The quotation for this Sunday which is a Christmas Day (with its Christmas meal) is a very short reflection form Ferran Adrià:
"You cannot be creative without good organization"
Ferran Adrià in "A Day at El Bulli"
What intrigues me most is that many people find a contradiction between "organization" and "creativity." This led me to dig up old references aout organized creativity in fields as diverse as Artificial Intelligence and Literature.
Strange symmetries beyond the natural/artificial divide
In strong theories of ALife these machines are understood not simply to simulate life but to realize it, by instantiating and actualizing its fundamental principles in another medium or material substrate. Consequently, these machines can be said to inhabit, or "live," in a strange, newly animated realm, where the biosphere and artifacts from the human world touch and pass into each other, in effect constituting a "machinic phylum."' The increasing number and variety of forms of machinic life suggest, moreover, that this new realm is steadily expanding and that we are poised on the brink of a new era in which nature and technology will no longer be distinctly opposed.
John Johnston, The Allure of Machinic Life
I have just been trying to catch up with recent developments in biomimicry applied to robotics and artificial intelligence. I also tried to read some references on biologically inspired computation, biologically inspired robotics and related subjects, such as the use of living cells to perform programmed tasks of computation.
(from stelarc work here)
They made me go back to the classics and unearth and old characterization of “techné”:
Techne, or techné, as distinguished from episteme, is etymologically derived from the Greek word τέχνη (Ancient Greek: [tékʰnɛː]) which is often translated as craftsmanship, craft, or art. It is the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective. Techne resembles epistēmē in the implication of knowledge of principles, although techne differs in that its intent is making or doing, as opposed to "disinterested understanding."
(from Wikipedia)
Just let us mention in passing that an intelligent robot may not fit with this definition since it can show a certain level of autonomy from its creator. But just let’s keep the definition to see what is happening now.
On one hand, we are transforming our concept of living matter as well as its reality so that it shares features previously reserved to technical objects. We “program” matter and in its most simple understanding “programming” is just reduce the set of rules of autonomy to the set given by the programmer. On the other hand, we strive to infuse technological objects not only with the procedural, adaptive, strategies of living organisms but also with the autonomy that formerly we observed only in living organisms.
The technical object becomes as autonomous as the living organisms and living matter as programmed as our former technical objects.
Interesting symmetry. What it tells about ourselves, is worth exploring.
I couldn’t attend the full two days of the Gastro Tech Days Days Meeting in Barcelona, organized by Telefónica I+D and elbulliFoundation. I missed the first day due to being superjetlaged thanks to the flight from New York. Never understood how my metabolism works: sometimes I arrive fresh, sometimes absolutely worn out.
Anyway. I attended and also presented at the second GastroTech day. Today I give a short summary of what I saw and heard. I will avoid talking about our presentation with Pilar Opazo, since I already posted it right there on the spot, the same day we gave it .
I missed three presentations because I had to attend to work obligations. Then, I cannot summarize them here. Unfortunately, this is not going to be a complete overview. Sorry about that. Nevertheless, I hope it helps to give the flavour of the meeting as research is concerned.
Common points:
So, withouth much furtther ado, here is my summary.
Gastronomic Online Social Networks, Balachander Krishnamurthy
Khrisnamurthy drew an overall panorama of the various social networks that have grown around food and gastronomy. He cited the impact of various rating and ranking mechanisms and highlighted the importance that they increasingly have with respect to classic and established guides and references (Michelin, etc.).
Also he commented in detail the existing problems when one has to provide or extract valid and useful information from these networks to guide decision making:
Finally he described some of the technological challenges needed to turn some of these perspectives into realities:
Kenton O'Hara. Shared Cooking and Eating
O'Hara presented his ethnographic and anthropological research on the customs and practices of eating together and, in particular, with regard to the use of information and media while eating together.
The work focused on the creation of an "information appliance" that would be used on eating tables (during friends or family meals, for example). This device stored photographs and other media.
