Talking Popcorn’s Last Words

Talking Popcorn (2001/2008) is a sound sculpture consisting of a commercial popcorn machine that decodes the popping sounds using Morse code and speaks out the results in real time. Viewers are invited to “eat the words” after the machine has popped them.

The first Talking Popcorn machine, created in 2001, self-immolated in 2008 while in an exhibition in Houston. However, its computer survived the fire and so its last words were preserved.

In 2019, for a solo exhibition at Fridman Gallery in New York, I asked sixteen people from a wide variety of fields and areas of expertise (among them an anthropologist, a psychoanalyst, a death doula, a computer scientist, and an opera singer) to address Talking Popcorn’s last words from their particular disciplinary perspectives. A new, functional Talking Popcorn sculpture was situated in the front gallery. In a small room further into the gallery was the burned, damaged carcass of the first machine. It stood on a black plinth upon which was written the machine's final pronouncement. The soundtracks of the sixteen interviewees played ambiently into the room.