a visual essay by Laura Paloma
In pet-cake-prank-revenge-train (2025), Laura Paloma reimagines the dataset behind the viral AI slop, Pet Cake Prank. [“AI slop” is an informal, pejorative term used to describe low-quality content generated by artificial intelligence (ed.)] Pet Cake Prank videos are showing a pet (parrot, cat or dog) reacting to a human cutting into a cake shaped like the pet. Using material from her personal and family archives, as well as Creative Commons-licensed material from the Cocodataset and Wikipedia Commons, Laura Paloma creates an AI slop fictional fantasy dataset. In this dataset, her younger self plays the main character, and the images of pets, found in public and private archives, leave their dataset folder to seek revenge on the humans who made them sloppy. pet-cake-prank-revenge-train (2025) explores the idea of the dataset as an archive and attempts to bridge addictive, synthetic viral content with the artist's personal image archive and emotional life. This project emerges at a time when the artist is grieving for her recently deceased mother. Using the structure of a dataset, she revisits her past in light of her recent loss. Each image category is accompanied by text mixing the genres of labelling, annotation, metadata and grief journaling.
Laura Paloma (*1995) is an artist and writer based in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland. Her projects address ideas of authorship, materiality, and performativity of digital and networked images and texts. Context-based and site-specific, her practice explores various formats, ranging from installations to online and print publications, as well as long-duration social media performances.
She has exhibited in several off-spaces in Switzerland, her desktop performances have been streamed online at Screen Walks (The Photographers’ Gallery London & Fotomuseum Winterthur) and offline at Medialab Matadero Madrid.
She was nominated for Prix Photoforum 2023, Futures Photography 2025 and has published works with Edition Taberna Kritika and sync.ed. In 2024 she was artist-in-residence at hangar.org in Barcelona and house guest at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin. She holds a Master’s in Contemporary Arts Practice in Literary Writing from Bern Academy of the Arts.
You can find Laura Paloma's projects at this link.
