I was curious about the psychological mechanism that rewards readers of sensational news. This mechanism stands behind continuous misrepresentation of immigrants as victims or threat in British media. Research shows that humans evolved to pay attention to the information that provides them with possibility to evade threats and demonstrate belonging to a group. My performance explores the similarity between gratification habits of a sensational news reader and a comfort food consumer.
I trained a machine learning algorithm on a database of just under 6000 photographs collected from Getty Images using the search term “UK immigrants”. After 5000 runs, it created a collection of peculiar patterns, which I combined into a collage with the help of Adobe Photoshop algorithm for object recognition. This collage was printed on icing and installed as a topping for a home-baked cake.
For the performance, I ate the cake every time I was reading news during one whole day. An audience was invited to participate by consuming the cake and listening to the news. The interaction sometimes developed into information sharing process, during which an audience was encouraged to notice the gratification mechanism that provides psychological reward for consumption of sensational information and comfort food.
The works were enacted in Southwark park, an Overground train, and my Pilgrim House apartment in London on 15 May 2021.