Eat for democracy!

by cajnik

This work has been commented by 1 curator(s). Read the comments

Title

Eat for democracy!

Headline

Some foods are more democratic than others

Concept author(s)

Miha Mazzini

Concept author year(s) of birth

1961

Concept author(s) contribution

concept & text

Concept author(s) Country

Slovenia

Copy author(s)

Miha Mazzini

Copy author(s) year(s) of birth

1961

Copy author(s) contribution

concept & text

Copy author(s) Country

Slovenia

Other author(s)

Marko Plahuta

Other author(s) year(s) of birth

1969

Other author(s) contribution

data analysis & programing

Other author(s) Country

Slovenia

Friendly Competition

Food Democracy (2013)

Competition category

Visual communication practice

Competition subcategory

web / interactive

Competition field

nonacademic

Competition subfield

artist

Subfield description

Writer, author of 27 published books, translated in 9 languages. Screenwriter of 2 award winning feature films and writer and director of 5 short films.

Check out the Food Democracy 2013 outlines of Memefest Friendly competition.

Description of idea

Describe your idea and concept of your work in relation to the festival outlines:

Brain has developed as an organ to help us fill the stomach. A lonely stomach hunting and gathering in the savannah has less chance to survive than a group of them, so the societies have developed.

So, the content of the stomachs must mirror the structure of the society - what are the preferred foods for authoritarian regimes and what for democracies?

We took all of the recipes from Food.com and democracy indexes of The Economist and Wikipedia; we linked national cooking recipes with the countries, split recipes into ingredients and added democracy indexes to them.

What kind of communication approach do you use?

Spoof scientific report on real data.

What are in your opinion concrete benefits to the society because of your communication?

To see have very sweet life in democracy really is.

What did you personally learn from creating your submitted work?

Person should choose their restaurant even more carefully than the country.

Why is your work, GOOD communication WORK?

It's fun getting the food for thought.

Where and how do you intent do implement your work?

Web page for now; interactive application if resources allow.

Did your intervention had an effect on other Media. If yes, describe the effect? (Has other media reported on it- how? Were you able to change other media with your work- how?)

Not yet. This project was done for Memefest exclusively.

Curators Comments

Jason Grant

"...[an] onion is on the boundary between democracy and authoritarianism". I've long suspected as much!

It's hard to know if this whole project is a joke, or just parts of it, but the idea of visually demonstrating the correlation between the preferred foods of authoritarian regimes and democracies is great.

The trick is that even if the 'research' is bogus (linking recipes from Food.com and democracy indexes of The Economist and Wikipedia), it is plausible, and more than that, I wondered why it hasn't been done before.

Even if it was fully serious, I'm not sure what its point would be, but it's definitely an engaging perspective on food. Food and culture and politics...

The image itself is typical of generic data visualisations, so although it's not especially interesting it at least looks the part. An interactive application would really open this up to a broad audience – I hope you can get there.

Comments