Food & Transformation: how are materials like us?
The Ouroboros Sausage is a comic emblem of the ridiculousness of our perceived status as alpha-matter. Its status as the eater and the eaten stands for an integration of matter - a liquidity of subject and object. The Great Chain of Being has been debunked; we too are stuff.
The human body is dynamically changing mixed-meat. We consist of the matter that surrounds us, we are composite animal, vegetable, mineral, and all the grey areas in between. We breathe, eat, absorb, mirror and become our surroundings, we are a fuzzy assemblage of living and non-living material made of complex chemicals, minerals and micro-organisms intra-acting, always dynamically changing in micro-structure according to what we touch and ingest, affecting our desires and actions.
Through research, making and playing with stuff, we know that structure effects material behavior as in wood grain, cocoa butter crystals, or density of the foam in a meringue, or in our bones. We can transform a materials’ temper; by force or heat, but how do the materials we encounter affect our own temper? What material forces affect us? The discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ suggests that we reflect and respond to other people in psychological ways which can effect physiological changes in us. Do we mirror our surrounding materials in this way, and can this engender a different kind of empathy for our fellow materials?
The shared transformation, ingestion and metabolisation of edible materials, could be a way in to discussing complex issues across disciplines, about the borders between the human and non-human, and to develop empathetic relations with other matter. Through embodied thinking, using a material we are all familiar with, in an informal research environment we might be able to think differently though cooking and eating together.
Through artist Ellie Doney’s practice, which comes from a close engagement with material properties, behavior and affect, and through experimental edible materials workshops with people from across disciplines, she looks look closer at the relationships between bodies and materials, our temper and terroir. She works with materials, technologies and and methodologies spanning historical and contemporary science, art and psychology.
This project is funded by a studentship with BEKO PLC research, to think through how the technology we use every day mediates our connection with edible materials, and how technology can help to address food waste and future health concerns. The PhD is supervised by Gary Woodley (Slade School of Fine Art, and Prof. Mark Miodownik (Institute of Making, UCL Engineering)