Consumed and Controlled

The thesis stipulates that we should reconsider the current political system of consumerism and question how our environment at both macro and micro-scale has been changed to morph citizens to consumers. Consumerism has allowed a new industry to be developed in our society, which measures our physiological and neural signals to gain insights into our customer decisions in different spaces. Today, architecture has started to alter our brain’s reactions and behaviors and convince us to spend more money. This profit-driven research understands our brains better than ourselves.

  
The thesis asks how architects can decode inconspicuous/micro-political architecture in the world of hyper-consumerism. What are the potential future scenarios?

Through the techniques that are often used in cinematography and short film, I wish to offer awareness of the inherent political valence of architecture in consumerism. The short film “Consumed and Controlled” envisions a dystopia that isn’t so far from our reality. The dystopian imagination will be used as an education tool portraying us directly into a terrifying world, warning us of the danger that the future holds if we do not recognize its symptoms in the present.