Author: MK

I gave a talk at the University of Central England in Birmingham in October of 2004. I blogged about it back then, and you can read the archived post here, if you wish! Back in that old blog post I promised to share details of the book that was to result from these seminars that were being held at UCE in collaboration with Vivid. It’s late 2006 already, but I do keep my word!, so here is the link to the Central Books ordering website, if you would like a copy of “Hothaus Papers: Perspectives and Paradigms in Media Arts” for yourself! It’s a very nice book, with great essays by Simon Yuill, Sarah Cook, Anthony Auerbach, Caitlin Jones, Drew Hemment, and many more.

I’ve also recently released two more reviews on Rhizome News: Practicing Everyday Life, about the recent Conflux festival in Brooklyn, and The Art of Networks, about Jonah Brucker-Cohen’s recent solo exhibition at Oboro in Montreal.

I’ve been coming into virtual and physical contact with a lot of artwork that is centred around food lately. The preparation of food, dining rituals, food as an art object, and tracing origins of food have all been examined in several projects I’ve taken note of. Thinking back, I realized that the art/food connection has been on my mind for some time.

It may have started for me in the summer of 2004, when I was in Paris and went to the Fondation Cartier. The show on at the time was Pain Couture, an exhibition of bread as art/design object by Jean Paul Gaultier and the French Bakers Guild. The “fashions” crafted out of bread were whimsical and charming, and the smell coming from the bakery downstairs (where, if I recall correctly, a bun with a blue swirl in it cost something like 8 Euros!) was intoxicating.

Later that same year, I took part as the “Montreal node” of the Liveform Telekinetics (LFTK) project. Artists Michelle Teran and Jeff Mann designed a series of kinetic objects that could be controlled at a distance, and that are integrated into table settings to produce festive dining experiences that allow connection over distance. In their own words, LFTK “…re-imagines the familiar objects and utensils of our everyday social spaces as an electronically activated play environment, capable of transmitting over distance the physical presence and social gesture that comprise such a vital element of human interaction. […] Imagine a shared creation, a social ritual, a dance through objects, an electric dinner-table that is played.” I was lucky enough to attend their picnics in Cesar Chavez Plaza that they held at the ISEA 2006/ZeroOne festival. Though the distance between our two picnic blankets was small, we didn’t have line of sight so the other picnickers could have been on the other side of the world. We connected through the dance of our telematic objects, munching on similar foods, and sharing an iTunes playlist.

A project that will soon be unveiled at the Perimeters, Boundaries, and Borders exhibition in Lancaster, What’s Cooking Grandma? is the latest offering from the Human Beans collective. Human Beans have previously produced a food-related work, albeit tangentially related, with their PowerPizza pizza box/laptop container. In What’s Cooking Grandma?, Human Beans are videotaping Lancaster’s Grandmas as they cook and share their culinary tips and secrets. The videos are then uploaded to the popular video-sharing service, YouTube. They’ve also invited others to videotape their Grandmas and share the videos on YouTube as part of a growing collection.

Other items of note:
Debra Solomon’s wonderful Culiblog
“Bread – Daily and Divine” at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem
MILK project

I was on the bus the other day and a headline on a discarded newspaper caught my eye – “Next year, concerto for laptop”. I bent over and grabbed the paper to check out the full story. It turned out the article was not about an upcoming laptop concerto, but was about the recent baggage restrictions on flights leaving the UK. Due to the recent terrorism scare, there have been extreme limitations to the amount and type of hand baggage one is permitted to carry on flights originating in the UK. Musical instruments are very often larger than the new allowance and so musicians were told their instruments must be checked. However, musicians with priceless instruments are, understandably, loathe to chuck them into the hold with everything else.

To make a long story short, at the end of a recent performance, a prominent conductor took the opportunity to slam officials for enforcing this restriction when it is apparent musicians are unable to comply, forcing them to cancel travel or develop elaborate plans to transport instruments. This conductor, Mark Elder, said “I think we would all agree that the time has come to put an end to this unfairness. Otherwise it seems to me that next year we should all look forward to Concerto for Laptop and Orchestra.”

Hmmm. I actually was looking forward to Concerto for Laptop and Orchestra. Seeing “laptop” and “concerto” in the same headline was the whole reason I picked up the paper. More recent news reports suggest that this restriction will soon be lifted, so we won’t have a concerto for laptop next year, and to that I say – how unfortunate. Can we have our Guarneri violins and our MacBooks too?

Just yesterday, I created my third del.icio.us account (a social bookmarking service) and wondered again if I should speculate aloud on my blog about what kind of split personality syndrome this indicated.

I maintain several del.icio.us personalities for what I imagine are very good reasons: I automatically post links from del.icio.us to this blog, so I needed to start filtering, or else clutter up my blog with silly posts that had a single, badly annotated link. So I created a junk del.icio.us, that is filled with most of my random discoveries, that I try to look at and filter occasionally, letting the cream rise to the top, the “top” being my main account, which is automatically published here. The only tag I use in this junk account is one that flags it to my main account. The third del.icio.us account I have just started for my other blog, curating.info, because I realised I might like to keep a set of links on the subject of contemporary art curating, and use the tags to be extremely focused in how I file them.

Chris Heathcote feels my pain! … and he describes the plight of people managing multiple identities around the inta’net in a way that I couldn’t have said better myself. He speaks of this utopia, that has this feature, “seamless user switching”… that I wish was closer to today than tomorrow. He also makes the very good point that these separate accounts are not just about work/life divides, but are about more subtle things, which is absolutely clear, at least to me. All I have to say to his post is – Amen! I need it to be easier to move between different scenarios with different needs. Until then it’s pain in the neck 2.0.