# animate! › Films › Hypnomart by Joe Magee & Alistair Gentry › synopses

Canonical: https://animate.org.uk/films/hypnomart/synopses

Discovery terms: 2000s animation, manipulated live action, surveillance, consumerism, behaviour, experimental short film, filmmaker, artist, illustrator

The following is the archived page text; discovery terms above are separately sourced metadata.

Archive status: restored in 2026; historical calls, deadlines and services are closed.

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**Hypnomart** a film by Joe Magee & Alistair Gentry

2001, 3 min 47 sec

### animate! synopsis

It’s a digital day out and the mall just got madder. Repeat to fade and trance away the heartache in a mirror world of mass production. I’m not a human being, I’m a number. Whitewashed? Absolutely. (Colour-) saturated? Sure. See you tomorrow.

### long synopsis

**Hypnomart** uses covert footage of shoppers in a suburban mall to study human behaviour, and as source material for the artists’ own manipulations of unsuspecting consumers. In these comprehensively surveilled and clinical environments, tiny gestures are magnified and transmit virally through the crowd.

In the **Hypnomart** watching and voyeurism are inextricable. Whether the subjects of surveillance are shopping in a trance or enacting compulsive rituals for the cameras, sometimes they align themselves in patterns like microbes or herds, or create dances that last mere seconds.

**Hypnomart** film, stills and other materials © Jo Magee & Alistair Gentry 2001