I trust you’re all working hard to get your final projects done for next week – and having fun doing it!

Please remember that you must submit a 250 word curatorial statement that 1) contextualises your exhibit or installation within broader themes of food, culture and design, and 2) explains your design rationale and intention, or what you hope the audience gets out of it.

Here are a few examples:

Inside ArtExpress 2010: Curatorial Statement
Toward the Sentient City: Curatorial Statement
Hidden Truths: Curatorial Statement

Please save your pdf to the R Drive by 9:00am on Tuesday 26 October, 2010.

Each exhibit or installation must be accompanied by a 1-page project description, A4 size, mounted on card or foam, that includes the following information:

Your name
Project title
1 sentence project description
Course name

Set-up starts at 9am in the 2nd year studio (3rd floor). Guest reviewers have been invited to join us at 10:30am.

If you have any questions or concerns, please email me or stop by my office this week – otherwise, I’ll see you on Tuesday morning!

On 10 April, 2010 she purchased a fresh McDonald’s Happy Meal and she’s been photographing it regularly ever since. After 180 days there was very little sign of decay – apparently because it is so “fatty, salty and practically empty of nutrients.”

But if you think that’s a long time, Karen Hanrahan has kept a McDonald’s hamburger since 1996!

That’s it on the left; the one on the right is from 2008.

Scary but kinda awesome too, right?

And just in case all this has inspired you to start your own burger collection, here are some DIY instructions.

The Future of Food (You can watch the entire documentary here.)

NOVA/Frontline: Harvest of Fear

The Svalbard “Doomsday” Global Seed Vault (Official site)

The Kew Millennium Seed Bank (Official site)

ART & DESIGN INTERVENTIONS

Seed Cathedral (UK Pavilion – Shanghai 2010 Expo) + Thomas Heatherwick’s inspiration

Free Range Grain – Critical Art Ensemble with Beatriz da Costa and Shyh-shiun Shyu

Family Whisky – James Gilpin

Community Meat Lab – Cathrine Kramer

The Chronic Facility – Alison Thomson

The Cloud Project – Zoe Papadopoulou and Cathrine Kramer

Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow – James King

Corn Study – Matias Viegener & David Burns

London Biotopes – Tuur Van Balen

Growth Assembly – Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Sascha Pohflepp

Also, a few things I’ve come across recently that you might find interesting:

DIY Meat Head

This is Your Brain on Food
“Is coffee, tea, tobacco, alcohol, cocoa, or marijuana a nutrient or a drug?”

Sweet Memories: How Jelly Belly Invents Flavors
“Flavor and scent are beloved for their ability to bring back memories long buried in the sensory deluge…The flavor designers at the Jelly Belly Candy Company make it their business to speak this sensory language, and, through a process alternately technical and zany, to suss out exactly what it is that makes those tastes—and by extension, those memories—jump.”

A real table for my imaginary family
“Building a table for Thanksgiving, I was armed with power saw and a dream. It wouldn’t be nearly enough.”

Get Gyro. Chef Anthony Bourdain’s new graphic novel is “about ultraviolent food nerds. It’s a gourmet slaughterfest.”

Visualizing Nutrition: American Food Consumption, Soft Drink Industry Structure, New Orleans’ Gumbo, Global Seed Industry Structure, Obesity and Hunger: Partners?

Notice how the images challenge or reject the “perfection” of fast food advertising without losing their seductive edge, and the simple captions (giving each item’s fat content) add thought-provoking information without distracting from the photos. The statement on his site is also a good example of how a photo essay, and the photographer’s intentions, can be explained.
 

The new due date is MONDAY 20 SEPT 2010. (The R drive will still lock at noon, and hard copies are still due in lecture.)

I’ll return written feedback in class this Monday, which gives you another week to refine your concepts and take more photos. If you have any questions please just let me know in class or send me an email.

Your storyboard should comprise 12 panels or frames that clearly present a visual narrative. We should be able to get a clear sense of what you are photographing and how you are framing it.

Your presentation should identify the title of your proposed photo essay and give a brief (2-3 sentence) summary of the story you want to tell. Be sure to include a few images from your storyboard or sample photos you have taken to give us a sense of your aesthetic approach and narrative structure. Each student will have no more than 5 minutes to present, so please be sure to time and practice your presentation before class.

I’m really looking forward to seeing what you’ve been working on – and if you have any questions before then please just email me. Cheers.

Hoosier Cabinets (early 1900s)
bulthaup b2 kitchen workshop (2010)

Kitchens of the future

General Motors – Kitchen of the Future (1956)

General Electric – Future Kitchen (2006)

Kitchens, material culture & politics

The Kitchen Debate (Nixon and Khrushchev, 1959) Part I of II

The Kitchen Debate (Nixon and Khrushchev, 1959) Part II of II

See also:

Kitchen Debate: A Research Project on Cold War Material Culture + “The Cold War’s Hot Kitchen” by William Safire

Learning How to Cook

Play Kitchens
Grow with Me Kitchen: Cook & Care
Play My Way Kitchen
Just Like Home McDonald’s Drive-Thru with Play Food

“I discovered bit by bit not the pleasure of eating good meals (I am seldom drawn to solitary delights), but that of manipulating raw material, or organizing, combining, modifying, and inventing. I learned the tranquil joy of anticipated hospitality, when one prepares a meal to share with friends in the same way in which one composes a party tune or draws; with moving hands, careful fingers, the whole body inhabited with the rhythm of working, and the mind awakening, free from its own ponderousness, flitting from idea to memory, finally seizing on a certain chain of thought, and then modulating this tattered writing once again. Thus, surreptitiously and without suspecting it, I had been invested with the secret, tenacious pleasure of doing-cooking.”

Luce Giard, The Practice of Everyday Life, Vol 2

This week’s readings:

“Haunted Kitchens: Cooking and Remembering” (pdf) by Jean Duruz
“Andy Warhol’s Production Kitchen”” (pdf) by Elizabeth Athens
“Cooking Codes: Cookbook Discourses as Women’s Rhetorical Practices” (pdf) by Elizabeth Fleitz
“My Father’s Kitchen, Tel Aviv” (pdf) by Yossi Gutmann

Taryn Simon photographs secret sites

Ryan Lobo on photographing the hidden story

Also:

Jonathan Klein on photos that changed the world
James Nachtwey’s searing photos of war
Frans Lanting’s lyrical nature photos
Edward Burtynsky on manufactured landscapes

Something else to keep in mind:

Your photo essay should be creative and beautiful but it should also be more than that; using the production and/or consumption of food as its subject, it should present a critical take on design and culture.

Our best design work–like all great stories–changes the ways we see ourselves, each other, and the world around us.