Museum of Contemporary Commodities

Imagine as you next walk down the high street or relax in your local park, that everything is known about you - your name, your favourite cafe, your last purchase, your most personal feelings, and even your religious beliefs. Does a warm feeling of belonging grow within you, or does this invasive surveillance freak you out? With retail driving the development of real-time big data processes, how and what we trade, exchange and consume and where we do it, is affecting both the worlds we live in, and those we dream of making - in ways that seem increasingly far beyond our knowledge or control.

The Museum of Contemporary Commodities is neither a building nor a permanent collection of stuff - it’s an invitation. To consider every shop, online store and warehouse as if it were a museum, and all the things in them part of our collective future heritage. Can you imagine yourself as this museum’s curator, with the power to choose what is valued and how? Could you trace and interpret the provenance of things and how they arrived here? Or consider the effects this stuff has on people and places close by or further away, and how it connects them?

Museum of Contemporary Commodities (MoCC) is an art-geography research & exhibition project investigating the deep links between data, trade, place and values that shape our everyday lives. MoCC was co-founded by artist-researcher Paula Crutchlow from Blind Ditch and Cultural Geographer Ian Cook from followthethings.com and the University of Exeter. The project is being developed in partnership with Furtherfield and a growing number of artists, academics, technologists and members of the public.