Kenton O'Hara presenting his research. The table "device" is on the screen.
The idea was to see how they influenced the act of eating together, and what kind of new dynamics it brought. Tellingly, it introduced new social rituals such as "I enjoyed your dinner, but I am afraid I have not uploaded enough pictures of our trip last year." I thought it would be interesting to extend the study to other cultures, because it was mainly focused on Anglo-Saxon countries.
Pilar Opazo & Ramon Sangüesa. Language as a platform for innovation: Lessons from elBulli.
We presented the general lines of work on elBulli organization and its change. We focused on how it has created a language that has strategically defined a playing field where all those interested in high innovation in gastronomy have entered. That is, by extending the use of internal language of their organization, they have created a dominant effect of the gastronomic discourse. But as I already described that in a previous post.
Johanna Blakley. Keynote - Food, Innovation, and Intellectual Property Rights
Blakley's presentation dealt with the characteristics of the knowledge of gastronomic and culinary products. Specifically she discussed what is a recipe and what kinds of protections you have. She use as a comparison the practices around intellectual property in other industries related to the use of creativity: fashion, music, literature, cinema, etc.. Also with traditional areas such as the automobile industry.
Her line of argumentation was to favour those models that thrived on knowledge sharing (Guess who created the recipe for omelette after all) She argued that they can generate more innovation and in a more distributed way. She also mentioned similar models in the field of open source and their multiplier effect of innovation. References to the usual suspects both in Open Innovation (Chessbrough) and Open and Networked Economy (Yochai Benkler) were made.
Blakley also commented how the big names in some sectors make use of copying form the practices of the public and how they integrated it in their creativity. She stressed the relationship between the big names and the fashion big chains, Lagerfeld and HM, for example.
In this regard she showed that, despite claims to the contrary by the traditional players (fashion designers, musicians, etc..) the role of copying and piracy was positive in the sense that it generated a bigger appreciation for the prestige brand names and actually increased their sales.
At the same time Blakley stressed the relationship of the major brands and designers with the "low" and democratic creatives. She reminded us how the "trend scouts" of the big brands explore what people from low income neighborhoods, do. For example, people who are creative in reusing clothes and recycled or pirated materials and recombine them into their own personal creations. This, in turn, generates a symbiotic effect: the big brands are inspired by "street fashion", in that sense. So, copying works both ways (but with different economic results if I may say so).
In short, she stressed the possibility of a combination effect of the democratic approach and the guru approach. The latter come to be recognized for their style and their contribution value and also work as a lever for facilitating decision making for the masses. When people have to choose between two options they prefer the guru product or the one that reminds them of the guru’s style. According to her, then, through opennes a dynamic imaginative interplay can be harnessed for the general benefit of everyone.
M. Powell. Genome Hacking and Food Food
The creator of a Foodspotting is as passionate about hacking as he is about food and it shows in his presentation style gallop, full of energy and humor. Powell has also been involved in gastronomy businesses such as the Fat Duck restaurant. He presented various technological approaches, focusing on two concepts:
Food Hacking: How to "hack" recipes
Genome Food: what defines the basic gastronomic creation mechanisms and their social acceptance. On this, he also introduced technological solutions for both the generation of creativity and the visualization and use of trends.
Food Hacking
The concept of food and hacking comes straight form the computer hacking culture. It bolis down to how open and remix a recipe developed by others to create new recipes. Powell showed different programs that are essentially combination generators that help in this. He stressed the need for open data representations for recipes that would allow such software to use them to generate new recipes.
Food Genome
This part of the presentation was more directed find out what defines the basis for accepting the results of good cuisine. He used the example of FoodSpotting and other similar systems which are able to “see” at any given time what dishes are being order in restaurants all over the world and to visualize them geographically. Then to compare this with the ingredients, flavours and taste. in this way you can either see or build the genome of taste in the world by having a look at the combination of ingredients and how they are distinctly distributed at any given time. This, can be used to fine tune recipes to local taste, specially recipes obtained by generative software.
