[-empyre-] March 2016: FOOD/TECH/ART

Tue Mar 8 12:21:44 AEDT 2016

On Mar 5, 2016, at 4:25 PM, Renate Terese Ferro wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Dear Amanda, 
> Thanks so much for agreeing to be our guest moderator this month.  I am excited to share a new project with our subscribers that I am about to launch that is definitely food centric but networks into culture and politics.  More about that in a bit but I thought it might be interesting to our subscribers for you to talk about the history of your own curating.  You have been doing this for such a long time how has technology and art impacted changes in the way you curate.  Given your recent exhibition at Radiator Gallery in Long Island City I thought it might be interesting for us to hear about how how your curatorial practice has evolved in relation to our current topic.  

Hi again Renate,

Thanks again for inviting me to participate as a moderator on -empyre-

And to give a little background to my interest in the specific topic of conversation this month....

As you know - and as attested in the little bio I provided - I've been working at the intersection of art and technology for quite a while now. 

My interest in the intersection of art and food probably began in childhood. My mother was (still is) an extraordinary cook - and I'd spend a lot of my time with her in the kitchen. My aunt was a restaurateur and I worked in her restaurant as a teen - it was a wonderful restaurant that served fantastic mostly french influenced food, in Australia. It was also something of a hotbed of political conversation and action: located in Canberra, the capital city in Australia; my uncle (my aunt's husband) was at the time a political journalist, so there was always an intriguing clientele and great conversation. In fact I often joke that an apprenticeship in the arts inevitably involves a stint working in hospitality: I spent ten years waitressing! Good food and good art inevitably lead to good conversation. Seems to me to be a no-brainer!!

For the Adelaide Festival 2002, the artistic director, Peter Sellars, assembled an extraordinary team of associate directors -- essentially the co-curators for the Festival. Among the team was Gay Bilson, an amazing writer, cook, restaurateur and cultural producer. Being 2002, it was pre web 2.0 times, but Gay and I had wonderful, exhilarating and complex arguments about the intimacy and generosity of food; and the capacity of technology to insert distance and alienation into personal relationships. Not surprisingly, I didn't entirely agree: there were lots of artists back then realising projects that were specifically about developing a sense of community into online community engagements - but that's probably a matter for a different thematic conversation to the one we're having here this month. 

Fast forward to my time at Eyebeam where, during my tenure, we established a research group around sustainability. Not surprisingly food and generosity also emerged as a conversation track as part of that research. Stefani Bardin and Hernani Dias were actually residents at Eyebeam during that time, hence my invitation to them to participate in this conversation as well. I hope they might talk to that experience a little too, as part of this thread.

And over the last few years, food has increasingly inserted itself, almost accidentally, into a range of the projects on which I have been working. This work is tagged ArtTechFood on my web site, for those interested to take a look. http://publicartaction.net/tag/arttechfood/

I'll do a new post about my current exhibition, food nostalgia, as that is really about a different relationship to food that has been informed by my time living in the USA.

regs

Amanda

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