SUGAR ENGINE

2025

Sugar Engine
autotrading system based on the realtime glucose data

S&P(Sugar and Poor's)
craft cola, recipe variable

‘Sugar Engine’ transforms the artist's real-time blood glucose data into an automated trading system, where metabolic rhythms drive market algorithms. As physiological signals become financial speculation, the project reveals how contemporary bodies operate as both data producers and capital engines in platform capitalism—with profits materializing as craft cola for audience consumption.

‘Sugar Engine’ is an automated trading system operating on continuous glucose monitoring data from the artist's body. Glucose spikes captured by a CGM sensor become algorithmic trading signals, with biological rhythms determining buy and sell orders. The installation's six-channel displays and LED boards evoke a trading floor, yet what's monitored here isn't market indicators but human metabolism itself.

The work transforms blood glucose from health metric to speculative instrument. This data—immediately responsive to food intake, both conscious and unconscious, universal yet intimately personal—becomes market language within our hyperconnected infrastructure. The World Wide Web, once built to connect humanity, now transmits glucose concentrations from individual bloodstreams in real-time, converting private physiological phenomena into investment strategies.

Returns from ‘Sugar Engine’ materialize as craft cola in ‘S&P (Sugar and Poor's)’, with sweetness levels adjusted to profit margins. When audiences consume this beverage, they ingest energy that has been transformed through market processes from the artist's bodily data. The drink recalls cola's origins as medicinal tonic, yet here functions as a technological interface acting directly upon the body—where caffeine and sugar activate reward circuits and dopamine pathways, creating addictive cycles that mirror our relationship with real-time data streams.

Curator Taehyun Kwon
Graphic Design Sarok Jung
Food Production Partner Marvel Maison
Supported by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture

Exhibition Archive, Factory2, Seoul, 2025

In this project, 'sweetness' extends beyond taste to encompass algorithmic seduction, data addiction, and the dopamine rush of market volatility. The work traces sugar's transformation from 17th-century 'white gold' to contemporary cheap sweetener, from industrial-era fuel for physical labor to information-age stimulant for cognitive work. Today's emergence of GLP-1 obesity medications as luxury commodities—with pharmaceutical companies surpassing luxury brands in market capitalization—reproduces historical speculative bubbles within the body-technology realm.

The circular structure from glucose monitoring through algorithmic trading to craft cola consumption demonstrates how contemporary bodies function within surveillance capitalism. As vital processes simultaneously "drive production while serving as its raw material," personal biological information becomes platform economy fodder, health management becomes self-optimization mandate, and even eating and drinking become data production activities.
Sugar Engine subverts the 'smart body' discourse that frames bodies as optimizable systems. Here, glucose data serves not health management but speculation; bodily optimization reduces to market returns. The installation's endless data streams compel pursuit of better returns, more stable glucose, more efficient bodies—exploring how 'sweet temptation' renders rational calculation powerless in an age of promised superintelligence.

From energy to capital and back to energy, this metabolic-market loop metaphorically captures how bodies operate within information capitalism. When sweetness touches tongue, caffeine stimulates nerves, and sugar enters bloodstream, audience bodies become artwork components while generating new data. The sugar loops continue—an endless cycle where boundaries between buyable and unsellable dissolve in platform capitalism's sweet solution.

MIN YOUNG KIM

Installation

Performance

Research