Everything Bazaar

What happens when instead of being sold a product, you are sold a feeling. Inspired by my experience of vending machines in tokyo this project asks that question. A row of five vending machines on a webpage. You walk the row, pick a feeling like loneliness or boredom, and a machine dispenses a procedurally generated product: a bottle, a can, a chip packet, a slim box, with a name, a brand identity, marketing copy, rendered in 3D.

Built in React and Three.js. The package shapes are procedural geometry and the label artwork is generated on an HTML5 canvas, so there are no pre-made models anywhere in it. The discipline is that the products have to be genuinely desirable. My experience as a brand designer for the last ~15 years + power of procedural system design is what this project relies on.

The subject is desire, and how we live with it now that culture, community and ritual have been replaced by brands as the things that organise our wanting. We say who we are by what we buy, which is legitimate, and the honest question the piece holds is how else you would even express yourself. The whole transaction stays invisible because it is banal. The five brands are not pretending to care either. The wish is genuine: real craft, a real desire to help. Nobody in the chain is lying. Rather than moralising from outside of the system, this project forces a view at capitalism and what does it mean to be sold feelings.