S.Ahnert/Y.Ahn Ingredients. Flavours and Data Mining
This was a presentation of a more scientific tome but nevertheless still related to an inquiry into the "genome" of the various world cuisines. The interesting thing is that the authors performed a thorough, in depth study focusing on more or less agreed sources of recipes and ingredients instead of subjective appreciations of dishes. So to speak, they “decomposed” recipes into their basic ingredients and they used the relationship between ingredients to get a better understanding of the style of every local cuisine.
They wanted to verify to what extent the "style" of every culture has to do with a peculiar use and combination of distinctive ingredients. This may seem as something that all of us know in some way or other. But one thing is to have an intuitive idea about this phenomenon and other to have objective evidence and a clear depiction.
It's like trying to detect which genes are activated together.
The result of their research showed clearly very different patterns in the joint use of ingredients and different points of contact between difference world cuisines through these ingredients and thei structure of their typcial relationships. Like soya and pure flavours in Asian cuisine. Also some interesting connection roles. For example the tomato acted as a "bridge" between the worlds of flavors of Latin America and the Mediterranean. The second part of the presentation was a second turn of this study where the authors also work with the proportion of effective use of the ingredients, i,e,at what proportion a major shift in the perception of the ingredient was created. The combination of both dimensions gave a very deep knowledge, both quantitative and structural, about the dynamics of ingredient interaction. In this way they amplified and complemented the previous results.
T. Roelleke. Rating of Restaurants 2.0 What do reviews tell?
This presentation explored the many variants that reviews in online sites like Yelp and others use to comment on recipes and restaurants. The presenter stressed the cultural differences in the appreciation of food, recipes, styles and restaurants. He stressed that people’s assessments not only use strictly culinary aspects but also take into consideration other factors such us local proximity, similarity to friends’ tastes and the weight of the local culture when they share their appreciation of a gastronomic phenomenon. And when all these aspects are merged into a single review, the sentences are more complex than they seem to be at surface level. And more difficult to interpret.
This he showed by giving precise examples and comparisons of different forms of expression online. He reviewed several online platforms that aggregated users reviews and recommendations. He pointed to substantial differences between the parameters that the different platforms offer to their users to categorize their reviews. He also showed the enormous degree of ambiguity in interpretation and the difficulty of extracting the meaning of expressions of user feedback when they are expressed as free form texts. In general they were richer and more subtle that pre-categorized evaluations, which made them difficult to translate into simple numerical evaluations. Thus, it is easier to understand, measure, sort, or integrate information from rankings which scores a dish from one to ten than to try to qualify or quantify expressions like "I cannot say this is the best restaurant I have eaten in but I liked the second course" and similar expressions.
He proposed that a lot of work has to be carried in the systematic description of these dimensions of assessment if we have to create reliable automatic processing systems of all information around food, dining, restaurants and gastronomy in general. In sum, he pointed towards a lot of work in Semantic Web technologies and similar ones.
G. Sinclair. Super Mario's Mushrooms: the role of food in video games
Geri Sinclair led a fascinating tour around a variety of games from the standpoint of food, which is used in videogames at least as :
The food is not only consumed but also cooked in various games. She stressed the role of food and games to promote healthy eating habits.
Finally she drew an analogy between entering into a creative restaurant (like El Bulli) or starting to play a computer game: in both cases you enter a world that operates with different rules and where one must be open to discovery, surprise and be ready for "magic" and she explicitly quoted some expressions from Ferran Adrià that remark precisely this aspect of entering a separate, magic, world.
P. Inverardi. Food and Computer Science
The presentation focused on finding relationships between the processes of food design and software engineering. These fields have much in common in the construction process, and creativity. This shows in the fact that they share common fans such as programmers who cook, as Powell, and vice versa.
