This Has Been Fun

	StoryLAB This Has Been Fun Immersion project in development the narrative of shopping and consumerism StoryLAB index StoryLAB video index
	PROJECT OVERVIEW & DESCRIPTION This Has Been Fun will transform an ordinary suburban strip mall storefront into a site of a new media performance installation--ritualized fetish event honoring American consumerism. This Has Been Fun will be as much a social commentary and satire as it is a gesture of community activism, education, and intervention. This Has Been Fun spectator/shopper will enter the “shop” environment to experience the multiple and simultaneous consumer events. Each spectator/shopper will, each in their own way, experience the store on their own terms, being free to pursue, participate, and guide themselves through the store’s displays, events, and encounters. This Fetish Store will adapt, blend and collapse the presentational languages of retail shopping, museum and gallery viewing of objects, the sacredness of church going with the theatricality of sales, carnival, and festival. The Fetish Store operators/clerks, will similarly composite and reveal the corporate/retail performance: 1) the corporate neutral 2) terminally cheerful drone 3) the sacred acolyte 4) the fast talking salesperson 5) and the reality of the performers social/economic status, and future prospects. This Has Been Fun will also consider American consumerism as cultural/anthropological artifact, as a discrete aesthetic objectified, cataloged, and displayed as encoded archetypes and metaphors. signs, symbols and icons of American consumerism. Ritual action, explanation, and commentary will reveal context and meaning associated with objects, displays, and events. Emphasis will be on the tactile, sensualized, emotional, and eroticized; the sacred/secular fetishization of consumer America. The boundaries between reality and performance will be blurred, truth will be a negotiated concept, the original and reproduction interchangeable, ambiguity and the lowering of expectations acceptable, as the spectator/shopper participates in a ritually facilitated liminal “in-between” space of transformation: i.e. shopping CONTEXTS At the heart, the concept and expression of retail consumerism are the underlying values of democratic choice, values, rights and expectations—Americans have the right to shop and to choose what they buy, why, and from whom. Choice has become expected, In the era of the digital, where are things can be “original” but are in content a pastiche, when the confluence of simulation and simulacrum, where the “real” and “authentic” are concepts and when morality, truth, and appearance are accepted and adaptable according to relevance. The faux, by way of Las Vegas, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Washington and or Disney are no longer reflectors and expressions of reality but rather creators of realities to serve agendas, needs and objectives. Reality is something now negotiated and navigated, a new consciousness, one that interweaves the virtual and tactile, the actual and imagined, the factual and the constructed, manipulated, and contrived, is the world we inhabit--its microcosm and metaphor is the store. Increasingly our American society has become driven by consumerism, the economic well being of the nation hinging on its citizens ability to buy—citizenship has been replaced by consumership. American are educated, conditioned, trained and encouraged at every turn to buy, consume, possess, and accumulate from a very young age. In the ever widening and frantic search for sales and profits, the consumer has become increasingly pressured by advertising, fashion, and a broadening range of objects. Sexuality has become the de rigueur sales accompaniment—the appeal to the sensual and bodily, the spiritual commonplace in advertising, packaging, integrating itself in. As a culture we have return to the hieroglyphs of icon, symbol, the archetypal, and fetishizing it all as consumerism increasingly interweaves itself within the American way of life and consciousness. CONCEPTS Objects in This Has Been Fun will at once ordinary and then again arranged for evocation, bewilderment and enchantment, creating a contradictory and often ambiguous presentation veering between materialist critique and celebration. This Has Been Fun environment will be treated as a visionary environment, crossing from the known into the revelation of its context and infrastructure. The environment of This Has Been Fun will be a microcosm. Its emphasis will be the evocation of emotion and bonding with the shoppers/spectators, the store, its objects and events, will function and engage on the level of senses and emotions. The use of consumer/capitalist expressions, products and slogans, will simultaneously comment, provoke, and entertain—much like the objectives of consumerism, its objects, promises, and advertising. This Has Been fun will be conceived as journey, an adventure, story unfolding and each aspect of the store, its objects and events and interactions another piece of a larger puzzle in which the shopper/spectator is an integral if not inciting participant. (continues...)

