Lifestream activity looks rather thin this week due to conducting all day workshops on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and having a surprise birthday away day at the Fat Duck in Bray (Heston Blumenthal’s restaurant) on the Thursday. I am not sure how personal the lifestream should be as I videoed each course (with my small Flip recorder) and could have uploaded onto YouTube and linked to the stream. Surprisingly the lunch (which took three hours) was relevant to the week’s discussion on genres and multimodal communication. Blumenthal’s philosophy to cooking and eating is on his web-site – http://www.fatduck.co.uk/ . He says:
“Eating is a multi-modal process (involving all the senses). Any comments concerning food being just about taste are misguided. Try drinking a fine wine from a polystyrene cup or eating a beautifully cooked piece of fish off a paper plate with a plastic knife and fork, it is not the same.
Both physiological and psychological factors come into play and in many cases, they cannot be separated. Take-for example- a fine wine drunk from a polystyrene cup; the shape of the cup will affect the perceived smell and flavour of the wine (physiological) and the material will affect the feel of the cup in the hand and on the lips (psychological).“
His restaurant is unique and represents a new genre of eating establishment borrowing techniques from acting, theatre and magic. Below is one of the thirteen courses we had – Nitro-scrambled Egg and Bacon Ice Cream (sounds weird but it was delicious). Each course was explained and performed in a similar style.
Gold nugget finds of the week:
Artist Chris Jordan shows how art can be a more effective medium for communicating complex statistical information http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_jordan_pictures_some_shocking_stats.html
Professor Melanie Hundley puts multi-modal, multi-genre academic work into practice http://www.vanderbilt.edu/bardonporch/The%20Bard%20on%20a%20Digital%20Porch_files/frame.htm see my earlier blog about this work.
