Samsung turns dirt into art with carpet portraits of famous faces, made using vacuum cleaners

Even if you've built the best vacuum cleaner around, finding an exciting way to market it is not an easy task. Samsung might have found the solution though, by commissioning a series of giant portraits of famous cleaning icons, created using dirt, on the floor, using its Bespoke Jet AI vacuum cleaner (the cordless stick version, rather than the Samsung Bespoke Jet Bot Combo robot vacuum). Neil Buchanan could never. 

The collection is the work of Nathan Wyburn, an award-winning artist who has previously created masterpieces from things like glitter, and Marmite on toast. For this series, he used the Bespoke Jet AI, a powerful, premium cordless vacuum that uses AI to intelligently adjust power based on floor type, as well as taking cues from the Dyson V15 Detect with a dirt-illuminating, light-up cleaning head for hard floors. But rather than indiscriminately sucking up dirt and debris, this time it was being used to shape it into famous faces.

The 'dirt' here is made from "a mix of household dirts including sand, mud and dust". The portraits are a pretty impressive illustration of this vacuum's suction powers on both carpet and hard floor, as well as the precision cleaning possibilities of its tools. If you wanted to, you too could be fashioning famous faces from the dust on that neglected top shelf.

"I'd never thought of making art with a vacuum cleaner, so I jumped at the challenge. Who wouldn’t want to recreate legends like Mrs Doubtfire?!" says Nathan. "As an artistic tool, the Bespoke Jet AI’s precision and power gave me a lot of creative freedom, so I’m chuffed with the outcome."

Famous faces

To identify which well-known faces to include in the collection, Samsung asked the British public to vote on their favorite cleaning personalities. The results were as follows:

1. Mary Poppins
2. Mrs Hinch
3. Mrs Doubtfire
4. Stacey Solomon
5. Cinderella
6. Monica from Friends
7. Kim Woodburn
8. Marie Kondo
9. The Janitor (Scrubs)
10. Argus Filch (Harry Potter)

Of those, I've been supplied with three vacuum cleaner portraits (and am a little disappointed that the Janitor from Scrubs is not amongst them). 

It's clear that the pool of genuine 'cleaning icons' doesn't quite run to 10, and by the end, we're more into 'pop culture figures who have been seen cleaning' territory, rather than 'cleaning icons per se. But still. I am pleased to see that in the era of TikTok resets and artful transitions, the old fashioned 'spoonful of sugar' approach still wins out in a battle for our cleaning affections.

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