dining with my mac

I was in Alabama this past weekend visiting family, being pulled on various inflatable objects behind boats, partaking in the shrimp boil, and photographing all of the food of course. My family and friends always get a kick out of how I obsessively photograph the food in front of me. There is something ritualistic in it. The celebratory food and wine at the wedding receptions to the pancakes and coffee at IHOP as my grandmother slips away from me. I don’t have an unhealthy addiction to food, but I do have a relationship with it. Especially when it marks important moments or serves as a quick notation of a story I don’t want to forget to tell. Someone once said “its the Southern in you.” maybe. But what I do have is a food log encompassing almost a decade of my life. Recently I’ve been mulling over my food log of images and video in my head…trying to figure out what this is and what will be its concise manifestation.

The other day, I ran the “vanity search.” Most of you know what this is. Anyway, a project I did with a class in graduate school turned up. It was an advanced digital art course with John Hopkins. I liked how he had it archived on his site: neoscenes.net I made the pecan pie of course. It was a fun dinner turned dangerous with the margaritas. there are some old ideas flickering in there…….who wants to have dinner or pie with me on their iSight?

From John…..

supper

the head chef, Rachel Cole, takes a pause from the kitchen to run the streaming cam this project grew out of sustained dialogues among the students in my Fine4126 Advanced Digital Art class at CU-Boulder in the fall of 2002. the menu included watercress wraps, 7-layer salad, veggie rice and stir-fry, Alabama pecan pie, wine, and margaritas. proof-positive that art and eating are closely tied together in the Big Picture! remote guests from Winnipeg, Kiel, New York, Texas, and elsewhere kept an eye on the proceedings and the video-sonic stream originating from my livingroom (which fortuitously had T-2 connectivity… weeeeeee!