I'd like to recreate an emotional linkage between overconsumption and its harmful effect. I want to use my project to plant a seed by creating an emotional connection. Hopefully it will root and grow in the audience's mind.
In order to establish my own emotional linkage with the audiences, I created my project Commodity Fetishism. It is an Audience Participated Performance, which means the audiences are the performers.
There are three layers to this project. The Shopper and Trash Tosser layer are created to perform actions and the Endurer layer is to receive impacts.
I created Shopper layer to represent the closest we get to Production in our daily life. I created Shopper layer to represent the closest we get to Production in our daily life. I want to use Virtual Reality to trap the audiences and to render the uncomfortable emotion. To emphasize that this emotion represents a real life of someone somewhere on earth.
Shopper layer is created based on reality scenario. The audience has a budget of 1000 dollars and will click to buy items on a shopping website I made. Once a product has been bought, it will be announced through a speaker. For myself this project is also a personal manifesto. So I decided to use my personal data on this layer. The item selection on the web page are derived from my personal instagram ads.
Also created based on reality scenario is the Trash Tosser layer. I hope to emphasize the action of tossing trash consciously. The audience on this layer repetitively puts trash into the trash can and eventually take the trash bag out when it’s full. The trash source are provided to the audiences in a pile. This trash pile is a personal collection of unnecessary objects that I purged, based on the KonMari method which was part of my research on overconsumption mentality.
I took away the Endurer’s capability of navigating and controlling the scenes. The Endurer’s here to endure.