When: Monday to Sunday, 6th January - 2nd February 2025. 17:00 – late

Where: The Cottage at Kampus, Aytoun Street, Manchester, M1 3GL

What: A conceptual fast-food diner. Churning out wood-fired burgers, ice cream floats and spritzy grape juice. It’s self-service counters, name tags and sauce udders. Eat in or take away using our automated telephone service. Grab a tray and find a seat, welcome to the future of convenient feeding; fast-paced and unlimited choice.

How: Head to www.exploretock.com/wtlgi/ to reserve your seat, or order a takeaway for collection on our phone line. Open for walk-ins also.

SCENE: A fast food restaurant. Here in this impersonal eatery, a humming light-board above a self-service counter stresses an abundance of choice. Rather than before where the choice offered hope and attainment it now feels oppressive. The server is visibly apathetic to Man’s presence. It is a stark contrast to the scene before. Though the messages still glow with a beckoning promise they stir a different feeling. One of alienation and deception. Man is in a state of joyless excess. Man has taken a bite from the city and now the city bites back.

PLOT: The city knows no limits, by now it proliferates through a precarious relationship with the disquieted man, shaped by his high demands and consumption. This symbiotic to and fro begins to take its toll on both the urban and rural landscape, the conflict of which begins to play out in Man’s conscience. The city feels increasingly cramped, burdened by the very structures and systems created to meet the desires.

Paradoxically, the countryside, once revered for its natural charm, is now struggling to keep pace with the relentless demands of the city. The rural landscape begins to mirror the city’s mechanised sprawl in the shape of factory farms. The lights, sounds and smells that were once attractive have now become ghastly. The constant hum of neon messages crawls through his brain in shattering whispers. His blood pulses to the high-pitched frenzy of the traffic, the smells that once lured him to the tables of the city's eateries have flooded the grease traps and poured back onto the streets in a stench of stale fat and cloying sweetness. The reliance on such a system and what’s more, he has lost autonomy, he is no longer self-reliant but instead relies on an illusion of choices that floods through his inbox and feed.