Inverardi focused on some aspects of the processes that take place in both fields such as compositionality and modularity, and connected them with combinatorics. The interesting thing is that his contribution went beyond the already oft-repeated analogy between software "remix" that is typical of Open Source and facilitate personal creativity and an overal increase of innovation (Blakley’s mainline of argumentation) open and the "remix" of shared recipes. Inverardi pointint to something more fundamental in the ways of thinking and doing in both knowledge domains.
Instead of taking this path she centered on the kitchen and software engineering and design processes and stressed shared common design principles.
The word “metadesign” was constantly on my mind as I was listening to Inverardi’s presentation.
I had to be absent during these presentations to meet different work obligations.
Gerard Vila y Jessica Jacques. Gastronomía, estética, arte y cocina
Gerard Vila, professor of aesthetics at the UAB, and Jessica Jaques presented an approximation to the aesthetics of food and gastronomy. They showed that this was an approach that allowed to shake the field of aesthetics, which had been more focused on the experience of beauty and its conceptual proximity. In this regard, they stressed that cooking introduced categories and questions like "what is flavor" "what is the aesthetic pleasure of food”, “what kind of pleasure goes beyond taste in relation to food”. Also, what makes something rises to the level of art (as in the case of haute cuisine).
They asked how all this is instrumental in reassessing the aesthetic experience and can open up other possibilities for the research field of aesthetics.
They also commented the results of their work with elBulli in the Master programme they organize at UAB. They described the interest in expressing culinary aesthetic concepts with food and gastronomy categories and vice versa. Also the process and practice of building these categories.
To sum up, I had a great time!.
When I woke up today, I couldn't but feel the weariness of too much rushed work done in the last days. Paperwork piles up on my table. It is the advanced payment that one has to go through to have projects up and running in the future, I say to myself. It is a way of convincing myself that it was worth to postpone for some days fully enjoying the first days of spring here.
It is enough, however, to look through my window, and see the old Mediterranean sparkling with the first light of the morning for all the fatigue to go away. I am a very fortunate person.
It is difficult to convey what one feels in these moments. A cup of coffee on the table, at hand, the bittersweet taste of the first sips still alive in my mouth. My memory plays with images from old readings. It ends up mixing two poems where morning, coffee, sails, sea, and blue skies dance together. Too lazy and lacking the skills to create my own I paste here verses from one and the other. They are appropriate even if I see no kids delivering the morning newspaper as Carver did and I am definitely not plucking weeds from my garden as Milosz was.
So early it's still almost dark out.
I'm near the window with coffee,
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought.[...]
Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love,
doesn't enter into this.
Happiness. It comes on
unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,
any early morning talk about it.
"A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails."
But I cannot keep thinking that my luck is to be on this shore of this old sea. My thoughts go to the other shores too, to the good and bad things happening there right now, the suffering and the injustice that boil there.
As I said, I am a very fortunate person. Hope sometime, someone on the other shore, looking through a window as I am doing now again feels like I am feeling on this one, this morning.
"Content was never king, contact is s"
Douglas Rushkoff, "Program or be programmed"
Rushkoff reminds us os something very simple: the net is there not just to sell content but to put each other in contact. Beyond a plain "social" view of this, he recovers the idea that the this contact is for doing something else together. This ability is connected to our capacity of understanding the working of the digital world, which he identifies with the logic of programming.
This little book has its pluses and minuses. It may be specially awkward for some because ts central premise is out the logic of those who still see the Internet as an enormous content repository, or even as a "read/write" web centered on the collective production of internet. It is interesting to compare how the book is evaluated by those whose personal and professional trajectory is not centered in programming (in Spanish) and those other who do have extensive involvement in this practice. It is a curious thing to do. I mean, both to read the book and to perform the comparison. Doing both helps you see a recurrent problem about the perception of what the cultural kernel of this strange "digital era" may be. We'll keep returning to both the book and the kernel.
