Sunpie
Sunpie (2011-2012) is currently in the concept development and fund raising stage.
ABOUT SUNPIE
Sunpie is a platform for the exploration and celebration of sun power—specifically the use of solar cooking appliances in the urban environs of Chicago.
Depending on the venue, Sunpie can take the form of a projected multimedia installation with a substantial public outreach component. By day, flying pie saucers spin and cavort in a textual landscape of recipes scraped from the web. The speed of the saucers is based on the amount of radiation available. By night, the pies take the form of slower moving planets and constellations in the night sky.
Each week, the artist will consult Google Recipes to make a new sun-cooked solar pie that will be served family style in the gallery. An interactive web kiosk allows visitors to view the recipes for solar-cooked pies.
BACKGROUND
Sunpie promotes interchange and dialogue between the existential and the virtual world of recipes. The physicality of something as remote as the distant orb of the sun is reimagined as the warm circular form of the pie. The pie is connected to the virtual environment of the Internet, which is becoming eminently more searchable each month as search engines like Google add micro-formatting functionality for specific content like recipes.
Food is perhaps one of the few remaining commonalities that link our human experience across the globe. Our dinner relates directly to what exists in the moment. Dessert is the culminating course of the meal—one that is designed to provide comfort, decadence and satiety. The content of our dessert plates is known more intimately by experience rather than reason. Pie recipes have been handed down for generations—starting with savory pies originating with the Greeks. It is perhaps ironic then that the Internet has become one of the largest repositories of shared recipe data with Google now offering specific advice to webmasters as to how to tag data so it can be best be viewed by a new search designation. “Recipe View” launched on February 24, 2011 in the USA and Japan only. Avid cooks and webmasters can now update their concoctions for inclusion in the search engine’s new Recipe View by using the new class designation “hrecipe” which enables users to search recipes by ingredient, cooking time, and calorie count. The Sunpie project leverages the new text searching features that the “hrecipe” permits and also provides a pathway to augment its dearth of recipes tagged “solar pie.” Modern American home cooks have minimal experience with solar cooking techniques as electric and gas powered ranges are standard in both luxury houses and government subsidized housing.
