Situated at the front of the spin room is an elevated platform. The instructors bike sits atop this platform facing the tight cluster of bikes in front. On the front of the platform is a large glowing advertisment for Sensodyne toothpaste asking "Are you at risk of acid wear?" The reason it glows is because it is white and responds to the UV lights installed in the darkened room. The most disconcerting aspect of this advertising is that the UV light environment also causes peoples teeth to illuminate. Sensory advertising. This promotes self consciousness, planting the seed that perhaps your teeth could be indeed at risk of acid wear> and that perhaps sensodyne might be a good answer to whiter teeth. scary
Set against the backdrop of a continuing interest in programmatic modes of living and behaviour, this project originated from a singular experience at a Fitness First gym in 2009. Tight spatial order, advertising saturation, theme park colour, garish sloganeering and the hyper-sensational fusion of fitness and entertainment. This was a seductively modern alter rationally designed for the worship of body image and the proliferation of consumption. Capitalism at its most healthy, toned and aggressive.
Once up and running on one of the treadmills in a 10 wide phalanx, I was horrified by info-text scrolling along the base of a Rhiannon music video, which read as an advertisement for the military.
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For months after I gaped in awe at the sick intersection of a mainstream social program and the military engine. It wasn’t until being re-exposed to this message through revisiting Fitness First in the last few months that I realised the advertisement was in fact for the gyms outdoor ‘boot-camp’ program. This discovery, far from discouraging critique isolated an important sub-textual field.
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The constant barrage of external stimuli we receive means that individual messages/advertisements/promotions do not give the human brain the opportunity to adequately process content. Our hidden brain (colloquial for the portion which uses heuristics as a means of making rapid judgement when there is no time for conscious deconstruction) is left with fragments of language or visual stimuli, which often misguide understanding. In the case of the ‘military advertisement’ , the format and language used (see below)convinced my hidden brain that what I had seen was a genuine call to the army, despite the seeming ridiculous nature of such an event in hindsight.
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This military reference took on an expanding resonance when aligned with the conformity of the ever-obedient corporate worker trafficking from office to treadmill wearing the iconic black and blue Fitness First backpack. Troops on the street carrying out orders. A supreme marketing intelligence that is able to make people pay for their own advertising on the street.On one level the same as wearing a McDonalds hat in earnest, yet what makes the branded backpack a viable practical option is the way it operates as a symbol of health and lifestyle. Fitness First has created a lifestyle package that you can purchase, parade and live.
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