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| Media Plate – e+l |
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Media Plate was a performance event using the form of a shared meal to engage questions of generosity and intimacy. We asked visitors to bring a plate to exchange with ones that were hand painted with diagrams of various models of communication.
General Public, Berlin, 2008 |
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| Media Plate – e+l |
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The performance posed several questions: How is food tied to intimacy and generosity as a form of communication? How do notions of 'the raw and the cooked' function as contemporary signifiers? Perhaps, most significantly for this event, how does the structure of the table propose a particular form of intimacy?
General Public, Berlin, 2008 |
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| Media Plate – e+l |
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We asked guests to engage with the construction of a table or table-like structure that might propose alternative forms of intimacy.
General Public, Berlin, 2008 |
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| Media Plate – e+l |
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Vegetarian Gumbo was cooked and served. The material object of the dining table choreographs the act of dining and the embodied movements of eating become incorporated into the collective sharing of a meal. Dining, in this sense, is full of communicative messages, both literal actions and secondary gestures and nuance.
General Public, Berlin, 2008 |
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| Media Plate – e+l |
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During the meal, Björn Quiring gave a lecture on communications theory and food. Focusing on the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss in particular, Quiring explored the relationship between table manners and forms of communication and offered reflections on the private and public gestures that come to define the table.
General Public, Berlin, 2008
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| Media Plate – e+l |
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The diagrams come from a wide range of communication models, from crisis management to Lacanian theory, and gestural performance to business relations. Each model forms an abstract matrix for understanding the concrete and delicate process of communication.
General Public, Berlin, 2008
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| Media Plate – e+l |
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General Public, Berlin, 2008
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| Media Plate – e+l |
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General Public, Berlin, 2008
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| Media Plate – e+l |
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After the cooking, the construction of tables, the plate exchange, the meal and a lecture...
General Public, Berlin, 2008
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