Food-Woche: Funky/Fresh: Sound & Food

Kurzbeschreibung und Leitidee

"Fresh" and "funky" are words used to describe styles, aesthetics, music, art, and other contemporary creative productions. They are concepts primarily derived from cultures of food. "Fresh" is used to describe things that are new, not stale, unwilted easy to consume — things that are, in effect, alive, almost, or recently dead. "Funky", on the other hand, responds to foods that are decomposed or decaying, making us furrow our brows and curl our upper lips. Musicians, of course, use the word "funky" in other ways. This class takes up investigations and experimentation of these two fundamental, even essential aesthetic categories through food and music, alimentation, and audition. With readings, media, arts, and culinary examples drawn from historic and contemporary social experiments and movements such as Afrofuturism, ruderal ecologies, and others, we will sketch together outlines of a culinary cosmopolitics that relates creative acts to survival, morality, the 'good life' and living well. With a particular focus on sonic experience, we examine and practice embodied experiences that immerse and envelope individuals, socialize, and cohere groups of humans and nonhumans in new rituals and ceremonies of ecological attachment.

Lerninhalte

TRIGGER WARNING: We will be discussing matters related to the materials of life in their raw, frozen, and cooked forms. This means we will likely venture into areas of thought that deal with mortality, culpability, responsibility, and realism that may be uncomfortable for anyone more accustomed to abstracted or indirect encounters. We will provoke funky encounters with the familiar and unfamiliar nature of putrefied, stank, dead, and dying sounds, expressions, and materialities. We will promote that which makes the familiar strange and the unfamiliar even stranger. Students are expected to engage and deliberate, in an open, respectful, caring manner that respects all positionalities, and their expression in a safe, supportive environment of experimentation and mutual investigation. The class will proceed as weekly readings, watchings, and materials with engaging in discussions, annotations, and short reflective audio exercises to be presented and shared with the group. Experimental techniques for sourcing, processing, storing, and presenting both digital audio and food will be taught. With invited artist-practitioner guests and in undertaking collaborative moments with Aylin Tschoepe and Viktor Bedö’s courses and participants, Funky/Fresh will serve up a spectrum for the making of fulfilling and sustaining collective and creative acts through sonic explorations and edible and inedible mediations.

zu erreichende Kompetenzen

Students are able to: Identify and collect materials and measures for deliberating and detailing current best practices in research related to concepts of 'raw', 'cooked', 'funky', and 'fresh'. Understand the relationships between culinary creativity and other artistic forms of creativity. Develop creative relationships and responses to food systems as an aspect of and in relation to eco-criticism, non-humanism, feminism, and race politics. Recognize and recall concepts, cases, and examples of destructively and sustainably consumptive behaviors at the group and societal levels. Demonstrate the ability to illustrate and relate examples from media, art, literature, cultural projects, architecture, and design, to individual and collective practices, projects, and creative work. Analyze and differentiate between imaginary and real instantiations of radical concepts and real, or plausible, orientations toward fulfilling goals and orienting principles of creative practice and life. Assess situations and relational practices toward other beings, human and nonhuman, grounded in their material foundations and in planetary finitude. Develop, integrate and compose creative audio works that respond to necessary and urgent issues of metabolic relations.

WATCHINGS: Soylent Green (1973), Richard Fleischer F for Fake (1973), Orson Wells Sour Grapes (2016), Jerry Rothwell and Reuben Atlas Grizzly Man (2005), Herzog Get Out (2017), Jordan Peele The Stuff (1985), Larry Cohen Mother! (2017), Darren Aronofsky Delicatessan (1991), Jean-Pierre Jeunet La Grande Bouffe (1973), Marco Ferreri READINGS: Of Metabolic Myth by Jamie Allen (2022) Tasteless: Towards a Food-Based Approach to Death by Val Plumwood(1994) Being Prey by Val Plumwood (1985) The Raw and the Cooked by Claude Lévi-Strauss (1964) The Anthropophagic Manifesto by Oswald de Andrade (1928) White bread bio-politics: purity, health, and the triumph of industrial Gastrodiplomacy: Assessing the role of food in decision-making by Spence (2016). Blockchain chicken farm: and other stories of tech in China's countryside by Wang (2020).