Food Ethics and Aesthetics

This theme issue has the founding ambition of landscaping Data Ethics as a new branch of ethics that studies and evaluates moral problems related to data (including generation, recording, curation, processing, dissemination, sharing, and use), algorithms (including AI, artificial agents, machine learning, and robots), and corresponding practices (including responsible innovation, programming, hacking, and professional codes), in order to formulate and support morally good solutions (e.g. right conducts or right values). Data Ethics builds on the foundation provided by Computer and Information Ethics but, at the same time, it refines the approach endorsed so far in this research field, by shifting the Level of Abstraction of ethical enquiries, from being information-centric to being data-centric. This shift brings into focus the different moral dimensions of all kinds of data, even the data that never translate directly into information but can be used to support actions or generate behaviours, for example. It highlights the need for ethical analyses to concentrate on the content and nature of computational operations—the interactions among hardware, software, and data—rather than on the variety of digital technologies that enables them. And it emphasises the complexity of the ethical challenges posed by Data Science. Because of such complexity, Data Ethics should be developed from the start as a macroethics, that is, as an overall framework that avoids narrow, ad hoc approaches and addresses the ethical impact and implications of Data Science and its applications within a consistent, holistic, and inclusive framework. Only as a macroethics Data Ethics will provide the solutions that can maximise the value of Data Science for our societies, for all of us, and for our environments.

Early ethics assessment of technological innovations promises to produce greater sensitivity to the potential for unfair impacts and problems of consent and distrust, yet faces a key challenge: ethical issues are hard to consider in advance. For technology, Collingridge (1980) describes a dilemma in which design inevitably comes before ethical assessment since the design influences heavily how the technology will interact with society. In this paper, we review an approach we undertook to early ethical assessment of nanobiosensors adapted for traceability systems to enhance food safety and animal and plant health monitoring. The approach is based on " expert committee " methods for integrating information from a range of disciplinary perspectives. It attempts to address the dilemma of early assessment through an integrative workshop discussion of how nanobiosensors should be represented during public engagement. Following the workshop, we conducted a metanalysis of the discussion transcript. The metanalysis shows that while the workshop approach responds to preliminary needs for the development of ethical assessment tools and processes, it also highlights inescapable challenges of ethical analysis. We identify key challenges and discuss their theoretical implications and implications for participatory assessment. We consider workshop discussion itself, and we consider the workshop as modeling one part of a cumulative process of assessment.

Please cite as
Elena FELL, Natalia LUKIANOVA, Fast food and the semiotics of gastronomy. ESSACHESS - Journal for Communication Studies. Vol 8, No 2(16) (2015). P.49 – 57. http://www.essachess.com/index.php/jcs/article/view/298/342

Nourishment stands apart from other physiological events: whilst we normally exercise discretion in relation to bodily functions, food consumption takes place in public. We dine, snack and nibble in front of others, and the imagery associated with food takes on the manifold of meanings—religious, cultural, historic and so forth. Gastronomic practices unite or divide people, and as such are a powerful communication tool. As the twenty-first century confrontational stance between fast food and family meal traditions intensifies, we investigate fast food’s visual imagery and its ability to attract consumers.



Résumé: La nutrition se distingue d'autres événements physiologiques: alors que normalement nous exerçons avec discrétion les fonctions corporelles, la consommation d'aliments a lieu en public. Nous mangeons, prenons une collation et grignotons devant les autres, et l'imagerie associée avec la nourriture prend une multiplicité de significations: religieuses, culturelles, historiques, etc. Les pratiques gastronomiques unissent ou divisent les gens, et sont en tant que telles un puissant outil de communication. Alors qu'au 21ème siècle la confrontation entre le fast-food et le repas traditionnel en famille s'intensifie, nous enquêtons sur l'imagerie visuelle de la restauration rapide et sa capacité à attirer les consommateurs.

Staged as a living laboratory, Bruised Food is a social artwork that uses methods of curation and public pedagogy to frame the discourse of the politics and aesthetics of food as employed by contemporary social practice artists. In adopting a curatorial and pedagogical mode informed by an ethics of care and responsibility, this living laboratory attends to the bruised ecologies of food and art by foregrounding the risks, uncertainty and frictions inherent in the potential encounters and exchanges between diverse participants. Through an experimental and iterative approach to testing, creating, engaging with, and displaying artistic ephemera and documentation, Bruised Food will present a series of process-focused projects from translocal artists (Asia / Australia) who will activate their research and audiences through performances, installations, workshops and critical dialogues around the precarious ecologies of food and art in a globalising world.

Bruised Food: a living laboratory is curated by Marnie Badham and Francis Maravillas, featuring artists Keg de Souza with Lucien Alperstein, Arahmaiani, Rhett D’Costa, Elia Nurvista and Stephen Loo.