I found an interview I gave to The Atlantic in March 2012, and it prompted me to surface Corner Convenience again.
Corner Convenience was an early instance of working with the humbleness of everyday articles of convenience. The starting point was the stuff by the till: lighters, batteries, breath mints, lottery tickets. Objects you can buy for a dollar or two, carry in a pocket, use up, forget about.
That little shop is a useful container for material culture. A culture’s hopes, fears, dreams, and desires show up in what people buy and sell at the counter. Wanting to get lucky. Wanting to smell good. Wanting to feel better, stay awake, or get through the night. There are prices, quantities, instructions, and promises printed on those packets.
For the films, we kept the shop familiar and changed a few of its contents. A scratch card could win you Twitter followers. The jerky came in panda and snow leopard varieties. It was a way into imagining possible futures through things you could pick up and examine. You could begin to imagine the people buying these things, what they wanted, what worried them, and what had become an ordinary purchase on the way home.
The Corner Convenience project page has the films, workshop photographs, and pages from the Convenience newspaper.