June 2014

Data Cuisine Workshop Barcelona

How does a tortilla taste whose recipe is based on well-being data in Spain? Would you rather like a cake based on the science funding in 2005 or in 2013? Can you imagine how a fish dish can represent the emigrants from Spain to countries across the world? The workshop in Barcelona was clearly influenced by the economic crisis, that Spain was experiencing at that time.

Data Cuisine Barcelona took place on June 10-13, 2014, as part of the Big Bang Data exhibition at CCCB, and in coordination with Sónar.

For the culinary side of the project, we collaborated with Sebastian Velilla, a great chef who has worked for the Alícia Foundation and was involved in the activities of the Torribera Food and Nutrition Campus of the University of Barcelona at that time.

Thanks to Jose Luis de Vicente and Olga Subiros for bringing us over, and our fantastic participants, especially Luis Fraguada, who brought a food printer.

From the announcement:
What is the taste of data? — The Data Cuisine Workshop is an experimental investigation on the representation of data with culinary means, or, if you like — edible diagrams.
We research ways to represent local open data in local food, through the inherent qualities of food such as color, form, texture, smell, taste, nutrition, origin etc.
The workshop is a collaborative research experience, blurring the boundaries between teachers and participants, data and food. At its end, a local data menu is created and publicly tasted.

Workshop structure:
On four afternoons, twelve participants explored data of Barcelona, Catalonia and Spain with culinary means.

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The first two afternoons were about getting into the methodology and coming up with quick ideas how to represent topics and data with dishes. We got some inspiration from our exclusive visit to Ferran Adrià's BullipediaLab, an emerging space dedicated to the research of food creativity.

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The second half of the workshop we spent in the kitchen, where the participants refined their recipes and made first tests and prototypes. On the last day, the participants, of which many worked in groups of two or three, produced their final dishes. The workshop ended with a presentation and tasting of all data dishes.

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Foto credit: Ferran Val - INDEX SCP

Dishes from this workshop

Photos from this workshop