The Materials Research Kitchen PhD is published!
It’s in two volumes:
The REPORT, which details and contextualises what I did and what I found out
The APPENDICES which is a visual record of the action research, and includes other collaborative publications which happened along the way.
Downloadable here: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10196046/
(CC BY-NC 4.0)
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Materials Research Kitchen: Making Food Together as Material Method and Metaphor. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London). Doney, Elise K F; (2024)
Keywords: Materials, Food, Epistemology, Practice Research, Making
ABSTRACT:
Materials have no rights; in our time of mass extraction and consumption we waste and mistreat them. But we too are stuff, we human beings are a mixed meat composite, an Ouroboros Sausage, sharing materials and microbes in dynamic transformation with our surroundings, to which our fate is ecologically linked. The sausage is eater and eaten, subject and object.
Through the establishment of the Materials Research Kitchen (MRK), I co-investigate perspectives on the properties, qualities, cultural, and emotional meanings and uses of edible materials through cooking and eating together, listening to materials as they transform, with an aesthetic curiosity.
Materials are inherently transdisciplinary, but our research disciplines are increasingly narrow. This thesis identifies an applied knowledge practice of making food together through which new materials research can be facilitated across contexts.
Using foodstuffs, utensils and cooking as art research materials, methods and metaphors, I show how materials become embodied, not only in our physical but also in our cognitive being, situating knowledge production within the material framework of a cognitive biome. It is an ethical approach that stimulates curiosity and care for past and future incarnations of materials and reveals how much is at stake in their exploitation.
The collaborative research takes place in three contexts: with research groups at UCL’s Slade School of Fine Art and Institute of Making, with home appliance manufacturer Beko Plc’s R&D team, and with various urban community growing projects in London.
The methodological and physical tools resulting from this PhD-practice exemplify its thesis: revealing likeness in human-material ecologies, towards self and environment care. This thesis shows that the use of these tools – the MRK, the Activated Works (a collection of generative sculptures), and the Sensicle (a prototype tool for sensing transformations in foods, soils, and bodies) – further expands our cognitive biome.
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Copyright © The Author 2024. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms.
