Berlin - Humboldt's Meal

When Alexander von Humboldt was traveling and mapping a total philosophy of the world two centuries ago, the weight of the bodies traveling was a fraction of the food they carried. Toward a journey’s end, these stores were depleted through consumption, rot, and rodents leaving a very limited palate with which a ship’s chef could organize a meal.
World travel today occurs at such a speed and with such masses that the nutrition of those bodies in motion is not a concern. Yet the movement of food through the filter of modern customs laws makes our possibilities for sending one another food similarly anemic. Our project, Humboldt’s Meal, uses these custom’s restrictions as a productive limitation to the substances for a meal. Alex Schweder.

PROCESS:

The food chain at present is Berlin-Melbourne-Montreal for a Society of Molecule’s meal feed in May. In the first week of April, molecule’s interested in participating should send each other seeds (or other foods) through the mail. What is not caught in customs should be used by the host to make a meal. These will be eaten together (via skype – see Mike Hornblow and Pia Ednie Brown’s ideas below).

PARTICIPATION:

During the week in May the relational recipe follows what is sent and there may be specific instructions about what may be added. The live feed via the internet will be the virtual platform in which other molecules can contribute to the conversation in Berlin, which will be centered around events in our studio in Prenzlauer berg during that week in May – we invite any emissaries to join us for either
1. seeds sent from molecule to molecule – join us virtually for a meal during May
2. come to Berlin for Humboldt’s Meal on May 3rd 2009.

LOCAL MICRO POLITICS:

Our German molecule gathers itself around the idea of a Humboldt Forum Meal to explore the state’s most recent representative architecture, museum and
event loci. In this ‘Humboldt Forum’ Leibnitzian and Humboldian philosophies are being used to represent the German national identity in a display of Oceanic and other non-Western art collected during the explorations of Humboldt and his followers. Through the readings (see growing list below) and food platform we invite an alternate forum. As emissaries we begin by finding a relation between Australia and Germany today, by making contemporary Leibnitz’s propositions.

MEMBERS OF THE BERLIN MOLECULE
(AT PRESENT – OTHERS ARE WELCOME):

Khadija Z Carroll
Alex Schweder
Jochen Buechel

MOVEMENT PROFILE:

Khadija and Alex were hosted on Feb. 2nd in Melbourne
by Pia Ednie-Brown and Mike Hornblow.

HOST RESPONSES
MIKE HORNBLOW:
i like the idea of setting the table for Skype conversations and trading recipes/instructions… i’ll take another look at some other free video-enabled VOIP applications as they allow for up to 8 users in a single interface, which means catering for less laptops for a potentially large group of virtual actors. Pia’s idea that some coding aspect could be fruitful for fine grinding of recipes is gr8 and i wonder how the actual/virtual dining table might praps be intensified by combinatoric tables and the like? In a sense, setting a place on the table for a virtual actor is an interesting notion re: subjectivity… a placeholder, proxy or space of potential for an intimate but undefined or multiple subject.

i’m very interested in developing the micro-political aesthetics of phosphate importation re: food production, and this intersects with the proposed food platform quite nicely. It would be easy to organise a performance along these lines with local buto dancers/performance artists, as part of a virtual/actual dinner party, perhaps using the recipes/instructions as movement scores…

PIA EDNIE BROWN:
The literal approach to the food + recipe + seed terms used to outline
the possibility of sending food parcels
and/or recipes (seeds) to once another the concurrence of the event would become palpably manifest [in this meal] I started to wonder about involving a scripting colleague (who also
likes cooking) and thinking about instructions as
looping algorithms, and we all expressed an interest in feedback loops.

READINGS:
von Jochen Buechel
1: Coming Out as a Philosopher
Acceptance speech for the third Siegfried Unseld Prize
Awarded biannually by the Siegfried Unseld Foundation
Franfurt, the 28th of September
In response to Peter Sloterdijk’s laudatio
Goethe University
Bruno Latour

2: Kap. 9 Am Leitfaden des Leibes aus: Bernhard Waldenfels: Sinnesschwellen, Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden 3.

3: Kap. 1 aus: Gabriel Tarde: Monadologie und Soziologie, suhrkamp 2009.