Multisensory dinner performance, Jan van Eyck Academie, 2019
The interactive food experience was co-created with food designer Céline Pelcé. The wider concept and the light and sound installation and experience was co-created with the artists Céline Pelcé, Anne Huijnen, Lyndon Barrois Jr, Ana Guedes, Ed Begley and Addoley Dzegede.

About Color Through Time
As the first event in this series, Color Through Time takes inspiration from Jun’ichiro Tanazaki’s text In Praise of Shadows (1977), and will use food to facilitate dissonance between perception and experience, as the relationships between appearance, taste and texture become complicated and re-adjusted. Approaching the sensorial experience through technological time, the evening will fast forward through centuries of evolving light sources, and transition from handmade to mechanized methods of food handling. The various flavours served over the course of the evening will explore, through a kind or re-enactment, changing environmental sensibilities that redirect the aesthetic experience of the beholder.

The flicker of the flame finds familiarity in the fluorescent tube, but so much has changed in the span of time between them. This first event seeks to offer its participants a time traveling of sorts, compressed into a few hours, towards a kind of atmospheric schizophrenia. Maybe the future is made from the past? Or maybe the past is just a collection of future artefacts?

Under The Influence of Color 
The multisensory experience series ‘Under the Influence of Color’ invokes the distinct sensory elements that contribute to the perceptual soup we call atmosphere (color, smell, taste, light, sound). Light and color can be seen as inseparable entities, as the former makes way for the latter. The manipulation of light leads to the wrangling of color, influencing the degree to which it is suppressed, liberated, differentiated, or assigned meaning. Color functions as an invitation or deterrent; as informant or signifier; and as aid to seduction or disgust. What if these codes were somehow re-framed and remixed? And how does the quality of light precipitate different responses to the same source material? Using food as a primary catalyst, Under the Influence of Color will examine the parallels between bodily ingestion and visual consumption, from the naturally occurring, distilled, and synthesized contexts of food and image, and the mechanisms of production and application that have ensued.

Color through time is a light sensitive tasting in seven stages. Here, we use food to facilitate dissonance between perception and experience, as the relationships between appearance, taste and texture become complicated and re-adjusted. This sensorial experience fasts forward through centuries of evolving light sources, and transition from handmade to mechanized methods of food handling. The various flavours served over the course of the evening will explore, through a kind or re-enactment, changing environmental sensibilities that redirect the aesthetic experience of the beholder.

Stage 1 : Fermented whole cabbage / natural light / end of the natural daylight
Stage 2 : Apples cooked in clay on fire / natural light / dawn
Stage 3 : Salt baked trout and beetroot marbled eggs / candle light
Stage 4 : Steamed dumplings / incandescent light
Stage 5 : Ice cream mochi / fluorescent tubes
Stage 6 : Grayscale icicle from earth to flower / LED lights
Stage 7 : Tonic and Szechuan buttons / Black light

Photos © Sebastien Lauret