villainous.biz

behold the wonders of dripping

December 10, 2006 – 9:31 pm
Posted in art related, learning log, projects
Leave a Comment

for the third and final project for the first term of my MA studies (damn. has it only been two months?), my group and i had to fulfill a brief within the topic of fat. no, not as in pretty hot and tempting, but as in;

…a category of lipid, distinguished from other lipids by their chemical structure and physical properties. Fats are solid at room temperature as opposed to oils which are liquid. This category of molecules is important for many forms of life, serving both structural and metabolic functions. They are an important part of the diet of most heterotrophs (including humans). – wikipedia.org

if you are familiar with the specifically british cuisine of dripping, then you would know the process of extracting dripping derives from cooking a large section of meat, whether it be pig, cow or goat, or cooking an animal in its entirety, which commonly includes duck, chicken or smaller pigs, cows or midget goats.

once the beast is cooked, one collects the succulence or essence of the animal within a jar to let cool. after the cooling process, the fats from the animal form two distinct sections within the jar; the top, solid, white, almost waxy substance of the dripping which is used for cooking other dishes like fish and chips (used to cook both the fish and the chips), and the gelatinous bottom half of the dripping which is prized for its flavor and is usually eaten with toast (known as a mucky fat sandwich in parts of Yorkshire) and is served for breakfast. truly, flesh marmalade. meat jello. ugh.

the collection of animal fats cannot be solely attributed to this cornerstone of culinary arts, this last bastion of sensationally flavorful cooking known as british cuisine. cultures from around the world have also partaken in the honorary tradition of collecting the cooked off scrapings of one of gods poor creatures. Ghee is a type of clarified butter important to indian cuisine. schmaltz is rendered goose or chicken fat that is kosher if prepared properly and is used in jewish cuisine. fat is a universal truth and a pillar of civilization.

anyway’s, for our project, violeta, anastasia, alex and i had to design an exhibition space and user experience at the Good Food Show that would promote the virtues of cooking fats over so-called healthier choices, and how cool and hip it is to put utter crap into your body again, just like grandma used to do. we came up with a kinda old-time grocery store during the day, Iron Chef tournament by night, sorta event. you had to be there for the powerpoint i guess.

here are some pictures from the model (click on the picture for the album).

space into place transmutation

November 3, 2006 – 3:11 am
Posted in art related, europe is my backyard, learning log, living the city, media theory, podcast, projects
Comments (3)

this week at school i am currently involved in a mandatory group project involving space intervention under the guise of social capital. the project involves several students from the MA courses of CSM school of design and school of interdisciplinary studies, including the Textile Futures MA students, Design Studies MA students, our colleagues at Industrial Design MA, MA Design by Project and of course, the MA Creative Practice for Narrative Environments posse. wuzzup.

so far it has been an intense 2 days of lectures, workshops, field work, research and meetings… lotsa, lotsa meetings. the project occurs in span of three days and in this time we are suppose to do all that and a bag o’ crisps… on top of getting to know each of our cross-discipline MA fellows, do an ethnographic study AND present an investiture of some sort. tomorrow is the crit. poo.

what we decided upon for a space2place intervention was to seek out and define the areas that were monitored by CCTV within london; something pretty easy to find, actually. the average londoner is photographed 300 times a day by CCTV cameras, not to mention some commercial spaces are even being audio recorded now so that conversations can be listened into in case of dissident smalltalk and flirting… i’ll let you chew on that for a moment.

using 2 inch wide yellow packing tape we marked out on the ground of covent garden, an area that was being monitored by CCTV. we choose covent garden specifically because it was at a crossways of several pedestrian walkways and roads, and was a meeting place and also a place for tourists and locals to work, shop and be at leisure. also using the same tape, we wrote out in plain english, signs on the ground denoting areas that were in and out of CCTV range.

our goal was to make apparent the actual boundaries and physical areas that were being monitored and vise versa. working differently then just a simple warning sign, people now had new perceptions of where and when their actions were being recorded. along with the experiment, we also conducted surveys and a small anthropological activity to create a more rounded ethnological study. as the day progresses tomorrow, i will update this post with more materials and findings.

here is a photograph gallery of our field research day in covent garden.

LUA – CSM – MA CPfNE – ARUP – STEEP group – manual research aggregator (that’s a mouthfull!)

This is a link to the blog for the CSM – CPfNE – ARUP project STEEP groups and those of us who are too lazy to remember or bookmark the actual URL of the address (like me) and have to navigate to certain pages by retracing the series of links visited before stumbling upon the one you actually wanted.

cpfne-arup.blogspot.com

come to think of it, i am starting to navigate and remember the psychogoeography of nodes around the internet through the use of virtual landmarks (kinda like “go to boingboing, left on slashdot under the -1 modded troll comment in whatever article, click through the banner ad, straight to flickr and then right on the link found in the signature of the dude who started the google cached discussion about monkey-less bananas on the LastFM forum). it kinda reminds me of when i first moved to the netherlands.

not really being able to navigate around urban spaces like i was used to in toronto (the grid of streets found in toronto and other north american cities pretty much ment it was “up and over or over and up” to get to certain places. this personal navigational system was replaced by concentric circles of streets, twisty roads, bridges and dykes that radiated from the center where the church was and became the “where the fuck am i and where the hell am i going, but i am riding a bike so try not to think about how stoned you are or you’ll get crushed by the tram” system of dutch city way-finding), so i had to begin to remember the progression in which i came across certain landmarks in order to get to specific places like my favorite coffeeshop for instance, only to realize that all the while i was taking inefficient routes to places for years after friends native to holland would actually, physically show me that where i wanted to be was just around the corner and not around the city in a downward spiral movement… or maybe i couldn’t navigate that well because of time spent in the coffeeshops… ah, i can’t remember any more… i’m hungry..

…oh and yes, i know i could use del.icio.us… and i do. just to confuse myself even more i have two accounts and also aggregate all the fii_research material on the CPfNE-ARUP blog… for those who actually get all the diminutives and abbreviations, this post is for you. come to think of it, bookmarking the URL would have been easier by now since i have started to make this a full blown blog post. i will make sure to tag this in the “excuses for posting inconsistently” category… ok… shutting up…

…now.

Pages