The Reward Feedback Loop Engine: You May Also Like

The Machine Zone

You might have woken up this morning with the intention of doing it ‘all different’ today: you set a 20-minute screen-time limit for Instagram, turned off push notifications, and intended to read 10 pages of your book. By the end of the day, you did so well that you rewarded yourself with a little bit of screen time before bed, only to find yourself, an hour later, doomscrolling through the slot machine that is your phone and realising you had once again been sucked into the trance of your feed.

This state of self-forgetfulness closely resembles the ‘machine zone,’ a term used to describe the state of slot-machine gamblers who lose all sense of time and physical presence, fully absorbed with their game. While the slot machine was the first device designed to deliberately capture and hold human attention, its constant, repetitive switching between certainty and uncertainty has extended to the swiping, scrolling, and clicking in everyday life today.

Loop of Chasing Rewards

Especially since the arrival of the infinite scroll, content has become endless, and attention increasingly scarce. In response, capturing attention has been stripped down to its most primal form: triggering dopamine through stimuli, surprise, outrage, and arousal — keeping you in a loop of chasing rewards, over and over and over again.

Within the rise of economic uncertainty and constrained pathways to adulthood, younger generations often experience life itself like a gamble. Meanwhile, the ecosystem based on likes, clicks, and virality promises limitless success and money. But for those who do not hit the influencer jackpot, behaviour is shaped to keep them spinning the slot machine reels, endlessly waiting for what might come next…

Infinite Media Scroll

The machine invites you to take a seat and activate the installation with your phone. Across three vertical screens, the viewer watches a short film that explores the mechanisms of dopamine feedback loops embedded in everyday life, beginning with the artist’s personal struggle to break free from her phone addiction. Stylised to mimic an infinite media scroll, the screens resemble both the spinning reels of a slot machine and the similarly named "Reels" of social media.