PROJECT: Tastes Like Metal: Spits Gold SERIES SIZE: Limited Collection of 8 Unique Interactive Machines ARTIST: OoakosiMo MEDIUM: Interactive p5.js (HTML5 / Canvas) "A space where critique and complicity overlap." ABOUT THE COLLECTION Tastes Like Metal: Spits Gold is a collection of eight interactive “Cat Machines.” Each piece functions as a looping system—watching, biting, ornamenting, and producing—while never fully resolving. The series explores the contradiction of critiquing capitalism while surviving inside it. Resistance becomes performance. Damage becomes jewelry. Protest is chewed, resold, and worn. These digital works act as ancestors to a forthcoming physical series using pastel, charcoal, and aluminum foil. INTERACTION THE GAZE: Move the mouse or touch the screen to engage manic, unstable eyes. THE BITE: Click or tap to trigger snarls, claws, punches, and gold-spitting gestures. THE NOISE: Grain, shimmer, and background corruption are generated in real time using Perlin noise loops, ensuring the damage is never static or repeatable. PIECE LIST (01–08) Critique & Complicity Overlap Nothing Is Pure Resistance as Ornament Protest Becomes Resistance Jewelry of Damage Metal Taste I Bite the System, I Sell the Bite, I Smile Spitting Gold, Chew the Chewed MINT DESCRIPTION Tastes Like Metal: Spits Gold is one piece from an eight-part interactive series of “Cat Machines.” Each work is a looping system of gaze, bite, ornament, and output. The machine watches you. You provoke it. It produces gold, damage, noise, or nothing at all. The series explores the contradiction of critiquing capitalism while operating inside it. Protest becomes performance. Resistance becomes decoration. The bite is repeated, softened, resold. Interaction is essential. The work does not resolve without your presence, and even then it never settles. Grain, jitter, and corruption are generated in real time, ensuring each encounter is unstable and unrecoverable. This digital piece functions as an ancestor to a forthcoming physical series using pastel, charcoal, and aluminum foil. CONCEPTUAL FRAGMENTS (NON-HIERARCHICAL) These phrases recur across the series as visual, behavioral, and symbolic motifs. They are not individual works, but internal logic loops the machines repeat. A space where critique and complicity overlap. Chew the chewed. Resistance becomes an ornament. Protest becomes resistance. Nothing here is pure, only loud. Tastes like metal, spits gold. Bite the system. Sell the bite. Wear the damage like jewelry. I bite. I sell. I smile. Ensuring the damage is never static or fully repeatable. GALLERY WALL TEXT (INSTITUTIONAL BUT NOT DEAD) Tastes Like Metal: Spits Gold Interactive p5.js, 2026 This series presents eight interactive “Cat Machines” caught in a loop of critique and production. The works respond to touch and proximity with unstable gazes, bites, and ornamental gestures. What appears as resistance quickly becomes decoration. Damage is aestheticized. Gold appears, but never accumulates. The artist frames these machines as both critics of and participants in capitalist systems—biting the structure that feeds them while surviving inside it. Each interaction produces unique noise and distortion, ensuring no fixed or ideal state can be reached. SHORT ARTIST STATEMENT I bite the system and it bites back and I sell the bite because rent still exists. This machine critiques capitalism while actively participating in it and that contradiction is not resolved. I made a cat that spits gold every time you provoke it and somehow that felt familiar. More Info: https://peakd.com/alienart/@ooakosimo/tastes-like-metal-spits-gold-the-synthetic-hustle-saga