When your snack talks back
Delicious and buttery. No, not my thighs but popcorn – official food of cinemas and the latest comestible to communicate with us. Artist Nina Katchadourian took a traditional popcorn machine and fitted it with all manner of clever Morse Code monitors; the irregular mixture of popping and silence as the tasty treat cooks is recorded and translated, then read out by a synthesised voice.
Rather morbidly, Nina first got the idea for decoding popping when thinking about the Kursk submarine disaster and how sailors on-board tapped out messages in Morse against the stricken hull. Specially written software on a computer hidden in the stand averages out the gaps in-between pops and uses that to differentiate dots from dashes.
At the end of each day, a sample of the corn is vacuum sealed and placed on the exhibition space wall, together with a recording and transcription of whatever garbled madness the machine has blurted out. Considering the old adage that vegetables scream when uprooted, maybe we should be deciphering the hidden messages in all our food. Whatever you might say about your mother-in-law's pot-roast, it's not half as bad as what I've heard it says about you...