StoryLAB This Has Been Fun

Immersion project in development

the narrative of shopping and consumerism

StoryLAB index

StoryLAB video index

PROJECT OVERVIEW & DESCRIPTION

This Has Been Fun will transform an ordinary suburban strip mall storefront into a site of a new media performance installation--ritualized fetish event honoring American consumerism.

This Has Been Fun will be as much a social commentary and satire as it is a gesture of community activism, education, and intervention.

This Has Been Fun spectator/shopper will enter the “shop” environment to experience the multiple and simultaneous consumer events. Each spectator/shopper will, each in their own way, experience the store on their own terms, being free to pursue, participate, and guide themselves through the store’s displays, events, and encounters.

This Fetish Store will adapt, blend and collapse the presentational languages of retail shopping, museum and gallery viewing of objects, the sacredness of church going with the theatricality of sales, carnival, and festival.

The Fetish Store operators/clerks, will similarly composite and reveal the corporate/retail performance:

1) the corporate neutral

2) terminally cheerful drone

3) the sacred acolyte

4) the fast talking salesperson

5) and the reality of the performers social/economic status, and future prospects.

This Has Been Fun will also consider American consumerism as cultural/anthropological artifact, as a discrete aesthetic objectified, cataloged, and displayed as encoded archetypes and metaphors. signs, symbols and icons of American consumerism. Ritual action, explanation, and commentary will reveal context and meaning associated with objects, displays, and events.

Emphasis will be on the tactile, sensualized, emotional, and eroticized; the sacred/secular fetishization of consumer America.

The boundaries between reality and performance will be blurred, truth will be a negotiated concept, the original and reproduction interchangeable, ambiguity and the lowering of expectations acceptable, as the spectator/shopper participates in a ritually facilitated liminal “in-between” space of transformation: i.e. shopping

CONTEXTS

At the heart, the concept and expression of retail consumerism are the underlying values of democratic choice, values, rights and expectations—Americans have the right to shop and to choose what they buy, why, and from whom.

Choice has become expected, In the era of the digital, where are things can be “original” but are in content a pastiche, when the confluence of simulation and simulacrum, where the “real” and “authentic” are concepts and when morality, truth, and appearance are accepted and adaptable according to relevance.

The faux, by way of Las Vegas, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Washington and or Disney are no longer reflectors and expressions of reality but rather creators of realities to serve agendas, needs and objectives. Reality is something now negotiated and navigated, a new consciousness, one that interweaves the virtual and tactile, the actual and imagined, the factual and the constructed, manipulated, and contrived, is the world we inhabit--its microcosm and metaphor is the store. Increasingly our American society has become driven by consumerism, the economic well being of the nation hinging on its citizens ability to buy—citizenship has been replaced by consumership.

American are educated, conditioned, trained and encouraged at every turn to buy, consume, possess, and accumulate from a very young age. In the ever widening and frantic search for sales and profits, the consumer has become increasingly pressured by advertising, fashion, and a broadening range of objects.

Sexuality has become the de rigueur sales accompaniment—the appeal to the sensual and bodily, the spiritual commonplace in advertising, packaging, integrating itself in.

As a culture we have return to the hieroglyphs of icon, symbol, the archetypal, and fetishizing it all as consumerism increasingly interweaves itself within the American way of life and consciousness.

CONCEPTS

Objects in This Has Been Fun will at once ordinary and then again arranged for evocation, bewilderment and enchantment, creating a contradictory and often ambiguous presentation veering between materialist critique and celebration.

This Has Been Fun environment will be treated as a visionary environment, crossing from the known into the revelation of its context and infrastructure.

The environment of This Has Been Fun will be a microcosm. Its emphasis will be the evocation of emotion and bonding with the shoppers/spectators, the store, its objects and events, will function and engage on the level of senses and emotions.

The use of consumer/capitalist expressions, products and slogans, will simultaneously comment, provoke, and entertain—much like the objectives of consumerism, its objects, promises, and advertising.

This Has Been fun will be conceived as journey, an adventure, story unfolding and each aspect of the store, its objects and events and interactions another piece of a larger puzzle in which the shopper/spectator is an integral if not inciting participant.

(continues...)