Release Date
tbc ( 5pm UK | 6pm Paris | 10am LA | 12pm Paris | 8pm Dubai )
About this work
Chemistry has always promised us a better life. Sometimes it even delivers.
That’s part of what makes it so difficult to think about clearly. Technical progress is rarely simple enough to praise or condemn in one clean sentence. It solves things. It creates things. It rescues people. It also rearranges expectations, builds dependence, creates side effects and quietly expands the number of ways the body can become a project under commercial management.
It began with international superstar DJ Fatboy Slim, a blue floppy disk, and the idea of what might have sat on the unseen front of his first album already tied to the phrase 'Better Living Through Chemistry.' That title has always resonated with me because it captures a very modern kind of faith: not just that science can help, but that it can improve the human condition in some broader, cleaner, more lifestyle-compatible sense. Better living. Efficiently delivered. Side effects may apply.
Ozempic felt like the right contemporary echo. A medical breakthrough, a social craze, a technological fix, a rebranding of the body through pharmaceutical possibility. It raises the same old question in new packaging: when we improve life through chemistry, who gets improved, who gets pressured, and who gets rich? The answer is rarely neat. That’s what makes it worth capturing.
The real benefits are real. That matters. But so is the wider cultural machinery that immediately forms around any successful intervention. The moral panic, the beauty politics, the new pressures, the way a useful tool can rapidly become an instrument for enforcing old anxieties with much better marketing. That’s the cycle I’m looking at here.
But the deeper current is the old Arlo question: does technological advance make us better, or simply different in ways we haven’t yet had time to price emotionally? The answer, as usual, is both less romantic and more complicated than the slogan suggests.
Better living is hard to market against.
Context: Ozempic, originally developed as a treatment for type 2 diabetes, became widely discussed in the 2020s for its use in weight-loss treatment and the broader cultural attention that followed. Its rise reflects a recurring pattern in modern medicine and technology: a genuinely significant innovation becoming rapidly entangled with aesthetics, status, commerce and social pressure far beyond its original clinical context.
Edition details
Dimensions:
Diskette: 9cm (W) x 9.4cm (H) x 3.3mm (D)
Framed: 23.5cm (W) x 23.5cm (H) x 3cm (D)
Box Dimensions: 28.8 (W) x 28.8cm (H) x 4.8cm (D)
Medium:
Hand-painted retro floppy disk: acrylic paint, plastic disk, aluminium, paper.
Edition size:
20
Authentication:
Signed and individually numbered: verso & inside frame by artist.
Co-signed by Musician/DJ Fatboy Slim on verso.
Packaging:
Collectible box with fancy-pants UV reflective floppy disk icon on the top.
Certificate of Authenticity:
Arrives with a signed booklet including signed certificate of authenticity, and potentially some retro digital files (non-infectious… probably).
Shipping:
Shipping costs will be calculated at time of check-out, and is location dependent.
Restrictions:
Please note orders are limited to 1 piece per person, any duplicate orders will be cancelled and refunded.
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