Research-Creation about and with Food: Diffraction, Pluralism, and Knowing
(2022)
author(s): David Szanto, Geneviève Sicotte
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
A hybrid approach for artistic-academic investigation, research-creation has proven effective in addressing complex socio-technical issues while usefully undoing the dualities that emerge within more conventional research practice. In the realm of food, this is particularly relevant, given that the knowledges that constitute food culture and food systems are pluralistic. Moreover, food embeds some of our most critical contemporary challenges, such as hunger, migration, trade, climate change, and justice. Methods that address the subjective and relational nature of food, such as those of research-creation, are therefore critical. This exposition presents two food-centered research-creation projects, created by the two co-authors, each of which aimed at three objectives: (a) the pluralization of methods, knowledge, and outputs; (b) collaboration in meaning-making, reflection, and feedback; and (c) ongoing epistemic and personal transformation. Geneviève Sicotte’s Signes de vie / Vital Signs is a digital, multimedia exhibition, largely presented through verbal, visual, and auditory content. David Szanto’s The Gastronome in You is a series of three performances about death, life, and the microbiome, using the materiality of a sourdough starter to activate the gustatory and haptic senses. By bringing these two projects into dialogue with each other, and through an experimental, “diffractive analysis” process, we present ways in which research-creation can help illuminate new forms of knowledge that engage with the distinct challenges and opportunities within food studies and for the future of food-and-human relations.
The sounds of food: Defamiliarization and the blinding of taste
(2017)
author(s): Tara Brabazon
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
This essay – situated within the small but emerging field of sonic food studies and gastronomic auditory cultures – is positioned in the gap between the sounds of food and the meanings derived from the behaviors and practices encircling food. In food studies literature, assumptions abound about multi-sensory engagement. Yet, the sonic components of food remain undertheorized. This sonic research article – consisting of an sonic artifact and exegesis – emphasizes and prioritizes sensory incongruity. Intentionally, the non-eating sounds of the digital and analogue interactions surrounding food are summoned. There is a reason for the focus on these interfaces. Working with Viktor Shklovsky’s theorization of defamiliarization or ostranenie (остранение), presented in his 1917 essay “Art as Device,” I am interested in reducing “automatization” and value “disruptions.” I have produced a sonic artifact that textualizes three slices of food sound: shopping for groceries, the delivery of food to a domicile, and cooking. These sounds were not slotted into a convenient narrative of a sonic documentary. They were not staged; they were not sound effects. There is a gap – of experience, expertise, perception, and meaning – between signifier and signified, the sound and its reception. The deferral of meaning creates hesitation, confusion, instability, and unsettles meaning systems.