User:Alice/Project proposal
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What do you want to make The act of cooking, following the instructions of a recipe, handling food and the meaning behind everyday gestures and habits related to food production and consumption, these are all details that interest me. Cooking is often used as an analogy, in order to explain other technical processes and concepts, such as programming. The recipe has often been compared to the computer program, and terms such as recipe and cookbook have been appropriated and used in the programming world to define pieces of code that perform a certain task, and collections of these pieces of code. For me, it's important that food is used as a medium to discuss a broader social context, so this will be more of a research into specific community practices, transfer of knowledge and biases, the political act of food production, etc.
How do you plan to make it
A goal would be to design/plan/conceptualize events related to food production, reflecting on the issues mentioned above. I am planning to follow food events that take place in and around hackerspaces, where hackers and programmers redirect their skillset towards food production and experimentation. I plan to write essays on specific issues; for example, I am currently reflecting on the concept of recipes, instruction sets, how they reflect the reality of the tasks being described, how different types of recipes can relate to one another, etc.
What is your timetable At the moment, I am still gathering resources and references. I plan to stick to the deadlines :)
Why do you want to make it
Reading on food culture, food history and other food related topics has been one of my main interests for many years, so this project comes as a natural progression for me. Furthermore, my recent introduction to the world of software culture has opened new possibilities and insights. Now I want to explore the relationship between the two, and how the principles connected to one can be transferred to another.
Who can help you and how
I have a couple of plans that I hope will lead me into a good direction. I will participate in a couple of workshops/conferences that are related to this topic, try to talk to the people involved and learn more about their motivation. So far, Femke has been my biggest inspiration, since many of the topics I am reflecting on are part of the work she has already done in the past decade.
Relation to previous practice
In the past couple of months I have researched quite a bit about women's relationship with technology. More specifically, I was interested in how women were first introduced to the technological world and were given tasks that seemed, at the time, menial and basic. These tasks eventually became the basis of programming today, a culture completely appropriated by men. Similarly, food production has always been associated with women's work, done behind closed doors, with little or no attention being given to it from the outside. In time, cooking has become appropriated by a different culture, hacking culture, stripped of its emotional layer and turned into a programmatic practice.
Relation to a larger context
As stated earlier, the one connection that jumps out right now is the appropriation of culture that has emerged in technology after world war 2, and is still ongoing today. I am also interested in the idea of food preparation as an anticapitalist political act (as expressed by Michael Pollan) in which people can become more than simple consumers in an industry ruled by big corporations. Other ideas:
- kitchen tools, from tools of oppression (Semiotics of the kitchen) to status symbols (https://smartypans.io/)
- replacing human intelligence, skill and intuition with gadgets (smartypans again)