The work draws its raw material from the archive of the American commercial landscape: sourced footage of vintage advertisements, cheerful and insistent, products pitched with the brazen confidence of a civilization that believed consumption and democracy were the same thing. Central among these is a Skippy Peanut Butter spot bearing the slogan "Swallow the Leader" — a phrase so unguardedly suggestive that it reads less like an accident and more like an admission. Here is the logic of late capital made literal: compliance repackaged as appetite, submission dressed up as preference, the hierarchical imperative delivered with a smile and a sandwich.
But the work refuses the easy pleasure of ironic distance. Rather than simply exhibiting these documents as self-condemning relics, the artist processes them through a system of deliberate corruption and feedback. Using Max/MSP, the video signal is routed through an emulation of analog video synthesis — the visual language of early electronic artists like Nam June Paik and Woody Vasulka — collapsing the footage into fields of phosphorescent decay, waveform distortion, and scan-line erosion. Alongside this, footage from a Hi8 camcorder is subjected to analog feedback, the camera turned on its own output until the image eats itself, producing luminous loops and recursive collapse. The technical process mirrors the political argument: a system feeding on its own image, generating heat and noise but no new information.
What holds it together — and what makes it visceral rather than merely diagrammatic — is the audio reactivity. A custom Max patch binds the visual processing parameters directly to the sound, so that the image doesn't illustrate the audio so much as respond to it, flinching and surging in real time.