Business Model

In Dalton’s new work, Business Plan, a pair of capsule vending machines-- one machine for hopes, the other for fears—dispenses sentiments expressed by viewers in a previous piece. Visitors to the Dataism exhibition will be able to purchase others' private hopes and fears from the machines for 25 cents each. Here, as in much of Dalton’s work, the artist playfully undermines the cold, numerical authority of the database, extracting information that elicits emotional response. By adding a second layer of exchange, whereby viewers purchase the data of others, she restages social media’s commodification of users’ personal data-- in the way that online ‘likes’ and clicks may be captured and traded by corporations to create marketing profiles and targets.