The Reinvention of Normal

Off the Wall Creativity and Its Inventions

Award-Winning **VIDEO**

Skippy Massey
Humboldt Sentinel

What is normal?  What is creativity?

Creativity is about connecting things.  When you ask people how they did something creative, they feel a bit awkward because they only saw something that was simply there, something they can’t fully explain.  It just seemed obvious to them after a while.  That’s because they were able to connect the experiences they had with the ideas of synthesizing new things.

In this brief profile by filmmaker Liam Saint Pierre, we dive head-first into the strange mind of British artist and inventor Dominic Wilcox who’s been entertaining the world for years with his delightfully impractical and outlandish ideas.

His recent off-the-wall inventions include a stained glass driverless car, shoes with built-in GPS that guide you back home, and a giant listening device called Binaudios that mimic tourist binoculars for the purpose of listening to a city.  He writes a blog and has also published a book filled with comic-like sketches of his most outlandish ideas, Variations on Normal.

St. Pierre’s film packs a lot into its seven minutes.  We spend time with Dominic on his “desperate” quest for inspiration, glimpse his studio, meet his parents and see the family business, and even trot round a hardware store after him.

There are animations of some of his most bizarre ideas and home video footage of Dominic as a child. “Quiet, shy children do a lot of work in their heads,” Dominic says rather poignantly.  “They’re thinking a lot, observing a lot.  Maybe as a child the creativity was there but it didn’t have an outlet.”

Creativity involves breaking out of established patterns, looking
at things in a different way and not being afraid to fail, Dominic
believes.

“Let’s do the ridiculous and by doing the ridiculous something else might come of it,” Dominic shares in the film, perfectly encapsulating his entire artistic practice.

We’re reminded that the process of creativity is allowing yourself to produce ideas and make mistakes by doing the inspiring and outlandish, and the process of art and invention is knowing which ones to keep.

~Via Dominic Wlcox, Liam Saint Pierre, This is Colossal,
It’s Nice That, and Vimeo