GASTRO
2017
Company
Independent
Exhibitions/Presentations
The Family Collective Share Night, August 2019.
Eyeo Festival Lunch Share, June 2019.
Parsons School of Design Thesis Exhibit, May 2017.
Team
Independent
Experiencing Gastro in a future without food to eat or grow.
About
Gastro is a fine dining, interactive installation and short film that speculates on a post-climate-change world in the year 2100. In this very possible future, restaurants do not exist anymore because farmers do not exist, therefore food cannot grow and cattle die often. However, a few restaurateurs and chefs decide to open a restaurant to let visitors experience food from the past. These entrepreneurs create smart machines with the newest technologies that recreate old gastronomic experiences while also providing stories from farmers' struggles growing foods.
Concept
It’s the year 2100. After our climate change disaster over 50 years ago, our world changed completely. Farmers are rarely seen since we do not have any seeds to grow or livestock to raise. Water is very expensive and we only consume a lab grown slop. That is our only food.
This year, the International Association of Endangered Chefs and Restaurateurs are opening a restaurant to let people experience food from the past, from almost a hundred years ago.
Their restaurant “Gastro” utilizes technologies that have been used in our society for decades, but it is the first time used in food consumption.
No-one really understands food as it was known in 2019. Gastro’s mission offers experiential fine dining through edible and olfaction systems in their machines.
Role
I produced, art directed, photographed and built this solo project that was submitted in 2017 to the faculty of Parsons School of Design at The New School to fulfill the requirements for the completion of the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Design and Technology. The project let me study the impact of technology on the relationship between human sensory analysis and memories as it relates to food from farming to consumption. Gastro allowed me to experiment on recreating gastronomic experiences while using human senses to trigger stories supported by farmers’ knowledge.
For Gastro, all research led me to many ways in which I showed the curiosity I had for all the topics of study. I interviewed farmers, cooks, food designers, flavorists; consumed Soylent (lab grown food) for almost three weeks, watched documentaries like “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” or “Chef’s Table” among others, read articles about climate change and crop preservation, books about the history of food and cultural experiences by authors like Michael Pollan; and read papers about law and rights of indigenous people sharing their knowledge of foods for the future of humanity among others. Similarly, the range of iterative prototyping all through the 10 month project ranged from a variety of different topics of study and permanent research and included physical objects such as sketches and drawings, cooked foods to test tastes, creating recipes of foods with synthetic scents to test smells, build cardboard structures of robots, 3D prints of dishware, built IBM Watson intents to test Machine Learning from audio and even a variety of physical computing electronics to be embedded onto ceramics.
Woman experiencing the olfactory machine at Parsons School of Design's Thesis Art Show in 2017.
Man after experiencing the edibles machine and activating the olfactory machine at Parsons School of Design's Thesis Art Show in 2017.
Set of Gastro machines. The olfactory gastro machine and the edibles gastro machine.
Gastro prix-fixe menu for May 16th-20th in the year 2100.
Decomposed set of Gastro machines.