Emote invites its audience to explore the contemporary relationship between healthcare, advertising, and inaccessibility through the looking glass of a dystopian future in which mental sanity has become a luxury of elite society.
Through this experience, I ask the viewer: how can we acknowledge that healthcare, psychiatric resources, and mental wellness has become so inaccessible? Is emotional stability becoming commodified? With this work, I wanted to exaggerate the horrifying experience of how it feels to navigate inaccessible and classist systems within healthcare and therapy, in order to critique the capitalistic approach to mental health treatment.
Emote intends to put the viewer into the shoes of many individuals struggling to gain access to psychiatric resources, and incite discussion around the flaws that corporatized healthcare creates today, and will continue to perpetuate in our near future.
This installation is intended to simulate the experience of visiting a fictional healthcare company, called Emote. Surrounding the installation are print and digital advertisements that advocate for an “effortless and luxury” approach to psychiatric counseling.
The user may approach a laptop to interact with a website that is projected onto the wall. From here, they learn about Emote’s classist, capitalist approach to treating mental wellness. At the end of the website is a page to initiate a trial of their services, where the user can speak to an AI-powered blob, which robotically asks you questions about your financial background and your mental stability.