Squatting Supermarket by Salvatore Iaconesi aka xDxD.vs.xDxD
by Salvatore Iaconesi
Share Festival- Market Forces, November 3th-8th
Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali, via Giolitti 36, h 10 am – 7 pm
This special project for Share Festival 2009 will be presented in two parts: an interactive installation inside the thematic exhibition “Market Forces” curated by Simona Lodi, and an experiential workshop, to be held back to back with the Share Conference scheduled for Thursday, 5th November at 4.30 PM.
Through “Squatting Supermarket ”, the artist Salvatore Iaconesi aka xDxD.vs.xDxD looks at how our everyday lives have evolved through shopping, piercing into the pulsating heart of Market Forces. Browsing products on shelves, choosing, paying, running up debt, being convinced and seduced, relating to places, messages and other people: shopping is an experience that fills our days, an experience constructed through images, suggestions and strategies that are all so complex that we, as final users, systematically fail to perceive them. “Every product,” reads the artistic statement, “generates a chain reaction that propagates through the environmental, social, political, economic, technological, relational and emotional spheres. As highly complex and ramified as they are, these connections are not explicit. All too often, people are left merely with the experiential message of ‘buy this good/service, it’s designed just for you, for what you want to be.’”
A hybrid figure straddling the worlds of hacking, engineering and rave parties, Salvatore Iaconesi takes all this as his starting point for Squatting Supermarket, a radically ecosystemic version of the marketplace and visionary point of sale in which reality is augmented. Innovation emerges from the interstices, values and infrastructure forming the ecosystem itself, with all its ramifications, connections and stratifications. The technologies used for creating new spaces for action/communication and overlapping them onto our everyday reality, thus augmenting that reality, also create new possibilities for use and interaction, which are ubiquitous, accessible, and above all emergent and polyphonic, emotional and relational. “Squatting Supermarket presents this very possibility, a technologically augmented reality which overlaps our ordinary, everyday world.” An interstitial marketplace squatting in existing physical and intangible infrastructures (logos and locations of consumption).
The installation is a minimalist supermarket, emphasising its structure and products and the messages that describe them. The vast network of connections that form the background story of a product is made explicit and accessible, making ecosystemic, narrative and poetic use of the data tracking and manipulation techniques that corporations otherwise exploit for purely commercial and/or political ends – the cross-referencing of data from barcodes, RFID tags, credit cards and financial transactions. The stories of a product and the people who buy it erupt suddenly onto the scene, in a distributed storytelling session. The gateway to these stories lies in the logos, in shopping-based narratives.