Directors Joe Magee & Alistair Gentry

It’s a digital day out and the mall just got madder. Repeat to fade and trance away the heartache in a mirror world of mass production. I’m not a human being, I’m a number. Whitewashed? Absolutely. (Colour-) saturated? Sure. See you tomorrow.

Hypnomart uses covert footage of shoppers in a suburban mall to study human behaviour and as source material for the artists’ own manipulations of unsuspecting consumers. In these comprehensively surveilled and clinical environments, tiny gestures are magnified and transmit virally through the crowd. In the Hypnomart watching and voyeurism are inextricable. Whether the subjects of surveillance are shopping in a trance or enacting compulsive rituals for the cameras, sometimes they align themselves in patterns like microbes or herds, or create dances that last mere seconds.

The emergent ‘story’ of Hypnomart highlights the journeys of entire family units to shopping centres. Are they just buying things or are they fulfiling other, more primordial needs? Observing people as they go about their shopping often reveals an apparent state of hypnosis. Passing through the revolving doors, the shoppers enter a shared, drug-like trance because the environment is designed to be (or appear) clinical, contained and safe. The proliferation and awareness of surveillance cameras heightens the sense that one is on a set and on display. The film in part adopts the role of a surveillance camera operator. How can he, she or (increasingly) it deconstruct and interpret such a barrage of minute clues and subtle behaviours?

Joe Magee