Monday 29 March 2010

Letter L – food Laboratory - Explanation


Activity: food preparation
State of mind: rejection, denial
Office area: vending machine in the corridor
Occupation: chemist (food scientist)

“...Nora's upset. Eating vending machine food is one of the worst aspects of living in the office. She goes from one to another, over and over again, hoping to find a type of food she hadn't noticed before. Something healthier, something fresher than tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches and crisps. Assailed by feelings of deep rejection, she starts making biased, subjective comparisons between the office vending machine food and the fare served at high-class Basque restaurants.
After emptying one of the vending machines of its food she decides to use it as a laboratory in which to create “bug cuisine”. Her game plan is to create flavours and aromas to change the properties of the vending machine food by means of alchemy...
Nora – who is her building's version of the 'Phantom of the Opera' – "borrows" wireless keyboards during the night from the occupied office below. These she chooses because they're the most "infected" pieces of office kit, having picked up germs off people's fingers. In her food laboratory she "extracts" the germs from the keyboards and distils them into bottles – one bottle of distillate per keyboard. Her food-play is completely imaginative. Child-like, she pretends to be a chemist distilling germs, using the vending machine springs, an office tray and a water circuit...reusing the vending machine as a food laboratory that she inhabits...”

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