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Grow Yer Own Dang Food opens in Amsterdam! Offering “micro green cuisine”, an “expression of contemporary culture and superior low carbon footprint values in the form of a restaurant.”
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“Every disaster or half-result becomes, then, your teacher. I find the discipline and recourses provided in failure a much more manageable bridle between my teeth than the standard preaching of some experts and most certified chefs.”
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“Learn how to open your senses to the colour, shape, texture, smells, and flavours of your ingredients and give yourself open, wide permission to play. Don’t try to make your dishes look like the swank arrangements of haute cuisine for art-directed people
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“the kitchen here at ‘theRestaurant’ presents a quite non-expert, intentionally biased and unschooled cuisine based on my on-going work with intuition, food, creativity, and health.”
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OK, Nigella Lawson is a slightly divergent note in this collection of links about radical and creative food practices. But comfort food has its place too – and this dish fits that bill nicely. Yum.
Author: MK
The Lake District Escape Line, (dial 0870 224 1856 if you are in the UK) plays sounds of the wind whistling through the mountaintops (click to listen), crunching leaves, gurgling water, and, my personal favourite, Cumberland sausage sizzling in a pan (click to listen).
Cumbria Tourism reckons that the soothing sounds of the Lake District will chase away the winter blues, and so they have set up this hotline (and also offered the mp3 sound files for download) just in time to coincide with the onset of the gloomy, dark winter months.
It’s the addition of the sausage mp3 that has me thinking this is an inspired project. Babbling brooks and crunching leaves are sounds we can hear anytime. But sizzling sausage! The sizzling sausage mp3 could be a guilty pleasure for so many people: semi-committed vegetarians, dieters, people watching their cholesterol, etc etc. It is almost a silly addition to the otherwise typical outdoorsy and touristy sounds on offer – which is why I love it, of course.
So go on, dial in – or download the sounds here.
I’ve been invited to be a guest respondent on the empyre mailing list this month.
-empyre- facilitates critical perspectives on contemporary cross-disciplinary issues, practices and events in networked media by inviting guests -key new media artists, curators, theorists, producers and others to participate in thematic discussions.
This month we’ll be discussing the work of art in a noiseless world – or, some ideas about technological determinism and utopian dreams. If you don’t already subscribe to empyre, you can do so here.
I’m finally getting some of my work up on YouTube. At first it seemed redundant, since I have many of these videos on my website already. Then I thought – well, YouTube has an audience that is certainly much larger and quite different than the group of people that already visits my site.
I think the traffic to my site is not too shabby, but of course the stats don’t offer me a clear enough picture of what people are looking at and what they find to be useful information about me. I can divine some things from the statistics (such as which might be the favourite blog posts or projects for people to view) but it is a bit harder to piece together a narrative of each person’s visit, at a glance.
So the decision to upload things to YouTube was generated by a desire to offer my tidbits of video to a larger and more diverse group, but also because there is a pattern of use at YouTube that I know I can feed into.
Streamlining and harmonizing the interfaces people need to use to get to you makes good sense. YouTube offers a way for its users to search, navigate and mark favourites that each user knows how to do instinctively after the first few times. As Steven Johnson says in his book Interface Culture: “…knowledge becomes second nature to most users because it has a strong spatial component to it…” And so it becomes easier for people to find my videos on YouTube, because they don’t have to learn the user interface of my own website, https://michelle.kasprzak.ca – they know the UI of YouTube already and just have to enter the right search term, or complete a serendipitous series of clicks through related clips or users.
So perhaps more and different mouse pointers will be easily sliding along, clicking on the hyperlink that conjures up my content. That’s terrific – though it brings up the whole other dilemma of the smart use of Web 2.0 tools. YouTube is a clear winner, but others? I’m not sure about posting my versions of popular songs on the karaoke 2.0 site SingShot just yet.