- HotKarot & OpenSauce
HotKarot & OpenSauce was a participatory art and design project exploring more-than-human relations between people, food, technology and data. The project travelled around as a street bistro serving carrot hot dogs topped with sauces made of people’s stories. The sauces were created in the online OpenSauce cookbook enabling visitors to upload their stories and convert this raw data into personalized data-driven sauce recipes. The resulting storytelling sauces were consumed at the public bistro that featured a varied menu: each person had a different story; each story had a different flavour determined by the OpenSauce algorithm. People have used OpenSauce to exchange edible messages, romance and love letters, or book chapters, others to talk about their life on street or speculate about possible world endings. Sauces were made of memories, moods, poems, song lyrics, jokes, as well as someone’s DNA code.
The bistro was opened in 2012 in Prague (CZ) by the art-design collective Cancel356 (Markéta Dolejšová, Tereza Lišková, Luboš Svoboda, Rudolf Kreibich, Martin Obert and Jiří Suchomel). Between 2012–2017, the bistro was presented in various cities and countries around Europe, Australia and South-East Asia.
The bistro was opened in 2012 in Prague (CZ) by the art-design collective Cancel356 (Markéta Dolejšová, Tereza Lišková, Luboš Svoboda, Rudolf Kreibich, Martin Obert and Jiří Suchomel). Between 2012–2017, the bistro was presented in various cities and countries around Europe, Australia and South-East Asia.
Years:2011 - 2017
hotkarot.cz
Exhibitions, Events, Publications -> scroll down the hotkarot.cz page
hotkarot.cz
Exhibitions, Events, Publications -> scroll down the hotkarot.cz page
The OpenSauce translation of people’s stories into sauce recipes (words into ingredients) relied on the network text analysis method. Each source text (story) was analyzed for its most meaningful keywords, which were later matched with ingredients from the OpenSauce cookbook archive.
The translation of keywords into ingredients did not reflect on the actual semantic meaning of the source story nor on any existing culinary traditions and dietary recommendations. The resulting personalized sauce recipes were not likely to have a balanced nutritional composition or flavor profile, and the ingredient pairing was decidedly serendipitous.
In this way, users had no control over the ingredients and taste of their personalized sauces. To enjoy the HotKarot snack, they needed to trust that the ‘smart’ OpenSauce system knows what is ‘good’ for them.
The translation of keywords into ingredients did not reflect on the actual semantic meaning of the source story nor on any existing culinary traditions and dietary recommendations. The resulting personalized sauce recipes were not likely to have a balanced nutritional composition or flavor profile, and the ingredient pairing was decidedly serendipitous.
In this way, users had no control over the ingredients and taste of their personalized sauces. To enjoy the HotKarot snack, they needed to trust that the ‘smart’ OpenSauce system knows what is ‘good’ for them.
Over time, the HotKarot project had morphed into various alternative forms, including the StreetSauce (where sauces were served and narrated by home-less women, our collaborators from the Homelike initiative), the HotKarot Riot (sauces made of sonified bioelectric resistance of a carrot), the Karot Tarot (edible Tarot prophecies), and the Eat Your Tweet experiment in turning tweets into sauces, also known as „Sežer si svý kecy“.
As a speculative artifact, OpenSauce reflected on the deterministic functions and promises of smart food technologies that use quantified data computation to suggest personalized diets, streamline food cultures into an automated process, and make food-related decisions on users’ behalf. OpenSauce took the idea of data-driven food practices to an extreme level: instead of reflecting on users’ taste and dietary preferences, the system created personalized recipes directly from users’ personal stories (turning words into ingredients). Through this literal understanding of Brillat-Savarin’s You are what you eat, the bistro wanted to provoke a productive tension: how will the visitors negotiate between their personal food preferences and algorithmic food recommendations?