I’ve recently been up at the Moving Images gallery on Auckland’s K-Road, checking out the agit-pop exhibition by Matt Kenyon, in the city as a guest of AUT University’s CoLab.

Kenyon’s day job is Assistant Professor of Art at Pennsylvania State University (aka Penn State), where he teaches courses in 3D animation, physical computing and video art.

Other times, as one half of the Swamp collective (the other is Doug Easterly, currently resident at Victoria University), he’s creating art that comments on our consumerist society, though not always of the aesthetically-pleasing manner of, say, Andy Warhol.

A hole in Kenyon’s cheek (which I at first take for a huge dimple) speaks to the fact he’s no pop art dilettante.

The hole is to accommodate wires to a barcode scanner, which Kenyon procured to turn himself into an unofficial participant in a Nielsen shopping survey. With the scanner in his mouth, Kenyon walked a store, scanning dozens of barcodes as he went. Later, he plugged a second device into his mouth - a tiny LED projector - to project the results of his survey onto a wall.

During a tour of the gallery - which includes a video installation of the Nielsen stunt - Kenyon struggled to immediately articulate the meaning of the escapade. Or perhaps he was leaving your correspondent to form his own response (which was, for the record: “An LED projector? Cool!”).

Overall, the artist’s modus operandi is “ to find creative expression within elements of culture that are inherently counter-creative”.

Other pieces are more accessible. And some led to some intriguing, unexpected outcomes.

Spore 1.1, for example (pictured above from a 2004 installation), was a small rubber tree purchased from US chain store Home Depot.

A wi-fi gadget attached to the plant was used to wireless check Home Depot’s stock price each week. If it went up, the plant got watered. If it fell, it didn’t. A 2007 update added a camera, and the ability to beam an image of the plant to a remote device.

Home Depot’s shares when up and up during the initial experiment, which took place before the crash.

The plant died, its roots sodden from overwatering - what could be seen as a metaphor, that the market was rising too far, too fast. Or maybe we should just look at it as a straight out market indicator. Certainly, it was better than whatever metric the clowns at ING were using.

Unfortunately, the version of Spore currently on display in Auckland is a static representation, not connected to any market.

And installation also delivered an unexpected revelation.

Improvised Empathetic Device (IED; a play on improvised explosive device) is an armband that features “custom software that continuously monitors a website (icasualties.org) that updates the personal details and numbers of slain US soldiers in Iraq. When new deaths are updated on the website, the data is extracted and sent wirelessly to custom hardware installed on the IED. armband. The LCD readout displays the soldiers' name, rank, cause of death and location and then triggers an electric solenoid to drive a needle into the wearers arm, drawing blood and immediate attention to the reality that a soldier has just died in the Iraq war.”

Wearing the device during the height of post-invasion chaos, Kenyon found he came to fear late Friday afternoon - one of the times when news is least followed, and therefore favoured for releasing bad news; in this case, US casualties, which tended to be released in bursts around that time.

A third installation, Coke is It, features a hex-crawler robot that’s programmed to locate puddles of coke placed on the gallery floor. It then sucks them up using an electric pump, then sprays the Coke over itself. An umbrella of industrial wrapping provides protection for a while, but it soon corrodes, exposing the robot’s skeleton, circuitry and sensors to The Real Thing.

“The robot is designed to search and consume until it kills itself. Companies such as Coca Cola deploy marketing strategies that infuse culture with a sense of well-being and elevated self-worth, contradicting the actual benefits of the consumable product,” says Kenyon’s commentary on the piece.

“It kills itself differently every time,” he told NBR. Unfortunately, for cost reasons, the robot won’t be committing Coke-icide in Auckland, although there will be a series of partial demonstrations (watch a video of the full bit here).

A fourth, Notepad, consists of pads of legal paper. Each sheet looks normal, but if you look at its ruled lines under a microscope (on hand at the gallery), you see that they’re actually formed from microtype listing the names of US casualties in Iraq. It’s oddly moving.

Kenyon has used a number of measures - licit and illicit - to get the pads into the Library of Congress (one legal method has been to write to congressmen using the paper. All correspondence is archived, creating an unofficial shrine).

There are more installations, picking up similar themes, at the Moving Images gallery exhibition, which constitutes a greatest hits, of sorts, of Kenyon’s work over the past decade.

What next? It seems The Warehouse has proven appropriately banal and grotesque to warrant Kenyon's attention. Watch this space.

It runs through til August 22 at the MIC, Level 1, 321 Karangahape Road