We Sell For Less

We Sell For Less

We Sell For Less is a meditation on the redundancy of Wall-Mart’s slogans and marketing phrases, such as – “Always!”,“Low Prices” and “We Sell For Less”. In this video, slogans were translated into an animation of smiley-faces morphing from message exclamation to message creation, through custom software written with openGL in C. In the 70’s the smiley face symbol functioned as a popular ‘have a nice day’ token decorating shirts, bags and notebooks. In the 90’s, Walmart’s marketing team painfully resuscitated it as an advertisement tool. In We Sell For Less, the original meaning is removed one step further, become nothing more than a pixel for revealing Walmart’s banal messages.

The background layer of video in We Sell For Less, is an exploration of Wall-mart from the view of an embedded wireless camera. As the video progresses, the vantage of the ‘anti-shopper’ is expressed – wandering purposelessly like a ghost through the murk of Wall-Mart products, architecture and signage while animated graphics flicker repetitive messages of hollow consumerism. Several custom functions were created in the animation program to cause severe distortions of the smiley face pixels, to match the noise-afflicted video from the wireless-camera.