Conference Presentations by Allie Wist
EmergencE/Y: ASLE Conference, 2021
I extrapolate what poetic dwelling looks like in terms
of our relationship with food, foraging, a... more I extrapolate what poetic dwelling looks like in terms
of our relationship with food, foraging, and water, as considered within the Anthropocene, the Sixth Mass
Extinction, and impending eco-crisis. In an essay and a series of photographs and art installations, I propose
ways to more poetically engage with our environment, using multi-sensory and embodied forms of knowing to
attempt to grasp my complicity within ecosystems and my role within large environmental systems. This work
essentially has to do with de-centering the white, anthropocentric narratives around occupying space, land, and
dwellings. The work explores various forms of “noticing” which took place in 2019 at the futuristic bio-dome at
Shell House Arts, connecting utopic architecture with tangible environmental engagements. The work includes
foraging for oyster mushrooms and re-culturing some of the mushrooms to be returned to the forest (“A recipe
for mushrooms for mushrooms”); foraging for plants on the property not seen as edible by property owners,
including clover, wood sorrel, and thyme; collecting rainwater from various external surfaces on the dome
structure. In all of these applications, nonhuman collaborations are given priority as a way to more poetically
combat our anthropocentric view on nature.
Think OLIO, 2019
Food photography seems simple on the surface—photographs of culinary and edible delights which ai... more Food photography seems simple on the surface—photographs of culinary and edible delights which aim to entice or whet our palette, ranging from elaborate feasts to macro cheesy pizza shots. But appealing to our senses is just one of the goals of food photography throughout the decades. It also acts as a way to communicate values about gender, society, race, politics, and even our ideals for the future. The fact that images of food conjure the senses of taste and smell, two particularly visceral sensory experiences and the two most closely tied to memory, makes it one of the most powerful mediums through which to communicate and persuade.
In the 1900s, food photography embarked on an evolution as a visual medium which, along the way, has acted as a mirror for historic and social changes in America. Food photographs after WWII reflected American values of abundance; photographs of international cuisine in the 1980s projected white colonial narratives; and contemporary food photography often must grapple with technology and globalism. Of course, the art of photographing food and drink is only as old as photography itself, originating first as simple still lifes of foods arranged in echos of Dutch paintings. However, food photography quickly embarked on its own path as a visual medium, and began to fundamentally change how we view eating, dining, and cooking as part of our collective identity.
We'll take a look at food photographs decade by decade to see what aspects of American society and culture can be gleaned, and attendees will have a chance in breakout rooms to analyze food images, working with each other to develop their own analysis of social or cultural issues that emerge in the styling, lighting, and food choices of a culinary photograph.
Columbia University School of the Arts' Digital Storytelling Lab, 2020
In a time of physical distancing, our personal relationship to food is evolving. For some, cook... more In a time of physical distancing, our personal relationship to food is evolving. For some, cooking has become an escape providing a sense of creativity or normalcy. For others, food has become increasingly a challenge, due to economic hardship and/or supply disruption.
Special talk by Allie Wist, an artist whose work is anchored in food culture, climate change and global landscapes. She creates narratives through visual and experiential expressions that reexamine our collective consumption identities and histories.
Plus a prototyping session centered on co-creating future artifacts related to the themes of food and accessibility.
Just Food Conference, 2021
Contemporary food spaces are often highly sanitized and heavily mediated through packaging, proce... more Contemporary food spaces are often highly sanitized and heavily mediated through packaging, processing, and post-natural design, rendering biological material (food) into media and into commodities. These spaces have systemically devalued the chemical senses of taste and smell in our experience of them. Smell has a particularly taut history of vilification in the West and in conceptions of ‘modernity,' as outlined in scholarship by Alain Corbin. This legacy stretches back to René Descartes, who repudiated the senses as a form of knowing the true nature of reality, denying our perception of the world in our accounting for nature. Contemporarily, the devaluation of smell especially has been a way to signify the 'other,' whereby odors are categories by white diners and shoppers as 'bad' when they are unfamiliar. The fear of smell in food spaces harkens back to a time of prejudice against street vendors and restaurants which did not adhere to a sanitized, odorless version of modernity authored by colonialist and white powers. During the COVID-19 crisis, the sanitization of these spaces became an acute phenomena, as restaurants and grocery stores became desperate to create enclosures safe from the virus. While consumers were further severed from the chemical senses, we discovered anosmia (loss of smell) was a side effect of COVID. My work, consisting of a photo essay and video, explores these sensory losses both in modernity and as highlighted during the last year of the pandemic.
The work postures smell as a way to forge more intimate relationships with our food, our environment, and our nonhuman companions in our food systems. Using three different mycelium dirt substrates, I grew oyster and lion's mane mushrooms in my Brooklyn apartment over the months spanning March to November, 2020. This mushroom becomes an anchor in otherwise sanitized food spaces. Three of the six flushes produced successful harvests. The unsuccessful mushroom was preserved in perfumer's alcohol, which is documented in the video
Concordia University's Interdisciplinary Humanities Contested Imaginaries Conference, 2021
A workshop using taste, smell, and memory to anchor us to other landscapes and other timescales.
Master of Gastronomy, Creativity, and Ecology at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, Italy, 2021
Papers by Allie Wist
Technoetic Arts, 2024
Abstract:
The archive produces a linear time that reaches towards ‘what could be’ by asserting ‘w... more Abstract:
The archive produces a linear time that reaches towards ‘what could be’ by asserting ‘what has been’, reassuring us of our existence through the assertion of a reliably *past* past. But the Anthropocene is an era of uncontained material ramifications, where the past juts into the future and temporality warps as change accelerates unexpectedly. As an ecological and geologic epoch, documentation of the Anthropocene inherently has a relationship to one common archive of Earth systems change: natural history museums. These institutions, however, troublingly rest on what Elaine Graham calls ‘ontological hygiene’ – the separateness of the human subject from ‘nature’. The Anthropocene challenges this Western, post-Enlightenment sanitization as humans emerge—a spectral, false collective—into the dominant earth systems force. Thus, documentation of this epoch might resist such ontological sanitation.
This article outlines an artistic research practice to create artifacts of the Anthropocene – ones that invite material idiosyncrasies, objects-in-becoming, ephemerality, and decay. I suggest that artistic ‘anarchices’ which prioritize process over objects, and resist linear representation. They contain material, embodied and sensory artifacts, which include waste materials, reworked forms of ‘geology’, edible artifacts, and multimedia works at landfills and feral sites. By focusing on waste as an analytical category, I form an unstable collage of the ontological breakdowns characteristic of the Anthropocene.
Loose Assosciations, The Photographer's Gallery, 2019
Consumption has often lent itself towards
conspicuousness. A reversal from an act which
assimilat... more Consumption has often lent itself towards
conspicuousness. A reversal from an act which
assimilates a substance inward, to one which
projects the substance back outward. Eating
becomes a culture and class exoskeleton of
what is otherwise a biological process, one
through which we simply gain “nourishment.”
Of course, eating has moved much beyond
its necessary function, and has perhaps
always been, at least in part, a cultural act for
humans. Eating is perhaps the most primal
way that we physically consume culture and
emotion—it is our earliest means of accessing
the stories of our ancestors (and of learning
new stories about our futures). Recipes hold
within them deep undercurrents of who we are
and who we hope to be. To nourish others is to
assume this responsibility—to build access to
the histories, ecologies, and futures embedded
within food. Feeding others can be seen as a
way to render accessible the many threads of
meaning held within a mother’s humble bowl
of congee, or encased beneath the cellophane
of a ceremonial gift basket. Cooking with
bones is one of our most ancient practices, a
prehistoric recipe. When we create ritual and
tradition around food, we unfold deep lineages
and connections spanning time and space.
One Earth, 2021
Flooded bridges the realities of sea-level rise with edible adaptations for the Anthropocene. The... more Flooded bridges the realities of sea-level rise with edible adaptations for the Anthropocene. The images reveal the intimacy between our collective pasts and our possible futures, depicting a food system that resists techno-utopianism and instead embraces collaborative ecologies, historic methods of preservation, and regenerative cultivation. The speculative foodscape in Flooded includes mushrooms, a critical component of multispecies ecologies and a potential tool for cleaning toxic agricultural waste, as postulated by mycologist Paul Stamets. Bivalves can detoxify oceans, and kelp farming sequesters carbon while requiring nearly zero land/water resources. Foraged wild edibles and underutilized plant varietals, including burdock, dandelion root, and mustard greens, emphasize the significance of biodiversity for resilient food systems. Flooded oscillates between dystopian and optimistic, leaning on Glenn Albrecht's notion of solastalgia—the solace and nostalgia we feel as our environment changes—while also suggesting a new orientation towards consumption. The images inherently accept the realities of generational amnesia, projecting artifacts of a future generation through a sensory tableau.
Uploads
Conference Presentations by Allie Wist
of our relationship with food, foraging, and water, as considered within the Anthropocene, the Sixth Mass
Extinction, and impending eco-crisis. In an essay and a series of photographs and art installations, I propose
ways to more poetically engage with our environment, using multi-sensory and embodied forms of knowing to
attempt to grasp my complicity within ecosystems and my role within large environmental systems. This work
essentially has to do with de-centering the white, anthropocentric narratives around occupying space, land, and
dwellings. The work explores various forms of “noticing” which took place in 2019 at the futuristic bio-dome at
Shell House Arts, connecting utopic architecture with tangible environmental engagements. The work includes
foraging for oyster mushrooms and re-culturing some of the mushrooms to be returned to the forest (“A recipe
for mushrooms for mushrooms”); foraging for plants on the property not seen as edible by property owners,
including clover, wood sorrel, and thyme; collecting rainwater from various external surfaces on the dome
structure. In all of these applications, nonhuman collaborations are given priority as a way to more poetically
combat our anthropocentric view on nature.
In the 1900s, food photography embarked on an evolution as a visual medium which, along the way, has acted as a mirror for historic and social changes in America. Food photographs after WWII reflected American values of abundance; photographs of international cuisine in the 1980s projected white colonial narratives; and contemporary food photography often must grapple with technology and globalism. Of course, the art of photographing food and drink is only as old as photography itself, originating first as simple still lifes of foods arranged in echos of Dutch paintings. However, food photography quickly embarked on its own path as a visual medium, and began to fundamentally change how we view eating, dining, and cooking as part of our collective identity.
We'll take a look at food photographs decade by decade to see what aspects of American society and culture can be gleaned, and attendees will have a chance in breakout rooms to analyze food images, working with each other to develop their own analysis of social or cultural issues that emerge in the styling, lighting, and food choices of a culinary photograph.
Special talk by Allie Wist, an artist whose work is anchored in food culture, climate change and global landscapes. She creates narratives through visual and experiential expressions that reexamine our collective consumption identities and histories.
Plus a prototyping session centered on co-creating future artifacts related to the themes of food and accessibility.
The work postures smell as a way to forge more intimate relationships with our food, our environment, and our nonhuman companions in our food systems. Using three different mycelium dirt substrates, I grew oyster and lion's mane mushrooms in my Brooklyn apartment over the months spanning March to November, 2020. This mushroom becomes an anchor in otherwise sanitized food spaces. Three of the six flushes produced successful harvests. The unsuccessful mushroom was preserved in perfumer's alcohol, which is documented in the video
Papers by Allie Wist
The archive produces a linear time that reaches towards ‘what could be’ by asserting ‘what has been’, reassuring us of our existence through the assertion of a reliably *past* past. But the Anthropocene is an era of uncontained material ramifications, where the past juts into the future and temporality warps as change accelerates unexpectedly. As an ecological and geologic epoch, documentation of the Anthropocene inherently has a relationship to one common archive of Earth systems change: natural history museums. These institutions, however, troublingly rest on what Elaine Graham calls ‘ontological hygiene’ – the separateness of the human subject from ‘nature’. The Anthropocene challenges this Western, post-Enlightenment sanitization as humans emerge—a spectral, false collective—into the dominant earth systems force. Thus, documentation of this epoch might resist such ontological sanitation.
This article outlines an artistic research practice to create artifacts of the Anthropocene – ones that invite material idiosyncrasies, objects-in-becoming, ephemerality, and decay. I suggest that artistic ‘anarchices’ which prioritize process over objects, and resist linear representation. They contain material, embodied and sensory artifacts, which include waste materials, reworked forms of ‘geology’, edible artifacts, and multimedia works at landfills and feral sites. By focusing on waste as an analytical category, I form an unstable collage of the ontological breakdowns characteristic of the Anthropocene.
conspicuousness. A reversal from an act which
assimilates a substance inward, to one which
projects the substance back outward. Eating
becomes a culture and class exoskeleton of
what is otherwise a biological process, one
through which we simply gain “nourishment.”
Of course, eating has moved much beyond
its necessary function, and has perhaps
always been, at least in part, a cultural act for
humans. Eating is perhaps the most primal
way that we physically consume culture and
emotion—it is our earliest means of accessing
the stories of our ancestors (and of learning
new stories about our futures). Recipes hold
within them deep undercurrents of who we are
and who we hope to be. To nourish others is to
assume this responsibility—to build access to
the histories, ecologies, and futures embedded
within food. Feeding others can be seen as a
way to render accessible the many threads of
meaning held within a mother’s humble bowl
of congee, or encased beneath the cellophane
of a ceremonial gift basket. Cooking with
bones is one of our most ancient practices, a
prehistoric recipe. When we create ritual and
tradition around food, we unfold deep lineages
and connections spanning time and space.
of our relationship with food, foraging, and water, as considered within the Anthropocene, the Sixth Mass
Extinction, and impending eco-crisis. In an essay and a series of photographs and art installations, I propose
ways to more poetically engage with our environment, using multi-sensory and embodied forms of knowing to
attempt to grasp my complicity within ecosystems and my role within large environmental systems. This work
essentially has to do with de-centering the white, anthropocentric narratives around occupying space, land, and
dwellings. The work explores various forms of “noticing” which took place in 2019 at the futuristic bio-dome at
Shell House Arts, connecting utopic architecture with tangible environmental engagements. The work includes
foraging for oyster mushrooms and re-culturing some of the mushrooms to be returned to the forest (“A recipe
for mushrooms for mushrooms”); foraging for plants on the property not seen as edible by property owners,
including clover, wood sorrel, and thyme; collecting rainwater from various external surfaces on the dome
structure. In all of these applications, nonhuman collaborations are given priority as a way to more poetically
combat our anthropocentric view on nature.
In the 1900s, food photography embarked on an evolution as a visual medium which, along the way, has acted as a mirror for historic and social changes in America. Food photographs after WWII reflected American values of abundance; photographs of international cuisine in the 1980s projected white colonial narratives; and contemporary food photography often must grapple with technology and globalism. Of course, the art of photographing food and drink is only as old as photography itself, originating first as simple still lifes of foods arranged in echos of Dutch paintings. However, food photography quickly embarked on its own path as a visual medium, and began to fundamentally change how we view eating, dining, and cooking as part of our collective identity.
We'll take a look at food photographs decade by decade to see what aspects of American society and culture can be gleaned, and attendees will have a chance in breakout rooms to analyze food images, working with each other to develop their own analysis of social or cultural issues that emerge in the styling, lighting, and food choices of a culinary photograph.
Special talk by Allie Wist, an artist whose work is anchored in food culture, climate change and global landscapes. She creates narratives through visual and experiential expressions that reexamine our collective consumption identities and histories.
Plus a prototyping session centered on co-creating future artifacts related to the themes of food and accessibility.
The work postures smell as a way to forge more intimate relationships with our food, our environment, and our nonhuman companions in our food systems. Using three different mycelium dirt substrates, I grew oyster and lion's mane mushrooms in my Brooklyn apartment over the months spanning March to November, 2020. This mushroom becomes an anchor in otherwise sanitized food spaces. Three of the six flushes produced successful harvests. The unsuccessful mushroom was preserved in perfumer's alcohol, which is documented in the video
The archive produces a linear time that reaches towards ‘what could be’ by asserting ‘what has been’, reassuring us of our existence through the assertion of a reliably *past* past. But the Anthropocene is an era of uncontained material ramifications, where the past juts into the future and temporality warps as change accelerates unexpectedly. As an ecological and geologic epoch, documentation of the Anthropocene inherently has a relationship to one common archive of Earth systems change: natural history museums. These institutions, however, troublingly rest on what Elaine Graham calls ‘ontological hygiene’ – the separateness of the human subject from ‘nature’. The Anthropocene challenges this Western, post-Enlightenment sanitization as humans emerge—a spectral, false collective—into the dominant earth systems force. Thus, documentation of this epoch might resist such ontological sanitation.
This article outlines an artistic research practice to create artifacts of the Anthropocene – ones that invite material idiosyncrasies, objects-in-becoming, ephemerality, and decay. I suggest that artistic ‘anarchices’ which prioritize process over objects, and resist linear representation. They contain material, embodied and sensory artifacts, which include waste materials, reworked forms of ‘geology’, edible artifacts, and multimedia works at landfills and feral sites. By focusing on waste as an analytical category, I form an unstable collage of the ontological breakdowns characteristic of the Anthropocene.
conspicuousness. A reversal from an act which
assimilates a substance inward, to one which
projects the substance back outward. Eating
becomes a culture and class exoskeleton of
what is otherwise a biological process, one
through which we simply gain “nourishment.”
Of course, eating has moved much beyond
its necessary function, and has perhaps
always been, at least in part, a cultural act for
humans. Eating is perhaps the most primal
way that we physically consume culture and
emotion—it is our earliest means of accessing
the stories of our ancestors (and of learning
new stories about our futures). Recipes hold
within them deep undercurrents of who we are
and who we hope to be. To nourish others is to
assume this responsibility—to build access to
the histories, ecologies, and futures embedded
within food. Feeding others can be seen as a
way to render accessible the many threads of
meaning held within a mother’s humble bowl
of congee, or encased beneath the cellophane
of a ceremonial gift basket. Cooking with
bones is one of our most ancient practices, a
prehistoric recipe. When we create ritual and
tradition around food, we unfold deep lineages
and connections spanning time and space.