F.O.O.D.

Tasty Augmented Culinary Objects

#dinner-party #volumetric filming #cookbook #3Dprint #exploratory-objects #spatial storytelling

From the still life to the vibrant, shelf-ready products of Pop Art, from Salvador Dali’s Surrealist cookbook Les Dîners de Gala to Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s cornucopian depiction of a Roman monarch made entirely of fruit and vegetables; from Marinetti’s Futurist Cookbook introducing controversial dishes and instructions on what and how to eat, or works like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, a monumental feminist installation that features a triangular dinner table set with place settings for 39 notable women from history and mythology; or today’s streaming culture that has created communities around food and dining, such as Mukbang, which allows individuals to overcome the feeling of isolation which is typical of our digital age and connect with others while eating: art, food, and design has a long and intriguing history and food as sociocultural medium that transcends the geographical borders was at the core of our experimental design research.

Adopting its name from Gordon Matta Clark’s New York-based experimental restaurant FOOD, the seminar redefined F.O.O.D. as food-oriented object design, aiming to investigate our future hybrid realities in which physical and digital materialities are continuously intertwined around experimental recipes, designed culinary objects, augmented reality technology, volumetric filming, and social gatherings.

Departing from artistic and architectural inspirations and implementing text-to-image models we explored alternative ways of designing socially and culturally relevant and meaningful culinary objects able to alter the way we enact the spatial act of dining. Through looking at food culture and history, we explored the emergent role of new design languages in our daily social activities and interpersonal encounters in an experimental Dinner Party where every course became a surreal and spatial multisensory experience, and the food-driven experimental design objects revealed their stories through performative actions and volumetric filming.