Seeking an escape from reality, we frequently turn to superficial substitutes for happiness: social media scrolling, alcohol, medication, etc. The problem with these habits is that the artificial happiness they provide is fleeting, trapping us in an endless cycle of consumption. Realizing that I was also personally caught in this loop, I created this digital animation.
Dopamine Factory visualizes this unnatural lifestyle through the metaphor of an assembly line. Inside a mechanized factory setting, uniform workers are tasked with delivering artificial ”happiness” directly into a monumental human head. The toxicity and danger of this cycle are reflected in the barrels of hazardous waste leaking from the structure, as well as the manic, mechanical facial expression of the head itself—a critique of the industrialization of human emotion.