P.O.P. Portraits

2005 / thermally activated receipt paper, video document

Wal-Mart is the largest retailer in the world and employs over a million people in the US alone. If Wal-Mart were a nation state its gross national product would be greater than 3/4 of the worlds economies. Wal-Mart employs many sophisticated tactics to maintain its market supremacy. These tactics include Wal-Mart’s dependency on sweatshop labor, extended store hours, and a liberal return policy to name a few. 
Currently Wal-Mart is profiling its customers, collecting buying habits as well as personal information such as date of birth, address, credit history and social security number. More accurately Wal-Mart creates portraits of its customers in the form of goods and services. These consumer portraits are used to predict and exploit customer behavior. If you have bought something from Wal-Mart with a check or a debit card or if you have cashed a payroll check at Wal-Mart, chances are they have you in their system. 

This data collection process is made possible by Wal-Mart’s technical advances in point of purchase networking. While your transaction at Wal-Mart may be fleeting, the information you leave behind is not. You walk away with a thin slip of thermally printed receipt paper-but may be leaving behind much, much more. The thermal receipt paper used by retailers including Wal-Mart is plain or bond paper coated with a heat reactive dye. When the paper is heated by a thermal print head, the dye turns black and images are formed. The advantages of thermal receipt paper for retailers include the small size of printers, their lack of ink, and their high speed, which many retailers use to add targeted marketing messages to their receipts. 

Using receipt paper as a vehicle for cultural critique, SWAMP artists replace Wal-mart receipt paper with an altered receipt paper. Acquired from Wal-Mart along with surveillance footage of individual customers, the paper’s heat sensitive emulsion is selectively removed to produce images of individual customers when printed upon. The altered paper is rolled up and placed next to the register where back-up rolls of paper are commonly stored. The cashier unknowingly loads the altered paper into the printer, producing portraits of individual customers from the variable content of purchases.