HotKarot & OpenSauce

HotKarot & OpenSauce is an experimental food desing project probing the possibilities of storytelling over edible data. The project travels around as a street bistro serving carrot hot dogs topped with specially designed sauces that are made of people’s stories. The sauces are created in the online OpenSauce cookbook enabling users to upload their stories and convert this raw data into personalized data-driven sauce recipes. The resulting storytelling sauces are consumed at the public bistro that features a varied menu: each person has a different story; each story has a different flavour determined by the OpenSauce algorithm. People used OpenSauce to exchange edible messages, romance and love letters, and book chapters , others to talk about their life on street or speculate about possible world endings. Sauces were made of memories, moods, poems, song lyrics, jokes, someone’s DNA code, and much more.

The OpenSauce translation of people’s stories into sauce recipes (words into ingredients) relies on the network text analysis method. Each source text (story) is analyzed for its most meaningful keywords, which are later matched with ingredients from the OpenSauce cookbook archive. The translation of keywords into ingredients does not reflect on the actual semantic meaning of the source story nor on any existing culinary traditions and dietary recommendations. The resulting personalized sauce recipes are not likely to have a balanced nutritional composition or flavor profile, and the ingredient pairing is decidedly serendipitous. In this way, users have no control over the ingredients and taste of their personalized sauces. To enjoy the HotKarot snack, they need to trust that the ‘smart’ OpenSauce system knows what is ‘good’ for them.

As a speculative design artifact, OpenSauce critically reflects on the deterministic functions and promises of smart food technologies that use quantified data computation to suggest personalized diets, streamline food cultures into an automated process, and make food-related decisions on users’ behalf. OpenSauce takes the idea of data-driven food practices to an extreme level: instead of reflecting on users’ taste and dietary preferences, the system creates personalized recipes directly from users’ personal stories (turning words into ingredients). Through this literal understanding of Brillat-Savarin’s You are what you eat, the bistro wants to provoke a productive conflict: how will the visitors negotiate between their personal food preferences and algorithmic food recommendations?

The bistro was opened in 2012 in Prague (CZ) by the art-design collective Cancel356. Since 2012, the bistro has been presented in various cities and countries around Europe, Australia and South-East Asia. Over the time, the HotKarot project has morphed into various alternative forms, including the StreetSauce (where sauces are served and narrated by home-less women, our collaborators from the Homelike initiative), the HotKarot Riot (sauces made of sonified bioelectric resistance of a carrot), the Karot Tarot (edible Tarot prophecies), and the Eat Your Tweet experiment in turning tweets into sauces, laso known as „Sežer si svý kecy“.

MORE ABOUT HOTKAROT & OPENSAUCE:

WRITING

Dolejšová, M., Lišková, T., Obert, M. (2017). HotKarot & OpenSauce: Edible Storytelling & Design Speculations. Proceedings of the 3rd Biennal Conference on Research Through Design. [pdf]

Dolejšová, M. (2015). A Taste of Big Data on the Global Dinner Table. Journal for Artistic Research, 9/2015. [pdf]

Dolejšová, M., Lišková, T. (2014). Extreme Metabolic Interactions: Cooking for Apocalypse, Panel talk at Mutamorphosis: Tribute to Uncertainty 2014, Prague, Czech Republic

Dolejšová, M., Lišková, T. (2013). Hotkarot – Lost in Biopolis. Talk at Enter: Biopolis Art I Sci I Tech Bienalle 2013, Prague, Czech Republic

Cancel356 (2013). Living Sculpture @HUB Prague.

HOTKAROT AT EXHIBITIONS

HotKarot at the 3rd Biennial of Research Through Design, 2017, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, [UK]

HotKarot at Urban Pangea exhibition, Karlin Studio [CZ]

SELECTED HOTKAROT EVENTS:

The taste of Data – OpenSauce workshop at FoodCHI’14 Brisbane [AUS]

KarotTarot Food Divination, Prague Quadrienalle, [CZ]

HotKarot at StreetDelivery Festival Bucharest [RO]

HotKarot: Digesting the Apocalypse, Academy of Sciences Prague [CZ]

HotKarot Dada Cuisine at National Gallery Prague [CZ]

Eat Your Tweet at Big Clean conference, Galerie NTK [CZ]