(This is seriously just a word-salad)
A common thread among all three of us is the translation of material to food. Reinventing food and non-food matter in a way that is nourishing to mind/body/environment
- What does food look like for non-biological matter
- Additionally what is a new food experience for non-humans, environmental nourishment
- Food for ‘material vitality’ pertaining specifically to rocks
- Food for rocks, food for non-humans
- Stromatolites
Enclosed system that converts inanimate material into something else—something more complex but in essence, still non-food. We talked a little bit about how natural phenomena performed this process before there was a bounty of life’s building blocks. In the 20s, there emerged a theory that life’s building blocks were created entirely through lightning strikes. Obviously we know now that many different natural phenomena contributed to the creation of essential amino acids. The theory was then replaced by the idea that hydrothermal vents kick-started life. Now that theory is being replaced by the idea that organic nuclear reactors created more complex mineral pools that may have seeded oceans with the ingredients for life. We’re concerned, however, with the idea that these conditions can be reinvented for an anthropocenic condition. We’re finding some kind of parallel between the conditions that nourished non-organic matter with life and our own food consumption. We’re additionally interested in how former systems intended to vitalize matter can be applied to food. Can we reinvent the term “food” to encompass human and non-human simultaneously.
GIZEM: Tyler is interested in duplicating the Miller Urey experiment and the primordial soup. I am interested in what happens when we radicalize our relationship to food and what happens when food is stripped down from all the BS, such as cultural context, emotional attachment, unnecessary ingredients. Still keeping the entangled relationship between mind, body, environment and using fermentation as a metaphor, I can totally imagine us coming up with a “system” where we produce edible “non-foods” (although they are the building blocks of foods today), producing them in an other-worldly fashion, creating a non-restaurant non-menu out of all this. Initially, it seems like a good concept to combine all three of us’ strengths and interests.
I think it’s a good thought experiment to try to combine our desires, strengths, and inclinations altogether. We realize that this is a long process and we might digress from time to time (just like now, I already feel like a lot has changed, but good!), but staying practical and loyal to purpose should keep us on our feet.
Stromatolite striations
Oklo, organic nuclear reactor, scars of uranium in rock
Fossilized mushrooms
More Stromatolites
Gizem:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/30256365/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3949257/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3949257/
TO-DO until next Tuesday (10/8)
Answering these three questions:
- What do we individually want to get out of this?
Interested in some kind of translation of matter. how artificial stand-ins for natural phenomena exist in an art/design format. 3 broad categories that the work falls into as of now: the process of eating, what our bodies do to process food, translation, and how our food intake has lasting implications–I fall into this category.
- What are our individual strengths?
Digital fabrication. biofabrication. Craft work: wood working, plastics, resins. Making work that exists in an art format
- What are our inclinations?
Self contained systems. Systems that ask questions outside of its own logic rather than posing questions about itself (question as an output or form of solution). Self-sustaining systems. System that solves its own questions, so scientific appeal in a design setting.
Coming up with a storyboard/draft visual representation of our idea (idea subject to individual, we can compress it later)
Formal inspiration:
Soft pneumatics
