SKU-18

Catalog is a collection of generative Duchampian readymades, readymade for the era of mass consumer art. Written in just 8 lines of JavaScript, the project uses the generative paradigm to produce images of random consumer goods pulled from Costco's image servers, thanks to their iterable URL paths (as opposed to hash-based ones) which allow that a mere random seed passed as the product ID will yield a hit. The simultaneous banality and strangeness of the random outputs reflects the condition of existence in a rapidly transforming world, where such strangeness often arises within the sterile, repetitive structures of bureaucratic, capital-driven systems. Catalog questions the role of longform generative art and the market that has arisen around it as symptomatic of this age. Like products that adorn the endless halls of retailers and posts that deluge our endless feeds, the goods, entertainment, and art produced by our culture are all too often pleasurable in the cheapest of ways, mass-manufactured, offer mere facsimiles of value, and on account of these things, are fleeting, brittle, and devoid of material reality. Catalog is no different.