 hours of rebellious creativity, will be rampaging and rollicking its
way through Rinascente during Milan Design Week. Hacking – the thrill of modification and customization – will be celebrated here in bombastic style.

To celebrate the world’s original design festival, Salone del Mobile, la Rinascente’s flagship store proudly presents ‘Hacked’. Over the course of 100 hours the store will be radically altered – inside and out – as it becomes an interactive experimental lab space. By collaborating with the most exciting young talents in design, la Rinascente invites everyone to ‘Come, explore and hack’

For the line up and times of all ‘Hackers’ click here

Update to the above post see results here…

Stonehenge

The sunset effect was achieved by shining a light through the Jaffa Cakes orange wrapper. I like the realistic reflection.

The white cliffs of Dover

Tower Bridge

Set up with a plastic bag.

The Loch Ness Monster

The Queen’s Guards (The ones with the big bear skin hats outside Buckingham palace)

The Union Jack flag

Queen’s head on coin

The Thames river

All of them.

You can follow my future creations on twitter or facebook. Or have a look at the other things I’ve made on this site using the menu on the left or visit my main project site here.
Thanks goes out to Joe McGorty who helped me get the photographs done.

Love and Protest, 2011 (Detail)

Love and Protest, 2011
In these times of peaceful protest in the face of armed repression, a protester and soldier kiss.

UC Davis Protest, 2011
I find it disturbing when people in positions of power abuse it and lose any sense of humanity. I was shocked to see the footage of the pepper spraying of people sitting in a peaceful protest at UC Davis. I felt a need to capture this incident in time.

Photograph: Wayne Tilcock/AP

Captured, 2011
CCTV cameras and three people photographing and videoing. Everyone is capturing everyone.

Comfortably Oblivious, 2011
Here two people fail to give up their seat to an elderly woman with walking stick and bags walking round and round.

The Beautiful Game, 2011
A footballer holds aloft a trophy in the form of a pound symbol (£) as three prospective WAGs fight for his attention.

Love and Protest, UC Davis Protest and Captured are on display at La Scatola Gallery until the 10th of January.
Comfortably Oblivious and The Beautiful Game are on display along with The Sitting Man and Unrequited Handshake at Phillips de Pury until 31 January 2012.

For larger images visit my project website page here
You can see the earlier watch sculptures here

To mark the 10th anniversary of the War Bowl I have created two new limited edition versions. The red Battle of Waterloo bowl is made with melted British Artillery and French Infantry figures. The black English Civil War bowl uses Royalists and Republican figures.

The War Bowls, together with limited edition prints of my invention drawings and anti-theft rust bike stickers are available online here here .

The War Bowls are also available over christmas at

Phillips de Pury, 45-47 Brook Street at Claridge’s, London, info here

and

The Temporium, 65 Monmouth Street,
Seven Dials, Covent Garden,
London WC2H 9DG
see info here

The War Bowl is hand made in small numbers, each bowl is stamped on the base by me with the date.
Each bowl is unique due to it’s hand made nature and comes with a loose set of the soldiers that were used in it’s creation.
The new red and black bowls are limited to an edition of 250 each.

The watch sculptures will be exhibited at Dezeen Space in Shoreditch, London from 17 September to 16 October.
54 Rivington Street, London EC2A 3QN.
more pictures and info on my other site dominicwilcox.com

London Looter: I had to walk across Mare st in Hackney to get home during the riots. I remember seeing a boy carrying a lcd tv down a back st. I noticed how the police seemed unsure how to react, holding their circular shields while the boy held a rectangular tv.

Adventures of a young vegetarian : a small girl attempts to stop a butcher chopping up a pig by hanging on his arm while the pig floats away.

The Sitting man: A man sits for a moment.

Hide ‘n’ seek

Watch sweeper: the numbers and hands are swept away on the second hand.

A man so engrossed in his iphone that he fails to notice a monkey balancing on the head of a weightlifting boy on the arm of an elderly roller skater.

One man stands with arms folded while another moves around in continual hope that his hand will be shook.

This photograph was taken by photographer Joe McGorty for an article about me in this month’s 100th edition of icon magazine. Since my studio can be anywhere, I decided to make a Tree Branch Work Desk to enable me to think up a tree with a cup of tea and pencils at hand. We decided to document the making of the desk as seen in the animation put together by Joe.

Photograph of Dominic Wilcox copyright Joe McGorty

I am happy to say my gloves cast from my own hands are in the excellent exhibition ‘The Power of Making’ at London’s V&A museum.

