Ingesting the Informational Imaginary

Session Submission Type: Lunchtime Workshop

Abstract

This 60-minute lunchtime workshop convenes an interdisciplinary group of STS scholars, artists, and scientists, each offering ingestible research presentations. With sensorial devices including tastes, sounds, and images, we will explore techno-cultural infrastructures—such as engineering, data management, and environmental stewardship—that inform our imaginary of the everyday. Through an associative tasting menu of water, pears, and foraged foods, we explore topics ranging from industrial agriculture to water filtration to variable definitions of locality. Each ingestible experience invites participants to question the relationship between tasting and knowledge; to ask how one knows what they ingest. Neither a meal, nor a demo per se, this workshop attends to the bodily aesthetics of knowledge circulation, showing how studies of science and art can surface information through sensorial demonstrations. Limited enrollment — registration will open on July 25 at http://tinyurl.com/y9bhsqzz

This program is preceded by the off-site event “Eating Humans: Eating Into Future Cosmologies” by the spurse collective, where locally-foraged ingestibles will be collected.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting

Chairs

• Christy Spackman, Harvey Mudd College

• Rebecca Uchill, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth

Presenters

• Krithika Ramchander, MIT

• Elizabeth Hoover, Brown University

• Iain Kerr, spurse

• Petia Morozov, spurse

• Matthew Friday, spurse