Culture Spy was a research project conducted in the summer of 2008 at Marwen, a non-profit art center that provides arts programming to underserved adolescents in Chicago. The teenagers in the project explored the relationship between the marketing practice of “coolhunting” and the cultural production and identity construction of teenagers.

To find the latest cultural trends of teenagers, marketing agencies hire teens to surveill and document their peers. These teen correspondents are often referred to as “culture spies”. In this project, the teenage participants documented their peers utilizing “culture spy” techniques identical to ones used by teen correspondents employed by marketing agencies. The particpants then analyzed this documentation and compared it to representations of teens presented in popular media texts marketed to teenagers. These texts included movies, television shows, commercials, music, magazines, websites, etc. Particpants then crafted responses to their findings in the very same media forms that they researched: video, photography, graphics, etc. These responses are compiled and published on this website along with the partipants’ reflections on the entire research and art/media making process they experienced throughout the course of the project.