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Tom Dixon Attends Stockholm Design Week as a Hologram

02.22.21 | By
Tom Dixon Attends Stockholm Design Week as a Hologram

With travel lockdowns putting a kibosh on media events attendance, British design iconoclast Tom Dixon found a crafty way to get around current restrictions and attend Stockholm Design Week. Dixon’s latest collection, CLOUD arrives accompanied alongside his projected digital likeness, one scheduled to attend multiple events within a 24-hour period in the form of “holoTOM”.

Dixon’s holographic facsimile is first and foremost “there” in Stockholm to bring attention to the designer’s latest collection of aluminum vessels, vases and platters. Crafted in India by master metalworkers, each piece of the CLOUD collection is made by warping and stretching aluminum into subtle planes and voluminous organic vessels, each pockmarked with hammered indentations, resulting in forms representative of their collection’s namesake.

The British designer was also scheduled to participate in a series of events and talks in holographic form, including an Architects and Designs talk about “heritage, legacy and sustainability”, an auction of signed CLOUD prototypes at Scandinavia’s leading fine art and antique auction-house Bukowskis, and amusingly also a flower arrangement workshop with Christoffers Blommor utilizing the new CLOUD vase.

The combination of holographic projection and deep-fake technology offers an inventive workaround the current travel restrictions that have restricted the design industry’s traditional schedule of trade and public events. While not everyone has access to attend events as a hologram (yet), Dixon’s technological stunt hints the pandemic may forever alter the landscape of trade shows attendance – a literal projection of the industry’s future.

Gregory Han is a Senior Editor at Design Milk. A Los Angeles native with a profound love and curiosity for design, hiking, tide pools, and road trips, a selection of his adventures and musings can be found at gregoryhan.com.