… on food and coding

FoAM and the Guild for Reality Integrators and Generators invite you to a synaesthetic dinner, to jointly sample, celebrate and debate the future of food.

Food is a nutritious and delectable product of our reciprocal, sustaining relationship with the environment. It is also one of the oldest cultural expressions, rooted in hospitality and sharing. As the gastronome Brilliat-Savarin noted three centuries ago, “the discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.”

Open Sauces will unfold in a sequence of experimental courses, matched with drinks, improvised music and esteemed guests. While savouring the foods, the guests will be engaged in table conversations, sharing experiences, recipes and ingredients needed to demystify cultural, environmental, technical and ethical aspects of contemporary food systems. From molecular gastronomy to fair trade, from permaculture to food-tracking, from open source to open sauces, we will blend seemingly unrelated elements of our food chain. In an era riddled with environmental and cultural anomalies, these transdisciplinary and trans-local connections will become one of the keys to our survival, as individuals, communities and species.

With: Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Sher Doruff, Maja Kuzmanovic, Alok Nandi, Sneha Solanki, Wietske Maas, Matteo Pasquinelli, Kate Rich, Femke Snelting, Maki Ueda, Allison Zinder and other local and trans-local food experts and enthusiasts

a book based around the dinner on 22-NOV-2008, including texts, recipes and pictures, can be found at open_sauces_book

the reader, compiled prior to the events can be found at open_sauces_reader

workshop leaders: Adam Hyde (Radioqualia), Maja Kuzmanovic (FoAM)

Open Sauces deals with two basic requirements for the survival of every media artist: understanding scientific principles behind new technologies and eating food. Intricate scientific and technological concepts will be unravelled through the language of food, secret recipes uncovered in kitchen-style experiments (such as Cube Cola: http://sparror.cubecinema.com/cube/cola), discarded technologies used as kitchen implements, new media drenched in steaming saucepans.

Although coding and cooking seem to propagate two completely different lifestyles (the first being concerned with digital bits, the other with physical atoms), Open Sauces will uncover their common roots; continual algoritmic processing of ingredients, fused together in a whole that becomes more than just the mere sum of its parts. Both activities benefit greatly from the sharing of expertise and experiences with peers around the globe. Both activities have large, rich industries behind them, often trying to monopolise the supply of code, recipes and ingredients, creating an illusion of scarcity for both programming and nourishment. Open Sauces takes an alternative route, based on an economy of abundance and cooperation, releasing the 'sauce code' far and wide. Cooks and coders of the world unite!

Related Topics: molecular_gastronomy, copyleft, foam_food, open_sauces_menu_2008, flavour_pairings…