Vendors is a moving image artwork, delivered on the web, which looks at the complex advertising ecosystem that is in operation on the internet.
When visiting a website, we're often confronted with an array of buttons and pop-ups asking if we accept cookies, or asking us to allow the website certain permissions to gather data about our visit. All too often, we hurriedly click 'accept' in order to get to the content the website is providing without really knowing what we might be agreeing to. Often, we unwittingly consent to the website sharing information about us with a bewildering array of advertising partners, many of whom process and aggregate this data to form a profile that is then used to target advertising at us.
This work is formed of a list of the advertising vendors with which data is shared when clicking the green 'Got it' button to allow entry to the most popular news website on the internet, dailymail.co.uk. By clicking 'Got it', the site visitor consents to the collection and sharing of information such as their precise geographic location, the type of computer or phone they are using, the content they prefer, and that they allow the site partners to infer interests by cross-referencing information they might already have gathered from previous visits or from other websites. These permissions are extended to 1413 different advertising vendors, operating across the globe.
This work attempts to introduce friction into the process of giving consent, by sequentially introducing the names of these normally inscrutable vendors to the site visitor.