Here's the first in a series of three posts about our contributions to Design After Dark, the fundraising auction event for the Denver Art Museum's Department of Architecture, Design and Graphics. This here is the very strange object we donated in 2008: the Electrosux/Electrofux. Handsome and tech, we thought, though the piece was nearly banned from the show for its phallicism (or for something—we never got the full story).

Lest you think we're just pervy doofuses, this was the task: they showed us an object from the DAM's design collection and a word ending in "ish" and asked us to use the two together as the starting point for a new piece to fit inside a 12-inch cube. We were assigned a very fresh Electrolux vacuum from the thirties and the word "outlandish." We gave them this: the Electrosux/Electrofux (Love Explosion). Here's how we described it: "The Electrosux/Electrofux is an outlandish extension of two cultural trends that the iconic vacuum helped establish: the mechanization of domestic life and the fetishization of high-design appliances and consumer electronics. Our piece inserts itself into the warm, wet center of domesticity and offers itself as a clean, mechanical alternative to the most fundamental (and messy) household labor." Made from milled aluminum, various bits of steel, some audio cables and o-rings, surgical tubing, test tubes, rubber stoppers, a baby-bottle nipple and the disembodied head of a Pink Jelly Big Tool.