“Power of Making celebrates the role of making in our lives by presenting an eclectic selection of over 100 exquisitely crafted objects. The exhibition is a cabinet of curiosities showing works by both amateurs and leading makers from around the world, presenting a range of skills with imaginative and spectacular results.” Curated by Daniel Charny

KKoutlet recently approached me to take part in their exhibition ‘Object Abuse’. The challenge was to ‘take an everyday object, remould, rebuild and repurpose it to create an entirely new item, using as little additional materials as possible.’

One day I was walking through an art shop and looked at the brushes. They seemed pleasant objects so I decided to come up with something using one of them. I remembered how I used to forget to wash paint brushes after using them and then would find them hard and unusable the next day. After quite a few trials and mistakes I managed to make something useful, a coat hook. Handily there is a hole at the top of the handle for the screw.

OBJECT ABUSE, PRIVATE VIEW THURSDAY 1 SEPTEMBER 7 – 9PM. EXHIBITION RUNS 2 – 25 SEPTEMBER
KK OUTLET, 42 HOXTON SQUARE, LONDON, N1 6PB
Exhibition PDF info
For hi res images email

‘The challenge is to design a pylon that has the potential to deliver for future generations, whilst balancing the needs of our communities and preserving the beauty of our countryside.’

Personally I quite like their current look but here is my idea to solve two issues in one, the fact that we are running out of landfill space and the desire for pylons that preserve the beauty of our countryside. They could even be built around existing pylons so are low cost.

Alternatively just rename pylons, Mini Eiffel Towers and the public will adore them, maybe even pay to go up them.

This is an alternative to my idea I did a while back for hill covered tower blocks.

This grand old building in central London is being demolished from today to make way for a new student union building at LSE. I was amazed to find this out and I am sure there will be many in that area that will get a bit of a shock when it starts.

I was contacted about making something in the building for a quickly organised exhibition that referenced it’s life and history in some way. The St Philips building started in 1903 as a workhouse Infirmary for the poor before going on to be a hospital for women and then bought by the London School of Economics.

I was shown around the building, all rooms were empty apart from one remaining locked office that was abandoned with all it’s contents intact. I thought that it was as if the room was waiting to die and I wanted to ease its transition from this world.

I double and triple checked that the contents of the room were no longer wanted and they were left to the fate of demolition.

My thought for the office was to leave it intact but to remove the colour from every aspect in the room (via white paint) thereby taking away a layer of reality and connection to our world as it moves closer to its imminent death.

In order to distance the room from our world further I decided to keep the door locked so people had to peer in through the small window.

I was interviewed by Paul Coyte yesterday on the UK’s national radio station Gold you can listen to it here…

America’s national public radio NPR did a nice little piece on it here…

It has been featured on The Discovery channel in Canada see here (after the ads)

It was also in the Metro newspaper in London.
And it’s been all over the web. It is interesting how things start spreading out across different media.

To go to the original Finger-Nose post click here

I sometimes use my touchphone in the bath. I know it’s stupid. One problem I encounter is that when put my left hand in the water without thinking, it gets wet and unusable for touchscreen navigation. It is too risky to try to hold and navigate with one hand. I found that I could use my nose to scroll but I couldn’t see where my nose was touching precisely. It was at that point that I came up with this idea of a nose extension ‘finger’ that would allow navigation while my phone is firmly held by one hand.

I did send a tweet from the bath last night which was typed as ‘Hello I am tweeting with my nose’ unfortunately due to the phone’s
auto-correct it sent it as…

I lost 2 followers.

It’s also very handy when out and about multi-tasking on a cold day while wearing gloves. I imagine it would be a great accessory for iPad users.

I bought a handheld stylus that I embedded in the plaster nose. The plaster comes mixed with fibres that make it look hairy.

Although this is handy for me in the bath and outdoors it touches on possible uses for people without use of a hand. Though the design could be made more ‘subtle’ for everday use maybe coming from around the neck.

UPDATE: see the amazing amount of press this received here
It was on BBC’s Have I got News for You here

If you like this you might find my other projects interesting listed on the left menu like my Speed creating project where I made something creative each day for 30 days.
Follow me on twitter or facebook.

For new visitors, VariationsonNormal.com is where I put my sketchbook ideas and experiments. On the left you can see a list of categories for easy navigation. Recently I completed a project called Speed Creating where I made something creative each day for 30 days.