Some days ago I started reading Sherry Turkle’s last book: “Alone Together, why we expect more of technology and less from each other”.
I am still midway through it (actually, a third of it) but I cannot get rid of one the very first anecdotes in the first chapter that Turkle used to paint the uncanny feeling she had about the notion of “live enough”. This is just one of the components of what she calls “the robotic moment”, i.e., that turning point in society when we stop being conscious about the difference between the reality of (at least, today’s) robots and the impulse to project on them humanlike traits. In a way, the “robotic moment” can be defined as that cultural moment when our relationship to robots becomes more “human” than the ones we sustain with other fellow humans. The whole book seems to be about the societal consequences of such a shift. I won’t be able to confirm if this is the case until I reach the final chapter, however. In the meantime, I am having a feast. Turkle’s books are always interesting.
But let’s go to back the anecdote that caught my attention. Picture this: an exhibition about Darwin and his theory of evolution at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The curators have strived to get as many “real things” about Darwin as possible: original notebooks, Darwin’s magnifying glass, etc. They also brought several live Galápago’s turtles as part of the exhibition. The reaction of kids to the presence of these turtles was what called the anthropologist in Turkle into action. In her own account:
It was Thanksgiving weekend. The line was long, the crowd frozen in place;I began to talk with some of the other parents and children. My question -“Do you care that the turtle is alive?”- was a welcome diversion from the boredom of the wait. A ten-year-old girl told me that she would prefer a robot turtle because aliveness comes with aesthetic inconvenience: “Its water looks dirty. Gross”. More usually, votes for the robots echoed my daughter’s sentiment that in this setting, aliveness didn’t seem worth the trouble. A twelve-year-old girl was adamant: “For what the turtles do, you didn’t have to have the live ones.” Her father looked at her, mystified: “But the point is that they are real. That’s the whole point’
Ever since I read this fragment I have been going back to it again and again. “Is this such a problem? Is this a good example?”, I find myself asking. Did the kids really prefer the robotic turtles because they would be “more real” than the living ones? Or the children were willing to renounce to the “real thing” (living turtles) so that the “real thing” could be left unbothered in their original habitat instead of suffering a long journey to NYC (or just from the Bronx Zoo)? Did the kids show greater concern for the “real” turtles and than the designers of the exhibition and the adults visiting it, mad about associating authenticity with “real things”? Did the children show a better understanding about the mechanics behind the narrative of an exhibition? Did they assume that an exhibition could very well be based on mock-ups and still be a strong narrative? Were the kids more postmodern (as narratives go) than their parents? Did they hold true that authenticity and reality may not be synonymous?. Am I projecting too much of myself on the kids behaviour?. ;-)
I am still puzzled about this example. What I have read in the rest of the book (which I find highly interesting) is not helping me getting myself out of this puzzle.
"Perfection is reached, not when there is nothing left to add, but rather when there
is nothing left to take away, when a body has been stripped to its essence.
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
This sentence reminded me of that other very famous one by Michelangelo. The Italian master said, that in order to reveal the hidden form within a block of stone, one had to remove what was not necessary. Michelangelo thought that he could reach perfection by substraction. Which made remember the design method by Birsel+Seck called "Destruction Reconstruction".
I found the quotation by the author of "The Little Prince" hopping from one link to another in my personal enquiry about the category and the practice of prototyping. More precisely, about prototyping as a method of designing and co-designing.
I have the impression that a prototype is something far removed from the idea of a complete, perfect thing. That's why a prototype is valuable. Perfection leaves little room for ambiguity. Maybe it stops our imagination. I closes any dialogue. Contemplating perfection leaves us ecstatic but also unable to speak.
Maybe that the cultural matrix where Saint-Exupery live in his time operated in completely different spaces to the one where prototyping is. In Saint-Exupery's very personal idea of aristocracy, probably, there was little room for the craftman's wisom that is hidden ... within prototypes.
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