Cooking—an Internet Project

If you leave your recipe at the www.avu.cz/~cooking, you may be witness to its realization during an Internet broadcast party in NoD Gallery at the Roxy in Prague on September 20.
Food is the most material thing imaginable; it is perceived and valued on the basis of the stimulation of all our senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. It is even so essential that we often forget its significance, the number of symbols, cultural signs and stories it carries.
The Cooking project, the process of collecting the recipes and recreating the food according to them, should allegorize experience with information and the telepresence of new media.
A recipe is the abstraction of the food, the tool for its immortality. A participant in this project sends the recipe via computer where it is transformed into binary units, and then becomes readable e-mail again. Later it evolves into the food.
A recipe obtained through the Internet carries no celebrated values or certificate of origin, nor is there any confirmation of being realized. It can turn out to be a fiction, a dream, a wish, an experiment or a set of instructions that can not be realized because of technical problems (if the process of cooking doesn't happen as described) or a misunderstanding (mistakes made by the transmission of the abstraction—the information).
Cooking with these recipes is a magic recreation—fulfillment of the imaginary. The final product is a version of the intended food (the authenticity of this version depends on how successful the food's transmission was as a recipe) and can experience confrontation with the original creator via the live transmission which is streaming the party where participants consume the results of the whole process.

01.03.2000