Guess What?
by David Cox and Vincent Villemaire
The idea for the project was always
to try to create a recipe that would be unpredictable and that would generate a
different result for each person applying it. There was this element of
randomness that we wanted to explore to see if we could get results that would
be as interesting as they would be entertaining. We also wanted to incorporate
the concepts of movement and communication inside the recipe.
Our original idea was quite different than the one we ended up using. We
first planned for having a person drop salad dressing from an elevated position
(like on a steps ladder) into a bowl on the ground. The dressing , because it
is so light, would have spread out quite randomly by the time it hit the
ground, and the result would have been an abstract piece in the form of a
salad, a sort of canvas made of food ingredients. We abandoned this idea
because we thought it would be too abstract and not really entertaining enough
for the people doing the recipe.
For our final recipe concept, we opted to use a "blindfolded"
element to the process, while also implicating the participation of 2 people.
The idea was the following: we would actually make 2 very simple salad recipes,
and bring all the prepared ingredients. One would be a standard vegetable salad
with dressings, and the second one a fruit salad. Each recipe would have the
same amount of ingredients and each ingredient from one recipe would be matched
with an ingredient from the second one, depending on their size and
consistency. The goal would be that, after choosing the type of salad they
wanted to make, a blindfolded person of the team had to guess which of the 2
ingredients, between the vegetable and the fruit, is the right one while his
partner would shake both ingredients individually in a container. The sounds
initiated by the shaking movement needed to be similar enough to create doubt
or even confusion, but they also needed to have a distinct characteristic to
give a chance of success to the person guessing. So even if the person guessed
wrong, his partner would just keep making the salad based on his friend's
decisions without saying a word. The result s would range from very horrible
mixes to surprisingly delicious mistakes.
Salty
ingredients
|
Sweet
ingredients
|
|
1
|
Salad
|
Apple
skins
|
2
|
Tomatoes
|
Raspberries
|
3
|
Nuts
|
Chocolate
|
4
|
Cucumber
|
Banana
|
5
|
Olives
|
Raisins
|
6
|
Carrots
|
Apple
|
7
|
Vinaigrette
|
Vanilla
extract
|
We found it interesting to explore the irony in which the recipe was
created. The ingredients were indeed chosen deliberately by a person with a set
goal in mind, but they would also be selected while in a state of confusion. So
the salad at the end is the result of his own doing, even though it isn't what
was originally intended. The tasks for
the project were distributed quite equally, we each assigned ourselves a set of
ingredients to take care of. We had to make sure to balance them adequately so
that the game would be challenging enough. We did a short trial phase where we
would ask people if they could guess which ingredient was which when shaking
them. The positive results were quite encouraging while the negative ones
helped us make some adjustments to the amount/weight put inside each container.
