spray paint and POSCA pen on canvas with frame
30.48 x 30.48 cm
Mass Bombardment – Supermarket
I started to ponder supermarkets and how they’ve got to where they are now – massive, long aisles that just seem to go on for days. Packed to the brim on every shelf with stuff. Multiple options. Stacked on top of each other. Screaming fluorescent tubes overhead. Repeatedly packed day after day. Each product with its own individual psychology of how that thing wants you to buy it. Supermarket manipulation psychology just in the way the shelves are packed, the aisles are organised, what shelf the product sits on for bestselling optimisation. BUY, BUY, BUY. I’m sure there is psychological manipulation that I couldn’t even imagine being cast on us; we’d probably be horrified if we knew it all – every product screams buy me.
Then I started to ponder the simple orange; think about it. Each orange has a sticker on it with a barcode and in that partitioned area for those oranges there are maybe 200 oranges. Then think about how many supermarkets are in your area and that they have the same portioned area for those oranges. Then every suburb has multiple supermarkets and rural towns have supermarkets; and everyone has the same (more or less) portioned area for oranges all with little barcode stickers on them. Then there are no longer 200 oranges but millions of oranges with little stickers. Now there are rolls and rolls of little plastic stickers being used every day just to define that that is an orange. Millions of tiny plastic stickers just for that one product.
Now look at the supermarket as a whole and imagine the number of raw materials, chemicals, cardboard, plastic required just for that supermarket and multiply it just for your area, now the suburbs and now the towns; all of a sudden, it’s quite overwhelming how much stuff is required to keep our supermarkets stocked every day, year after year. It’s seriously overwhelming in its mass bombardment of resources and manipulation.