real-time blood glucose data, automated trading system, multi-channel displays, PC, dimension variable
<S&P(Sugar and Poor's)> 2025
craft cola, recipe variable
Curator Taehyun Kwon
Graphic Design Sarok Jung
Food Production Partner Marvel Maison
Supported by Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture
On Sugar Loops, What Can Be Bought and What Cannot Be Sold
Sugar Engine is an automated trading system powered by real-time blood glucose data. The continuous glucose monitor (CGM) attached to the artist's body captures glucose spikes that become signals for algorithmic trading, with these biological rhythms determining the timing of buying and selling. The installation, composed of six-channel displays and external LED boards, evokes a trader's room—yet what's being monitored here is not market indicators but the artist's own metabolism.
In this work, blood glucose transcends its role as a simple health metric. This data, immediately responsive to food intake, is both conscious and unconscious, universal yet intimately personal, reflecting individual biological differences and daily routines while containing deeply private information. The World Wide Web, once developed to connect the world, has now become an infrastructure transmitting glucose concentrations from within our blood vessels in real-time. Within this hyperconnectivity, the most intimate physiological phenomena are translated into market language, and private bodily activities function as investment strategies.
The returns from Sugar Engine materialize as craft cola in S&P (Sugar and Poor's), with sweetness levels adjusted according to profit margins. When audiences consume this beverage, they're not simply drinking—they're ingesting energy that has been transformed through the market from the artist's bodily data.
This beverage recalls cola's early history as a tonic and medicinal elixir, though the actual ingredients remain unremarkable. Here, cola is imagined not as a simple drink but as a technological interface acting directly upon the body—where caffeine and sugar activate the brain's reward circuits, promoting dopamine release and creating the addictive cycle that mirrors our relationship with real-time data streams.
As Patricia Clough noted, today's vital processes simultaneously "drive production while serving as its raw material." Sugar Engine literally embodies these biomedia conditions. The artist's metabolism becomes both a source of data production and an engine of capital accumulation, with the generated value circulating back to the body.
This circular structure—from continuous glucose monitoring through real-time data streaming and algorithmic trading to craft cola—condensely demonstrates the conditions surrounding the contemporary body. Personal biological information becomes raw material for the platform economy, health management becomes a command for self-optimization, and even the most mundane acts of eating and drinking become data production activities.
Today's 'smart body' discourse views the body as an optimizable system. Monitoring blood glucose, tracking sleep, and managing heart rate have become routine. Yet Sugar Engine subverts this logic of self-quantification and the market. Here, glucose data becomes not a tool for health management but for speculation, and bodily optimization is reduced to market returns.
The work's multi-display data streams compel an endless pursuit—better returns, more stable glucose levels, more efficient bodies. In an age where artificial intelligence promises superintelligence, Sugar Engine explores the power of 'sweet temptation' that renders even such rational calculations powerless.
From energy to capital, from capital back to energy. This loop created by Sugar Engine and S&P (Sugar and Poor's) metaphorically captures how bodies actually operate within today's information capitalism. Just as our clicks, scrolls, and likes become data and advertising revenue, our glucose fluctuations become market signals and capital.
This project returns what exists only as data back to matter, ultimately resolving into bodily sensation. When sweetness touches the tongue, caffeine stimulates the nervous system, and sugar is absorbed into the bloodstream, their bodies become part of the work while simultaneously becoming new data producers. The 'sugar loops' continue—an endless cycle where the boundaries between what can be bought and what cannot be sold become increasingly indistinguishable, dissolved in the sweet solution of platform capitalism.