[-empyre-] Fwd: from Sophea Lerner: fast food for ears

[Amanda McDonald Crowley]

My colleague Sophea Lerner recently tried to send this through to the list, with no success (perhaps the unsw server doesn't accept mail from small independent mail servers? she says that's been an issue for her recently), so I am forwarding here:


> From: Sophea Lerner <hello at phonebox.org>
> Subject: Fwd: fast food for ears

hi amanda - looks like the list spat this out!

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: fast food for ears

belated greetings from delhi. thanks amanda to everyone who has fed the list with such an abundance of inspiring projects and provocations.  i am a sonic media artist, broadcaster and permaculture designer who believes lunch wants to be free! i am so late to the feast and scrambling to taste everything as people pack and head home! i can only plead the chaos of a looming show with the lovely delhi listening group, a long term collaboration--built, unsurprisingly, on a strong foundation of sharing lunch...which brings me to:

food and collaboration...

cooking together as a creative activity can be a very revealing collaboration in miniature that can become the basis of other working relationships between artists. are you a whizz at following the nuances of complex recipes with the best ingredients? or do you shine brightest in the kitchen when improvising with leftovers? perhaps you are the beloved guest who pays the compliment of wanting third helpings? some of my most enduring collaborative alliances were formed in the kitchen in situations where i had the pleasure of cooking with ohter artists, often at residencies.

food/eating as a medium and metaphor for participation has been a recurring focus for a number of paricipatory radio projects where cooking and eating together led to... more cooking and eating together, with more people.

'where are we eating?', a translocal sonic feast, networked dinner events from around the globe for isea 2004 in helsinki, the local node of which used a temporary fm station to distribute a live to air tour of local streetfood which was mixed with local streams and remote feeds.

the distributed network that emerged out of this project segued into the foodradio_network which various nodes instigating edible audio semi-regularly and hosted by free103point9 (now wave farm).

we had a 'manifeasto' of sorts. a version of which can be found as 'live feeds: hybrid cuisine from the new radio kitchen...a dinner invitation to radio cooks everywhere' in brandon labelle's 'radio territories'.

"Hybrid radio cuisine distributes active performer/participants and lurking performer/participants throughout the networks in which it takes place Ñ there is no separate location for audience. It is a networked experience both in its conception and execution. Rather than represent a network to participants, let us invite them to share food/food for thought from their own global position and local variables. We aim to provide suitable hosts and clear protocols for open participation. We exchange recipes and we share ingredients, exploring models of open content and accessible technologies as ways to circumvent commercial and legislative gatekeepers of spectrum and net. Our recipes are in a state of constant variation as we experiment with the ingredients and utensils at hand."

recipes as knowledge sharing featured in 'recipe for radio' where we opened australia's radio national up for live public contributions and remix using august black's 'userradio' software.

another foodradio_network project that i instigated was the 2007 'snack city' for mediawala festival in new delhi - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ms_static/albums/72157612650291792 streetfood became a focus of that project too as just as we were starting work on it the cooking of food on the street was banned in parts of delhi as part of a whole swathe of brutal beautification of the city in the run up to the commonwealth games. people who had been serving a
particular snack on the same spot for 30 years and their fathers before them disappeared overnight. we  invited people to celebrate streetfood and turn their phone into a microphone, by means of an elbow movement, and call us up from wherever they were snacking.

right now i am visiting delhi, no longer based here full time. after spending the lions share of the last ten years living in two very different megacities, delhi and bangalore food related priorities have shifted a bit. so little
time...so much to say about compost, fermentation, foraging...the complexities and contradictions around food cultures in our cities here...there's no time to unpack this properly right now. but (for example) on the one hand delhi has an enviable continuity of urban farming practices and on the other hand the elites and the aspirational middle class are not proud of or interested in what on the whole is seen as backward or rural and hence out of place in the modern global city. whilst in places like sydney and new york urban farming is more often seen as part of a desirable future, but there is less everyday know how. there is a lot to learn from cities here. when i first moved to delhi one of the things that made it a quality of life choice was the easy access to real food. (in the five years that i lived here, before moving to bangalore, i never had to step into a supermarket once and the only frozen food i ever bought was ice-cream.) with limited options between cooking completely from scratch and eating entirely processed or outside food it was an easy segue to scratch that a little further and start to scratch in the dirt--growing food as an extension of cooking--making dirt and growing food in very limited space became a focus.

ongoing projects include:-

flat_food : tiny space strategies for people with no time no, limited resources, and often limited water, to get more nourished and manage waste locally.

porticulture : a suitcase garden that grows where you go! started during time place space : nomad in 2014.

in development:

openradio : a network garden for shared and fearless listening-- a collaboratively designed platform for locally shared listening experiences of both a regional sonic ecology and socially engaged listenership. the idea of a garden as a metaphor for a sustained and interconnected context that nourishes community and brings people together, and grows and changes over time, as a template for growing new forms of sonic media exchange.

i'm looking forward to slowing down enough to chew over this months offerings properly from next week on and am so inspired by all of you! so delicious to get more details on work i'm aware of and to learn about so many many more projects and people. what a smorgasboard!!

YUM!!
sorry to eat/read and run...so many tasty thought to respond to...much audio to edit tonight...

.sophea
phonebox.org/sophea