Materializing Foods is a studio, lab, farm, seminar, and warehouse-based program for playful and exacting creative researchers—and anyone who loves language and food. This exploratory program will introduce you to major and minor elements of the wide field of food and language arts: seed libraries (packets, portraits), food culture zines and posters, freeze-dried food recipes and packaging; food-based printing, and food arts books. You’ll have the option to take one (or a combination) of these as your main focus for developing an individual or small group project. A series of studio and lab assignments for materializing food (with a menu of challenges) will document your synthesis of seminars (reading and discussion) with weekly practicums on the campus organic farm and the SW WA Food Hub. This synthesis of creative, applied, and academic work will begin with, and turn round, relationships between thought and form, such as the letter “A” originating with an ox horn.
We’ll also explore when "A" is for "Apple" and other food alphabets, such as writing's origin with a recipe for fermented grain. While reading Michel Leiris's alphabet we'll cook, taste, then print hand-made alphabet pasta. We'll print with shells after learning to read and taste the effects of tidal movements at the campus shellfish garden. This program will encourage you to explore visceral and conceptual correspondences between language and food. How will experimenting with freeze-drying food allow us to reassess the role of water in seed evolution while creating value-added food? What does it mean to ‘tweet rather than eat”? While the first concrete poem was egg-shaped, what food could inspire you to write poetry in its image? How do words and foods align, such as in cultural studies founder, Stuart Hall’s self-reflection: “I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea”?
You’ll develop a portfolio of experiments along with a finished personal project that will push you to develop project planning skills, articulate conceptual foundations for creative work, and focus on your chosen areas of practice in relation to community food and agricultural practicums.
Materializing Foods will collaborate with the program Material Words: Letterpress and Book Arts for Friday afternoon workshops to explore correspondences between the materialities of words and food.
This program provides spring quarter continuity for students enrolled in the fall and winter programs, Food & Media: Making Fresh Food Close and Food Science, Cooking and Nutrition
Anticipated Credit Equivalencies
4 - Creative Research: Food Alphabets
4 - Food and Agriculture Practicum: Farm to Food Hub
4 - Food Studio: Printing
4 - Food Materials Lab: Seed to Freeze-Drying
Registration
Academic Details
$130 fee covers a Food and Ag Field Day event ($30), a required lab fee ($50), and a required studio fee ($50).
Students should expect to cover expenses for individual projects regarding choices of materials used beyond classroom proficiencies.