Abstract

Full Paper. Session: Nature and Worlds / Critical robotics

Keywords: Food, robotics, power, nurture, interactivity

Orchestrer la perte / Perpetual Demotion is a food-and-robotic art installation that addresses and engages with multiple power-related structures in culture, politics, discourse, and the built environment, demonstrating how putting food matter ‘where it doesn’t belong’ can reveal what remains obscured in our societies, bodies, digital realms, and other relational spaces.

Food, technology, and humans are entangled in a set of complex relationships that both produce and resist systems of power. The specifics of these dynamics often remain hidden, whether in agroscience, cuisine, mobile apps, or other mediated contexts. In this paper, we present a reflexive analysis of Orchestrer la perte / Perpetual Demotion, a food-and-robotic art installation that demonstrates how putting food matter ‘where it doesn’t belong’ can reveal what often remains obscured in our bodies, digital realms, and other relational spaces. Conceived around the themes of domination and nurturing, OLP/PD features a feeding robot that delivers spoonfuls of edible paste to humans’ mouths, using facial-tracking technology. The work probes issues of mutual enslavement, deskilling, the loss of privacy, and the fear-risk-trust within eating. At a broader scale, OLP/PD also troubles food and safety policies, probes culinary authenticity and heritage, and heightens tensions relative to eating and bodily penetration. Drawing on our experiences, we show how digital-material art can illuminate a variety of ways in which dominance and power arise. We propose that this can help surface different and more equitable forms of interaction, whether among food, technology, and humans, or in the more abstract realms of power, culture, and ‘mattering.’

• David Szanto (CA) is a teacher, researcher, and writer who takes an experimental approach to gastronomy through design, ecology, and performance. Past projects include performative meals focusing on urban foodscapes, collaborations with sensory and music artists, and performance-installations about memory, death, and the microbiome. He has taught about food, performance, and communications at several universities in Canada and Europe, and has published widely in both scholarly and consumer outlets.
• Simon Laroche is a media artist and teacher who creates installations, audio and video performances, and robotic and body artworks. Co-founder of the art collective, Projet EVA, he takes a critical perspective on socio-technical hybridization, focusing on problematics related to relationships between individuals, computer systems, and their physical extensions. Laroche teaches Electronic Arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. His work has been presented in Asia, Europe, South and North America, and the Middle East.