Hervé This - Art et Science (photo: Wired)
Morgan Meis and Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set, Palate or Palette? The like problems behind molecular gastronomy and modern artmaking.:
“Contemporary art has an uneasy relationship to form. Sure, art is all about form. But what materials are we forming, and what are the models and traditions by which we are forming them? The sculptor Richard Serra, for instance, is fascinated by the properties of iron and steel. He recognizes that industrial materials are as much a part of our “natural” world as anything else. Serra loves to experiment with such materials, to find out what they can do and how they make us feel. He accepts the fact that we do not live primarily among plants and earth. We live in a world that has been manufactured, and Serra wants to manipulate the formal properties of that manufactured world. He hurled balls of molten lead at gallery walls and, more recently, twisted sheets of steel into elegant spirals. He was using the matter and the technologies available to persons of our time. He is not trying to represent the natural world — he is trying to create new forms in a post-natural environment in which artifice and nature are inextricably intertwined.
Likewise, Molecular Gastronomy has opened up an immense realm of formal experimentation. These experiments are not limited by the traditional boundaries as to what constitutes food and what you can do to it. Here is Hervé This:
In 2002, I introduced a formalism to describe, in a non-periodical manner, the organization of food space or different foodstuffs. All foods are complex disperse systems, also called “soft matter.” The simplest of these systems — formerly called colloidal — are well known: emulsions, foams, gels and so forth…But food needs more than interfaces to describe it; even a simple sauce such as a béarnaise consists of three phases: solid matter (microscopic egg-yolk aggregate) and a hydrophobic liquid (oil droplets) dispersed in a hydrophilic liquid (water).
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