Kaws Darth Vadar Companion

Call yourself a ‘Creative Technologist’? WTF! Where are you going with this whole designer toy/Star Wars vinyl mashup thread? Huh? Stop talking to yourself.

Designer toys are often grouped with a love of street art, urban apparel, limited edition trainers and one year, 1984 when I was given my first Han Solo figurine purchased from a toy store in Tossa De Mar.

What exactly is a designer toy?

‘It is an artist or designer working with a production company, or solely, to produce a limited run of a ‘collectible’ 3D figure in one or more colour variants… It is most often constructed from rotocast vinyl, with articulation points (joints that move)…’

‘So designer toys seem to bridge the gap between say a singular piece of fine art, and say an offset poster or postcard set by the same artist. The price also seems to fall between these 2 spectrums…. Think of them in the same way as say a portfolio of etchings by a famous artist, or a series of hand pulled screenprints, of which there are only 100 in existence… Designer toys have based themselves on this limited edition precedent and model, and taken it further. In that regard, they are more like affordable sculptures by an artist, fine art multiples, when viewed in this limited edition framework,’ (Vinyl Will Kill You - Jeremyville)

I’ve been collecting work by the artist Kaws for a couple of years, limited edition prints of dissected plastic toys, sort of Damian Hirst meets Mattel and Barbie is cannibalising Ken. So when I stumbled across this Kaws Darth Vadar Companion I knew I had to have it. I can’t it’s all sold out and his potential co-companion Han went to Oxfam in Hull a good 20 years ago.

So I started thinking about the whole physical artefact and grown men wanting plastic figurines about their office space. What if you had a virtual toy? A digital toy for your desktop, given that’s where we spend most of our time. A limited edition designer digital toy? Sure it would look good, we could do some great 3D work on it from a design perspective, but it has no intrinsic value unless we grant it minor application status - make it an RSS feed reader, pre-loaded with suitable feeds, in this instance trawling the net for all things Star Wars.

I think it might be a genius idea, or perhaps I’ve been holding half eaten Ken too close to the angle poise and inhaled the toxic fumes coming from his melting face.

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