task force: family dinner #3
dave, kate and michelle made a mexican fiesta in under an hour.
dinner scores: “I” as a trigger, volume fluctuations, ridiculous toasts, incrementally moving an object along the table.
Month / May 2013
task force: family dinner #2 – chit chat and low blood sugar
post dinner chat about the scores.
waiting for dinner. low blood sugar hysteria sets in.
kate and dave made: rotini with chicken and veg, green salad, strawberries & cream w/ sea salt chocolate.
what we worked on: group generated scores, individual place settings, negation, acceptance, distraction, silent cooking, and how to maintain focus with low blood sugar.
task force: live feed
through a live feed from kitchen to dining room, we watched kate and dave negotiate each other and navigate the space.
task force: drawing ‘sticks’
we drew sticks to determine who would be cooking. kate and dave got the shortest sticks
task force: prep and schrapnel
kate & dave made dinner together in silence, without knowing what they were going to make. this is how they organized themselves.
the state of the kitchen post meal preparation
task force: dinner #2 place settings
task force: bachelard in point form
thoughts from the moleskine
task force: what we are thinking
at each meeting of the task force, we track our thoughts, ideas, observations in a massive moleskin notebook. here’s what was written on day 1.
task force: the table
task force: fingerling love
task force
the choreography of preparing and sharing a meal.
first reading – The Sociology of Taste – Jukka Grownow
The historical development of the meal is described by Simmel as a kind of a civilizing process. The social form and the rules of interaction are first transformed into more complicated ones among the higher echelons of society where this can take place to such a degree that the original purpose of the meal, the satisfaction of hunger, can almost totally be forgotten.
The sociability of eating presumes social rules. The necessity of such rules, or at least of a certain regularity of action, follows directly from the chronological regularity of eating but it is greatly increased by the socialization of the meal:
‘With all such changes a formal norm is raised above the changing individual needs, the socialization of the meal elevates it into aesthetic stylization, which in its turn influences back on it; because if, besides the purpose of satisfying needs, eating has to serve also the purpose of aesthetic satisfaction, an excuse is needed and a community of several persons is not only able to take better care of such an excuse, but it also acts much better as its legitimate carrier and performer. (Simmel 1910)
task force – family dinner #1
meet the task force: billy, ali, dave, josh, kate, michelle, tiff, justine, and james.
Justine A. Chambers 
