Food Democracy: Critical Lessons in Food, Communication, Design and Art (Socially Repsonsive Communication, Design and Art: Memefest Interventions) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783207965 ISBN 13: 9781783207961

Verlag: Intellect Books, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Food Democracy brings together contributions from leading international scholars and activists, critical case studies of emancipatory food practices and reflections on possible models for responsive communication, design and art. The book includes recipes and essays that ask how to counter the role of the food industry as a machine of consumption.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Oliver Vodeb is a researcher and lecturer in the school of Design at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne. He is also director, editor, and curator of Memefest Festival of Socially Responsive Communication and Art.

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Food Democracy

Critical Lessons in Food, Communication, Design and Art

By Oliver Vodeb

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-796-1

CHAPTER 1

Hungry for Change + Thirsty for Life

The Socially Responsive Communication, Design and Art Kitchen and its Dishes

OLIVER VODEB

THE BOOK

This book engages food democracy with communication, design and art. Food is central to our lives, but broader knowledge related to food is increasingly dissolved in the standardizations of consumerist society. Knowledge about communication, media, design and art is largely subsumed to a discourse diluting responsibility through elevating the market as the main principle for the final justification of human actions. We argue that knowledge created under autonomous conditions can lead to change, as it has the potential to create new situations, and particularly that socially responsive communication, design and art can crucially contribute to food democracy.

Not long ago I talked with a university lecturer, an experienced and inspirational designer who regularly participates in radical social actions. He explained to me how a group of academics wanted to study one of their actions — having received a grant to do so. The activists were irritated, wondering what they would get back from the researchers. They felt that their activities enabled the researchers to get a grant, do the research and probably have a good time too, but were wondering about what impact the research would have. It is true, the usual scenario is that researchers, as a result of their work, publish papers in academic journals, which are mostly only read by an isolated community of academics. While I share many frustrations with current academia, this little story seems typical to me of an important part of the problem. While it is true that academia should collaborate more with social movements, I think social movements should aim to collaborate with academia as well. As is evidenced by this anecdote, a situation emerges where, instead of trying to bridge the different cultures, to create conditions for collaboration and if necessary to provide translation of the academic research to 'people on the ground' that could potentially greatly benefit the activists and their efforts, relations of exclusion were reproduced and a chance for the activists to influence academia (which they critiqued) was missed as well.

This book brings together different cultures — academic, activist and professional — and connects them with design, art, social sciences and philosophy. These cultures have different principles of rigour when it comes to knowledge production and research. Brought together in an inter/extradisciplinary manner, they have the potential to measure, think and produce affective insights and act in the world. Connected in a collaborative way and in different (non)institutional contexts, they open up possibilities for response ability.

This methodology, developed by Memefest, is practised through a unique international network, along with a series of events: the international Festival of Socially Responsive Communication, Design and Art, the extradisciplinary symposium/workshops/interventions and this book. The Memefest network connects people of various backgrounds from around the world interested in an alternative to the dominant practices engaged with public communication. The online network has almost two thousand members with various degrees of intensity of participation. The core of the network consists of the Memefest Collective and a close network of curators and editors who inform many of the Collective's decisions. Curators and editors are mostly long-time collaborators: academics, professionals and activists of various backgrounds.

The Festival of Socially Responsive Communication, Design and Art addresses themes of urgent relevance and creates a 'friendly' competition process that is more formative than selective, more research- and education- than star-driven. This process is an alternative to, and a critique of the dominant design and advertising awards, competitions that play a crucial role in constructing criteria of what is good public communication. Through a complex interplay of awards, their representation, legitimization and marketing-based quality criteria, these dominant design and advertising awards reproduce a self-promotional culture based on competition. They promote and naturalize values and communication and design approaches aligned with the logic of the spectacle and neo-liberal capitalism. Such awards are used as a marketing instrument for promoting the profession and designing its image, and as such are not an instrument for fostering in-depth understanding (Grant 2008; Vodeb 2008, 2012).

Memefest's Friendly Competition engages participants in urgent social issues and puts communication, design and art at the centre of the curated themes: 'Debt' in 2012, 'Food Democracy' in 2013 and 'Radical Intimacies: Dialogue in our Times' in 2014. The process offers a public forum for dialogue and provides participants with multiple forms of educational, curatorial and editorial feedback through the memefest.org website, which also presents a number of works regarded as outstanding. Works are also exhibited in the online gallery and made publicly accessible. In this way the Friendly Competition nurtures and rewards socially responsive communication, design and art (Vodeb 2008).

A range of research is generated from the Memefest Friendly Competition process. The Food Democracy issue of the Memefest festival triggered responses from 25 countries in the areas of visual communication practice, critical writing and participatory art. These projects are used to inform the symposium/workshops/ interventions event, which applies this research to a local context and develops it further. The symposium hosts leading scholars and practitioners and feeds directly into the workshop process where extradisciplinary groups work on developing public interventions in various formats. The groups are mentored and designed as self-sustaining, response-able communication/design/art studios. Within a given deadline, with fixed financial resources, the workshop process culminates in interventions in the public sphere. The Food Democracy workshops were especially significant because of the groundbreaking collaboration with the Aboriginal activist group — The Brisbane Aboriginal Sovereign Embassy (BASE).

This extradisciplinary approach, which is also integrated in Memefest's Friendly Competition, is rooted in artistic institutional critique and directed towards practices that operate at the intersection of art/theory/activism:

At work here is a new tropism and a new sort of reflexivity, involving artists as well as theorists and activists in a passage beyond the limits traditionally assigned to their practice. The word tropism conveys the desire or need to turn towards something else, towards an exterior field or discipline; while the notion of reflexivity now indicates a critical return to the departure point, an attempt to transform the initial discipline, to end its isolation, to open up new possibilities of expression, analysis, cooperation and commitment. This back-and-forth movement, or rather, this transformative spiral, is the operative principle of what I will be calling extradisciplinary investigations. (Holmes 2009)

This experimental research happens at Memefest within a newly created public, connecting network-based self-organization, participatory action, critical research and public...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Intellect Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783207965
• ISBN 13: 9781783207961
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 554
• Herausgeber: Vodeb Oliver
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar