Anagram on DocLab: Humanoid Cookbook

One of the very nicest things about life is the way we must regularly stop whatever it is we are doing and devote our attention to eating. -Luciano Pavarotti

Everything you see I owe to spaghetti. -Sophia Loren

Never eat more than you can lift. -Miss Piggy

The theme for IDFA DocLab this year is the Humanoid Cookbook. With more than a nod to The Futurist Cookbook from 1932, DocLab invites the humans of 2018 to explore a collection of projects—each, in their own way, asking what it means to be a human in a world disrupted by technology.

The theme suggests a novel way to approach the ritual of engaging with interactive and immersive work. This ritual, after all, is defiantly different from walking into the cinema. Talking about cooking invites the question—if each project were a recipe, or a meal, what relationship is being set up between the eater and the eaten? And which tools are required to navigate this relationship? Chopsticks, perhaps. A flat LED screen. Or a huge vat, to plunge into and be immersed.

At Anagram, we make interactive work. Following previous years in documentary, we were curious about one thing that is rarely explored in the film world: the experience of the audience. Beyond perfunctory partitioning by age or affluence, we wanted to know: who were these people who would settle into the plush hallowed cinema seats? And what happens if they stand up and walk around? The cinema is a sensory experience, but are there other ways to do it? Through a series of projects, we have explored these questions—from blindfolding people and leading them through a dark space to interrogating their relationship with being lost, to designing a playful machine that choreographs games of domination and surrender. We are just one of many companies exploring these questions by experimenting with new technologies that offer novel methods for engaging the audience.

The trouble with new methods of engagement is that there are no conventions that help shape the expectations of the audience. And with entirely new ground, people get nervous. What am I supposed to do here? Thus, the importance of metaphors and signposts. Enter, the Humanoid Cookbook.

In the context of a film festival, the closest experience to grasp onto is a visit to the cinema. Yet the cinema is not appropriate as a metaphor. It is a building, made of specific materials with specific behaviors attached to it. There are the velvet seats, the silence that falls. The irritation at the crunching of the popcorn, the sacrilege of a phone ringing. In the cinema, we prostrate ourselves in front of the overwhelming size of the image in front of us, we sink into the surround sound, we are still—if occasionally fidgety.

While the dinner table is a different place altogether, eating together is also shaped by convention. Many animals do carry food home for their young and some do share delicious morsels with others—but it is only humans who regularly and continuously work on the portioning out of food. Eating together is part of what makes us human, and to maintain a shared vision of what it is to be human we stick to what we know. We make choices about what is acceptable to eat: there are starters, main courses, desserts—long-evolved structures to hold onto. At the heart of these structures sits the horror of any small child or 1970s party host: manners, or etiquette. Who is invited to sit at the table? What is considered stylish—or vulgar—to serve? Which fork do I use first? And at what point in the meal are we allowed to talk about sex, or flatulence? Reflecting ingrained social beliefs of the time and place, manners shift across eras and places.

The Futurist Cookbook referenced by DocLab is part serious joke, part radical manifesto. It outlined new rules for dining, rules that Marinetti said would change culture. Knives and forks were to be outlawed, exotic perfumes were to be wafted during different courses and pasta would be banned as it created, in Italian diners, that “typical ironic and sentimental skepticism that can often cut short their enthusiasm.”

While some of his sentiments were not received enthusiastically, there is a lesson in this thinking beyond the obvious. Marinetti argued that meals thus consumed would increase the creativity of his diners. This interest in art being a conduit for change—a change only accessed by the participant having to do something for themselves—is at the heart of today’s most ambitious interactive work. Work that explores what we do automatically and unthinkingly, inviting a departure from the norms of behavior. We are what we eat, but we also are how we love, what we say, what objects we surround ourselves with, how we navigate, what we look at and all the things that we do.

Back to DocLab’s dining scene. Here, instead of a soup spoon, we see the technological gadgets made by the giants of our time. From the axe to the fork to the virtual reality headset, technologies shape how we live, behave and think. What etiquette is suggested by the objects in the exhibition?

In 1990, the Grateful Dead lyricist and digital pioneer John Perry Barlow experienced VR for the first time and wrote, “Suddenly I don’t have a body anymore. All that remains of the aging shambles that usually constitutes my corporeal self is a glowing, golden hand floating before me like Macbeth’s dagger. … In this pulsating new landscape, I’ve been reduced to a point of view.”

While Barlow fantasizes that we can be ageless glowing souls in this egalitarian landscape, the bulk of the Vive headset slips inelegantly down my face, and it’s all too easy to wonder if the person making the object had a particular kind of head in mind. Or a particular attitude to the messy reality of bodies in general.

It would be naive to imagine that these technologies don’t hold within them an implicit rulebook about how they should be used, but we can be invited to use them incorrectly. The power of the interactive and immersive works that are offered in DocLab is that they invite us all to use technologies in strange and original ways. Like the best science fiction, in a world increasingly mediated by technology, they offer speculative fictions that suggest new recipes to deal with being alive.

The DocLab program is made possible by the Ministry of Economic Affairs of the Netherlands, CLICKNL, The Netherlands Film Fund, Google, ARTE, Diversion, Flanders Audiovisual Fund, Flemish Arts Centre De Brakke Grond. DocLab Research Collaborations: MIT Open Doc Lab and The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision. Eat | Tech | Dinner Party is realized with support from the Filmfund DocLab Interactive Grant. A Dinner With Frankenstein AI is co-commissioned by IDFA and the National Theatre Immersive Studio. IDFA on Stage is supported by the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds. DocLab Live: Jacco Gardner’s Somnium is an initiative by Paradiso and Jacco Gardner, presented in collaboration with IDFA DocLab.