Let them eat cake!

Let them eat cake! is a tasting event serving an edible imaginary of your Facebook profile. In early 2012, Facebook conducted massive scale emotional contagion by manipulating the emotional expressions in the News Feeds of 689,003 users. This exemplifies how the governability and the biopolitics of everyday life flow through the many layers of shared images, liked videos, protocols, and hyperlinks, all orchestrated by the Facebook News Feed algorithm. Let them eat cake! proposes a gustatory experience to the visitor, a cake imagined with synthetic DNA encoded from a user’s Facebook profile data. The profile’s data categories (Ad Topics, Facial Recognition Data, Friends, Followers, Likes, and Political Views) are transposed into cake layers, with an absurd twist that reflects the algorithms agency. Ultimately the work explores innovative forms of engagement with human- machine relationships through ‘algorithm taste’ interaction. The basis of these relationships depends on vast resources allocated to the development of new forms of data storage to accommodate expanding capacity requirements. Synthetic DNA is the proposed solution to Big Data’s storage problem. Its high-density information encoding capacity, stable format, and low maintenance properties are fueling the promise of near infinite, never-deprecating storage. For the first time, data will be truly embodied, with the code of life itself. In short, DNA presages the Facebook server farms of the future. With this project we look particularly at some of the ways in which Facebook curates each News Feed. Such as: emotional contagion experiments, the augmentation of political polarization, and the adjustment of content visibility depending on its source, and its format. We propose tasting as a way to interact with these complex socio-technical assemblages. Though we do not yet propose the synthetic DNA version of the cake, but rather a harmless sugar substitute, we aim to emphasise the materiality of data by making it edible, and thereby to engage with the issues around near future DNA data storage and datafication through taste interaction.

This work is conceived as a tasting event. The cake is sliced by the artists while the work is briefly introduced to the audience duration:15min. Visitors are then invited to taste. Outside of the timeframe of the punctual event, a photograph of the work with its explanation will be displayed.

BIO
Francisco+Audrey of F͡RA̴UD̸

FRAUD̸ is a métis duo of artist-researchers (Audrey Samson & Francisco Gallardo). Their backgrounds include computational and software culture, environmental history, postcolonial feminism, cultural studies, disruptive design, performance and space systems engineering. The duo focuses on exploring forms of slow violence and necropolitics that are embedded in the entanglement of archiving practices and technical objects, and erasure as a disruptive technology in knowledge production. Past exhibitions and performances have taken place at Rotterdam Architecture Biennale, Rotterdam; Kunsthal Aarhus, Aarhus; Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin; Bâtiment d'art Contemporain, Geneva; Tabakalera - International Centre for Contemporary Culture, San Sebastian; Maison d'Art Actuel des Chartreux (MAAC), Brussels; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; and CentroCentro, Madrid.