TARGET AUDIENCE

CREATIVE DIRECTOR | CONCEPT + DEVELOPMENT | MUSIC PRODUCER

Target Audience underscores the terminally online culture society is transfixed on. As it turns out, the desire for incessant dopamine hits does appear to lead to a new specific unforeseen posture and maybe even doom, while still another relevant adage remains true: thoughts are things. Target Audience is a film made in a bathtub. It’s a conceptual riff on ad culture, hyperstimulation, the internet, and deconstructing the word “content” as either filler, contentment, or something inherently destructive.

With the disappearance of society’s public spheres, we are increasingly made aware of a banal existence that reflects inward for transformation and catharsis. The two people confined to the porcelain chamber in Target Audience are repeatedly smashed, crushed, and reconfigured, frame by frame, beyond recognition. They are melted down into patterns and memetic imagery where fresh meaning is gathered from Tulpas, shapes, and symbols, ushering in a new pedagogy. Or an ancient and familiar one, a meme. We witness a skincare routine give way to epistemological degradation and physiological mutation, fabricating an Egregore. Through psychic manifestation and new thought forms, Egregore’s influence grows too powerful and eventually dominates those who fashioned it. There is a moment when the deity moves out of the realm of their direct control, power, and understanding, the closing of something.

The film borrows methods of AI, as it scrapes cultural floors, universal source material, fabricated memories, and mythological archetypes, in both its practice and ideology.
Algorithm. Utopia. Skincare. Myth. Artificially generated realities. Old and new symbols establish a divergent era using our narratives against us. We are trapped inside our own stories. We have become the muse of the mythologized, willingly giving ourselves over to the new gods of the twenty-first century.