'Hypnomart' Text

HYPNOMART
A short film by Joe Magee and Alistair Gentry

Synopsis

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.

Background Information

HYPNOMART was devised by artists Joe Magee and Alistair Gentry, who met at one of PVA's LabCulture brainstorming sessions in Bridport, Dorset. It was commissioned in 2000 by the Arts Council of England and Channel 4 for their 'Animate' scheme. 'Characters' were selected from hours of digital video footage and removed from their original environments using Apple Macintosh computers. Loops of movements and behaviours were generated. The mall was then re-populated and reorganised to create a bizarre, yet logical new environment. Sampled sounds from the mall were similarly selected, manipulated and reorganised.

The artists were committed to making their first film using only digital technology. With no proposed plot and little precedent for this type of work, the commissioning bodies-- and the artists themselves-- were in a constant state of development and discovery. HYPNOMART was entirely conceived, shot, edited, produced and processed by Magee and Gentry. The resulting work reflects this intensive, convoluted process. It also reflects both artists' interest in and explorations of cultural transmission: the 'viral' transmission of human behaviour. In this instance the artists chose to examine these forces in commercial environments.

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. In 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?

Premiere

Brief Encounters 7th International Short Film Festival. Watershed Media Centre, Bristol, England 14-18 November 2001.