Wednesday 17 October 2012

Midterm - Recipe


Guess What?


by David Cox and Vincent Villemaire


The idea for the project was always to try to create a recipe that would be unpredictable and that would generate a different result for each person applying it. There was this element of randomness that we wanted to explore to see if we could get results that would be as interesting as they would be entertaining. We also wanted to incorporate the concepts of movement and communication inside the recipe.

   Our original idea was quite different than the one we ended up using. We first planned for having a person drop salad dressing from an elevated position (like on a steps ladder) into a bowl on the ground. The dressing , because it is so light, would have spread out quite randomly by the time it hit the ground, and the result would have been an abstract piece in the form of a salad, a sort of canvas made of food ingredients. We abandoned this idea because we thought it would be too abstract and not really entertaining enough for the people doing the recipe.

   For our final recipe concept, we opted to use a "blindfolded" element to the process, while also implicating the participation of 2 people. The idea was the following: we would actually make 2 very simple salad recipes, and bring all the prepared ingredients. One would be a standard vegetable salad with dressings, and the second one a fruit salad. Each recipe would have the same amount of ingredients and each ingredient from one recipe would be matched with an ingredient from the second one, depending on their size and consistency. The goal would be that, after choosing the type of salad they wanted to make, a blindfolded person of the team had to guess which of the 2 ingredients, between the vegetable and the fruit, is the right one while his partner would shake both ingredients individually in a container. The sounds initiated by the shaking movement needed to be similar enough to create doubt or even confusion, but they also needed to have a distinct characteristic to give a chance of success to the person guessing. So even if the person guessed wrong, his partner would just keep making the salad based on his friend's decisions without saying a word. The result s would range from very horrible mixes to surprisingly delicious mistakes. 



Salty ingredients
Sweet ingredients
1
Salad
Apple skins
2
Tomatoes
Raspberries
3
Nuts
Chocolate
4
Cucumber
Banana
5
Olives
Raisins
6
Carrots
Apple
7
Vinaigrette
Vanilla extract

   We found it interesting to explore the irony in which the recipe was created. The ingredients were indeed chosen deliberately by a person with a set goal in mind, but they would also be selected while in a state of confusion. So the salad at the end is the result of his own doing, even though it isn't what was originally intended.  The tasks for the project were distributed quite equally, we each assigned ourselves a set of ingredients to take care of. We had to make sure to balance them adequately so that the game would be challenging enough. We did a short trial phase where we would ask people if they could guess which ingredient was which when shaking them. The positive results were quite encouraging while the negative ones helped us make some adjustments to the amount/weight put inside each container.