Telstar Shopping Network, 2014

Telstar Shopping Network is a fictional home-shopping channel for products from possible futures. Developed during a two-day workshop hosted by Z33 and FoAM in Hasselt in 2014, the project uses the familiar language of television advertising to explore how future needs, desires and values become things we might be persuaded to buy.

Participants developed scenarios of everyday life, drawing on contrasting ideas and emerging developments in biotechnology and ecology. They identified needs and desires within those worlds, made product prototypes, and wrote and performed short advertisements in a nearby audiovisual studio. The objects acquired stories about who would want them, what problems they promised to solve, and how they might fit into daily routines.

Making a sales pitch became part of the inquiry. To present an imagined product as useful or desirable is also to present a way of living as normal or worth pursuing. The fictional advertisements invite viewers to consider what each promise takes for granted: whose needs it serves, which values it promotes, and what accepting its benefits might ask us to give up.