Harvard Alumni evening at the Le Laboratoire… A center where Art and Science come together! It is David Edwards who founded it. Fantastic evening inhaling chocolate and tasting a chocolate cake baked by “choc thermique”… Indeed David Edwards is collaborating with Thierry Marx, a champion of deconstructed cuisine. Food for thoughts, the sensations triggers the intellect, mixes quantum mechanic, philosophy and performance art. Totally postmodern.
ALVISO, CA & ANN ARBOR, MI — November 17, 2008 — TV has never tasted this good. That’s because TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO), the creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders (DVRs), and Domino’s Pizza, Inc. (NYSE: DPZ), the recognized world leader in pizza delivery, have teamed up to give broadband connected TiVo subscribers the ability to order pizza for delivery or pick-up, and track delivery timing, right from their TV sets using the TiVo® service. It’s a service that cooks up the perfect pizza purchasing recipe.
Eating habits have changed! There is much to say about food and technology… Food and TV…
Until recently, the most widely credited individual inventor of the TV dinner was Gerry Thomas, a salesman for C.A. Swanson & Son in 1953. For example, the American Frozen Food Institute honored him in their “Frozen Food Hall of Fame” as the inventor of the TV dinner. However, his role as the inventor is now being disputed.
Find below some links:
500 years of American food.
Hungry men don’t go disco.
Space food.
TiVo press release.
Info via l’Internet Des Objets.
No need to pollute the environment with disposable plastic or cardboard tableware; no need either to carry fragile and heavy tableware… eat it!
Picture via Dezeen: “Japanese designer Nobuhiko Arikawa of Rice-Design has created edible tableware for Orto Cafe in Japan.”
Reminds me of the bread with a handle.
Back from the field, Amsterdam where I stayed at the Lloyd hotel designed by MVRDV, the renowned Dutch architecture firm. I really did like the concept of the Lloyd: it is a 1 to 5 stars hotel, meaning that budget and business travelers mingle. Art brings everyone together:
The hotel’s Cultural Embassy offers various services in communal spaces. Situated above restaurant the Cultural Embassy informs guests and interested parties on topics such as art, culture and cultural projects. In conjunction with the Lloyd Hotel the Cultural Embassy and its members organize projects and cultural activities: performances, small exhibitions and presentations. Admission is always free for everybody.
Some rooms have kinetic architectural elements: cupboards open up to disclose and create a proper space for a bathroom. One advice, make sure you don’t get a room located in the basement!
Cupboard door opening up to give proper space to a bathroom (surface area saving…).
While in Amsterdam I have met with the food designer Debra Solomon, curator of The Edible City exhibit:
The exhibition presents a cross section of pragmatic proposals and utopian schemes that enable cities and city-dwellers to meet their own food requirements. They range from MVRDV’s Pig City and Agroparks to the urban agriculture Cuba found it necessary to develop after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As befits the subject, much of the exhibition is itself edible.
Check Debra’s culiblog!
Studies we conduct are like dyed cloths, those which pigments tint the skin of whom wears it (not unlike the indigo cloth of the Tuareg, the blue man of the desert…). They change us.
Cropped image taken from the NASA website. The caption reads as:
STS090-E-5001 (18 April 1998) — Among flight day 1 activities, astronaut Richard A. Searfoss, STS-90 mission commander, sorts out food on the mid deck of the Earth-orbiting Space Shuttle Columbia. Searfoss uses velcro to attach the food packets to the trays mounted on the outside of mid deck stowage lockers. Searfoss and four other NASA astronauts are joined by two payload specialists from the academic sector for at least 16 days of Neurolab research in the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Spacelab science module in the shuttle’s cargo bay. The photo was taken with an electronic still camera (ESC) at 04:01:21 GMT, April 18, 1998.
The space food reminds me of the project by the artiste Marti Guixé: HiBYE, 2001. He provides pills for the worksphere that accomplish the following functions / desired effects:
1. Concentrate everywhere
2. Carry nothing
3. Filter
4. Relax everywhere
5. Breath-e
6. Write everywhere
7. Switch on/off
8. Flirt
9. Approach everyone
10. Collect experiences
11. Taste local food
12. Get AURA
13. Share
14. Give Memory gifts
15. Take care
16. Convince
17. Develope ideas
18. Isolate everywhere
19. Consider everywhere as indoor
20. Drink water
21. Consume
The LUKYSTAR links Chinatown, Boston (now, as you would do if you where to take any other company, you depart from South Station which is located at the edge of the neighborhood) to Chinatown, New York City and at a price defying any concurrency, US$30 round trip (The price of the Chinese bus used to be $20; the price of the Greyhound dropped dramatically, from approx. $80 to $50 round trip). Certainly the fact that this bus links these Chinese neighborhoods shows the transportation overlay in function of trajectory, affiliation, spatial identity or proximity.
Usually the Chinese bus stops half way (The travel time varies depending on traffic and weather conditions from approximately four hours to five and a half hours) at a I-do-not-know-if-I-can-qualify sandwich place. Now, the LUCKYSTAR stops at a Chinese restaurant, with no name on it. However, a sign clearly indicates “Bus costumer restrooms” and “Food, drinks & ice cream”. To go to the restroom, you pass in front of an incredible display of food (good quality/price, certainly tastier than the sandwich place!), a Chinese buffet. The restaurant is clearly an obligatory extension of travel, again linking mobility with consumerism.
There was a time when men… and women had to sit in front of a TV set to eat a Swanson TV Dinner®, now a hotel provides “meals to take on the flight or drive home“!
PS: The “Hungry Men Don’t Go Disco” ad from the 1070 portraying an African American has been removed…
Anyway, here is another image…:
