Hedonistika
Project Description
Hedonistika is a curatorial project by Jane Tingley and Simon Laroche. ‘Hedonistika – Montréal’ produced by Elektra festival, is the inaugural exhibition of the larger umbrella festival concept – Hedonistika, which was conceived of by monochrom, an art-technology-philosophy group based in Vienna, Austria. Hedonistika will occur in different cities world wide, and so its form and taste will be shaped by the exhibition location – Hedonistika Montréal will be presented at the International Digital Arts Biennial / Biennale internationale d’art numérique (BIAN).
Hedonistika Concept | monochrom
The Smorgastic Festival for Culinatronics, Advanced Snackhacks and Nutritional Artistry
Hedonistika is a new festival for various approaches in gastronomical robots, cooking machines, molecular cuisine and experimental food performances. Created by monochrom (co-organizers of the prime festival for cocktail robotics), Hedonistika wants to extend the realms of radical man-machine interaction and wants to go where no slave-driven extruder engine has ever gone! Hedonistic robots, unite! Makers, rejoice! Food and drinks for humans and bots, uplifting experiments in food processing and snack delivery are on the way.
Created as an international festival, travelling from city to city and culinary landscape to culinary landscape, Hedonistika wants to find local curatorial partners and cooperate with local hackers, builders, chemists and phood phreaks to present a tour-de-farce of new approaches and discourses. Let’s not only build new gadgets, let’s also analyze and deconstruct the processes that the horrible agro-chem industry uses to create and sell us cheap and sickening crap! Let’s free ourselves and our machine buddies! Let’s crack the patents of Monsanto, the copyrights of Kraft — and don’t let us trick ourselves into the absurd belief that organic food and machines are enemies. They aren’t. It’s the system, dummies!
You don’t play with food? Well, not enough, we’d say!
Hedonistika – Montréal | Simon Laroche and Jane Tingley
Hedonistika pulls together artists, researchers, chefs and scholars to create new works and experiences that unpack and think through some of the questions around the inseparability of food and technology, and the dominant structures of society, economy, and culture that it engenders. By setting up collaborative teams of artists and scholars with expertise in food and robotics, Hedonistika seeks to explore how hybrid skills and perspectives help destabilize assumptions and habits that are inherent to each practice area. By setting up this creative process between individuals from different locations and backgrounds, Hedonistika wants to be reflective of this mixed reality through both art and words, but to also explore the very nature of this complex entanglement of ideas and skills.
Participating artists and projects include:
- “The Bliss Point” by Natalie Doonan and Ken Gregory
project description: Part love affair with all things sweet and part critique the Bliss Point explores food technology with an emphasis on the production and consumption (amongst other issues) of sugar in its various forms. The specific site of investigation is the human body and its manipulation by major corporations, marketing, government and other institutions. The tension between medical issues such as diabetes and obesity and the idea of a fun and colorful candy mountain sugar party will drive everything we do.
www.lesensorium.com and www.cheapmeat.net
- “M2A: The Fantastic Voyage” by Stefani Bardin (phase i: research and phase ii: exhibition) and Dr. Braden Kuo (phase i: research)
project description: The Fantastic Voyage is an immersive installation built around the first ever clinical study to use the Pill Cam wireless gastroenterology device to look at how the human body responds to processed versus whole foods. This device captures digital images of the inside of the GI Tract culminating in a Quick Time video of the alimentary canal. Using preliminary data from this human subject trial, taking place at Massachusetts General Hospital, the installation is designed to re-imagine and re-contextualize our food systems within the influences of corporate culture and industrial food production.
http://www.stefanibardin.net/m2a-the-fantastic-voyage/
- “Orchestrer la perte / Perpetual Demotion” by Simon Laroche and David Szanto
description de la pièce: Une machine nourrit ses humains. En cherchant à ce que ceux-ci ingèrent la matière préparée qu’elle a devoir de leur donner, la machine sustente sa couvée. De par sa taille et le rapport qui s’instaure entre elle et son bénéficiaire, elle dépasse la simple servitude. Si on considère les agents machiniques et synthétiques capables de transformer et reconfigurer le monde, la culture et la matière, on peut penser qu’ils participent effectivement aux affaires humaines et animent la singularité. Inévitablement, on procède alors au déclassement des agents sensibles et à la naturalisation de l’artefact, en envisageant un contexte de détermination technologique orchestrant la perte de contrôle généralisée.
project description: A machine nourishes its humans. Stardust or cyborg, substrate or bloom, social or technical, all things feed and are fed. Eating actions perpetuate patterns of nurturing and disempowerment, of growth, death, and decay. In repeated and reciprocal gestures, matter is cycled from one state to another: human, food, machine, food. Humans chew, swallow, and process, spawning energies and powering the machine. Microbes rearrange and stabilize tissue, neither raw nor cooked, fodder for the machine. Machines sustain their litter, feeding and desingularizing the human. In these cycles, bodies gain just as they lose control, eating, determining, and orchestrating their own demotions.
laroche.projet-eva.org and www.iceboxstudio.com
Video
Download the Tech Rider here
Upcoming Exhibitions
There are no upcoming exhibitions scheduled.
Hedonistika is available to travel in Canada and abroad. Exhibitors interested in this project can contact Jane Tingley for further information.