Check Self Out

Critical Play with Supermarket Surveillance

June '24 - March '25

Check Self Out is a playful simulation of a supermarket self checkout, that checks you out while you check yourself out.

It's kind of a video-game, somewhat an installation, and slightly a performance.

This video is assembled from screen recordings captured at ACMI WIP Night, February 2025.

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I started making the project as part of my practice based PhD research on subversive game design as an approach to troubling the sensor society. The work is a response to my own experiences of being rendered as a datafied body in Australian Supermarkets.

The project is arranged our 3 core design intentions:

    The first; is to create a space for critical play with the surveillance technologies that are present in our existing supermarkets. To open up a subversive dialogue, where players learn to play against a force that is trying to find meaning in their data.
    The second; is to reflect on the exhibitionist desire we might feel when seeing ourselves through systems that try and measure us. Like a fitness tracker, might the self check out be a place where we check ourselves out, embracing the surveillance in return for a glimpse of our best entrepreneurial selves.
    And the third; is to explore the transitory state of the supermarket, a site that is trying to shed it’s roots in the suburban mall and agricultural Australia, for a logic of automation, dark supermarkets, and amazon-ification. The corporate works visual design attempts to capture the failed promises of a brighter futur, employing elements of the fruitiger aero aesthetic to evoke the lost humanist technical futures where everyone benefits.

Thank you to Charlotte Galvin for redeveloping the Aero UI elements, and the hardworking game developers and researchers at the RMIT Centre of Digital Ecosystems for their ongoing support throughout the projects' development.