WVW

This afternoon I’m presenting the project Cuisine Interne Keuken again.
It is a project about the living conditions of what we call a precarious worker (somebody whose work situation is not stable, or who has to have several work identities).
It is a project started in 2004 at Jonctions/Verbindingen 7, a yearly festival around art, technology and ethics organised by Constantvzw.
We were curious about the living conditions of the people we invited for the festival, so we decided to interview them, in a very structured way. We made a questionnaire in a big brainstorm with about 20 people.
I will go over the questions with you.
The next process was gathering all this information. We chose for audio, a relatively cheap mobile way of working. Also archiving and processing compressed audio is not so serverspace absorbing.
Then, stage 3: putting all these answers online in a structured way.

First of all we chose to compress the audio in .ogg, an open source compression format, actually better than .mp3, especially for voice (we did some blind tests with Radioswap).
Then Nicolas Maleve from Constant made the database, all the time keeping in mind the audio aspect. So, we decided to edit all this audio – a lot of work – and name the audiofiles in a specific way.
I will give an example.

There is an interview made with harrisson.
The edited question 01 will be called q01_harrisson.ogg
Question 2: q02_harrisson.ogg
(underscores because servers can have problems with space)
If he answers question 10 and 11 at the same time, we named the file q10_q11_harrisson.ogg.

So, the audio is edited, uploaded to the server -> we go to the database, and we link up the audio, with the information about this interviewee.
Because we gave the files the prefixes q01_ and q02_ etc etc the database can automatically link them to the right audiofile.

This database, but now the public side of it.
-> the database generates playlists -> m3u
-> some problems arose -> files have to be long enough
-> mac users and ogg playlists are not an easy marriage -> so we will next year make a mp3 mirror site, and some maintenance. Vlc can be an option too, but is not extremely straight forward – but it does work…
-> this project also got sidetracked, in a sense that it travelled for example to City of Women in Ljubljana-> there, instead of showing a play or singing a song, we interviewed almost all the invited people of the festival, which made this a very special interventions.
In Ljubljana, we also changed question 16 pictures of your workspace to a drawing of your workspace.- > General Picture gallery -> Drawings
-> During Jonctions 8 we also built a no-budget installation with the idea of Cuisine Interne Keuken behind it. There is a weblog and a picture gallery documenting this.
-> Johannes Taelman constructed a Pure Data patch, which automatically records, names and edits the questions on a computer. You record the sound by pressing the space bar, and you go to the next question pressing enter. The only thing left to do is enter somebackground information and you have to upload it to the server….

Now, between all that browsing, programming, e-mailing, talking, phoning, thinking, the brain has to eat. And why not take this literally…
For some years I have been using the bcc food site as a source of inspiration for cooking with what I have left in my fridge (I think Benoît gave me the idea).

But now… Their website has really put the cherry on the pie…

Find a recipe!

Example: you only have some pumpkin in your fridge and you want to cook a fast vegetarian course with it.
Enter pumpkin, tick the quick and vegetarian squares, and Bob’s your uncle!
Then, you can choose the cuisine (Indian, Japanese..), other ingredients, the preparation method…

And, also, you might be frightened by the fact that some English people want to advise you food – when I lived on the British Isles, I mostly cooked myself, because the food was… (fill in for yourself).

Don’t be frightened, but do brush up your knowledge of the names of veggies and stuff in english.
Quite a good dictionary: Lookwayup.

Auntie beeb also has a good glossary to find the weird stuff.
And, in case of, what ??? is this: google images makes you find the right vegetable…

I hope…
Get out your best kitchen gear and feel inspired… (And get vitamines)