ˆ



o
Abstract
1
Primordial Soup:
Linked Inception
11
Body:
The Vessel of Change
111
Hands:
Tools of Alternation
1v
Mouth:
Communal Dialogue
v
Stomach:
Metabolism HQ
v1
Intestines:
Food and Magic
v11
Anus:
The Trace
≡ table of digestion

Enter the mouth, in comes the enzyme rich saliva. Mechanical mastication mashes it all preparing for it to be swallowed. Chew at least 20 times.

Mouth: Communal Dialogue

As an internal process transcending the body, metabolism is reflected in constructed and natural structures. It's not an exclusively individual affair, it involves action from multiple actors, microbe to cell to human to human to microbe, creating an endless conversation between matter and energy. Companion (Latin: com + panis = together with bread), community eating is the core activity which binds a group. As food goes in, speech goes out. It's a stimulus for discourse. In this sense, it is entangled with the primary purpose of design, communicating. Food must be swallowed in order for the tongue to be freed, for language to be vocalized. In this sense, food is a barrier to spoken communication, but food is already involved in an endless dialogue through its cyclical trace. The constructed notion of eating is infused with the gesture of offering, stemming from the baby that is offered the breast; which certainly is an act of communication. As an extension to the primal needs of eating, it also allows for closeness. The passage of food seems to demarcate the borderline between object and subject. By the means of metabolism, the duality of the self and the outside world becomes blurred. Consequently, the outside is internalised, but it also makes digestible the shifted perception that the self is constituted from the outside.

Nicolas Bourriaud, describes a situation, a happening involving art, but not an art space, rather human relations and the context they are in. Relational art attempts to subvert the situation which Guy Debord describes in "Society of the Spectacle" as a society where human relations are no longer directly experienced but start to become blurred in their spectacular representation, which raises the question over whether it is still possible to generate relations at all. Rirkrit Tiravanija is known for his culinary endeavours within the white museum walls around the world, with a constructive idea behind them. Tiravanija’s ideology would be that he would just cook, instead he would cook in relationship to these ideas about trying to reanimate life around the object. Through this provocation, eating, which has easily turned into a routine, becomes ritualistic. Other opponents of contemporary food practices include the punks, who use food as a site to make themselves, and to theorize and contest the status quo. Many Americans, and particularly self-described ‘White’ Americans, experience eating as banal. Punks do not. As an integral part of their daily practice, punks politicize food. For punks, everyday American food choices are not only nutritionally deficient, they are filled with a commodified, homogenous culture, and are based in White-male colonialism over nature, animals, and people around the world. In order to destabilize these canonical beliefs, they must be established as harmful. Food in the supermarkets and restaurants is cleaned from its production process, looking innocent. Ethical gathering and production of resources must be constitutional. First acknowledging the human corpus as one which takes too much and gives too little, then acting towards reorganizing this system.

Food is a tricky medium through which to analyze the rift. Food, processed or not has qualities similar to those of drugs. Our oral senses send nerve impulses to the brain and then to the entire nervous system. Each taste bud responds best to one of the five basic tastes — sour, sweet, bitter, salty, umami. When eating, our primary concern is pleasure. Eating empowers our sense of self and gives comfort, which can obscure the spiritual aspects of metabolism.

Is the introduction of tasteless food a way to become desensitized from the primary tastes and desires? Punk cuisine, the Futurists, and meal replacement developers, such as Soylent, have imagined and practiced removing preconceived ideals about food consumption. Already we see here a radical shift away from the folk political notion of food. Instead of an authentically natural conception of food, we see the shedding of the traditional phenomenology of food and its replacement with an abstract chemical concoction of food. Rather than conceiving of food in terms of its aesthetic and sensible qualities – the beauty of a well-cooked steak, the crispness of fresh lettuce, the aroma of a simmering stew – meal replacement products instead perceive food in terms of its chemical nature. Ultimately, food becomes reduced down to its bare functional minimum: that of providing our bodies with the energy and nutrients necessary to survive. This is the striking innovation of Soylent – to move it beyond our human phenomenological biases and present us with a scientific image of food. However revolutionary this system may be, it does profit off the back of capitalist labour schedules. It doesn't seek a middle ground between transcendence and sustenance, only serving the human battery.

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