I presented Digital Food in the exhibition Food Revolution 5.0 at KGM Hamburg in 2017, and in so doing completed a personal project on food design that began in the mid 1990s and was first exhibited in 1997, with SPAMT at Galeria H2O in Barcelona. In the ensuing years, I have continued to research the topic and to update my ideas of food as a designed object in light of new technologies. The designed edible object has arguably found its ideal medium in additive manufacturing machines, commonly known as 3D printers, and takes on its ideal form in the speculative project DIGITAL FOOD, in which an algorithm analyzes personal data to create a product whose nutritional qualities are created independently of taste, colour, texture or form. The digital food objects are tasty, ergonomic, personalized and free from the burdens of tradition, cooking and most importantly, agriculture. It is the perfection of food. 

There is also a secondary effect: Not only does perfect food separate from nature but the mind separates from the body. With the perfect diet, the body loses all feeling and disappears. And so the subversive project Digital Dark Food tries to compensate for this deficit by recognizing and reappropriating the body.

Digital Dark Food is a misuse of the technology proposed in Digital Food. Edible objects are created that taste, smell and feel good, but whose principal effects are to provoke bodily experiences, forcing the diner to feel the body itself. The effects are inoffensive and temporary: hunger, fullness, nausea, hiccups, illness, diarrhea, indigestion, flatulence, acid, headaches, allergies, itchiness, sweat, tremors and cramps.

Food Projects Exhibition
Opening Tuesday 17.12.2019 20h
Juan Naranjo Galería de Arte & Documentos
Casanovas, 136-138, B-3  08036 Barcelona
www.juannaranjo.eu

Photo Inga Knölke 2019