around the fireplace

the sense of sound - listen to the process

The life of the mind is intimately connected with sensory experience.

The art of cooking, with its stimulating scents and its “living” ingredients, is as complex and inspiring in its practice, and the inventiveness of its outcomes, as the creation of music. The two processes are indeed similar, if not to say structurally related.

The Poetics of the Process
In this project, the sound artist and the chef work in tandem on a mutual time-score-recipe. Sounds and foods are cooked up at a central fireplace where the materials are heated. Sounds that arise during the course of preparation are recorded live and treated as sample ingredients for the sound-space composition in the electronic sound kitchen.
The guests sit in a circle around the fireplace, where they can observe the two chefs engaged in the processes of generating, using, and arranging the materials.
The initial products of this activity are shared around the observers’ circle as a sonic and edible amuse–gueule.
After this chiefly concertante performance, everyone will enjoy eating the cooked dishes in this communicative communal setting.

Nourishment for the Senses
Cooking, like sound, is something that penetrates, something that touches, directly affecting a receptive body in each and every cell of its being and reaching into the deepest layers of the psyche. Aromas, like sound, diffuse in space and impart their information to our sensory organs. Both mediums harmonize in their propensity for ephemerality, for transformation, as well as in the variability of their forms in process.

Frank Schulte – sound and media artist and Oliver Schneider – artist and chef

For Schulte and Schneider, cooking is the source of not only our culture, but also the fine arts. The basis of their creative approach lies in the consistent development of artistic ideas. In their view, art, since its inception, has been a tool for changing the world. In this project, Schneider and Schulte enlarge on a fundamental archaic idea, cooking up some pleasurably sensual and subtle opposition to the short-sighted zeitgeist.

Performance length: ca. 70 minutes; after which the prepared foods are sampled together.