Sensing the Wood Fired Oven strives to elicit a full sensory experience of the outdoor wood fired oven through expressive and layered imagery and as told through four wood fired oven bakers: Juli Vanderhoop, Jeffrey Hammelman, Noah Elbers, and Rob Gurwitt. The outdoor wood fired oven is an example of communal outdoor infrastructure which activates many of the human senses. It also can alleviate isolation and food insecurity and increase mental wellbeing and connection to others and the natural environment. If built and used appropriately, it is very fuel efficient. The outdoor wood burning oven is a brilliant example of stacking functions for ecological and human health.
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SPECIEs…DESIGNERS
When we sense the world beyond human language and numerical systems, beyond the occularcentric, beyond the limitations of our clever, capitalist, anthrogenerated technologies which are always mirrors or extensions of our species, we make discoveries. In The Built Environment: Species and Forces as Designers, I invite you to participate on my embodied journey of connection across difference, arriving at a perspective largely unconsidered by contemporary, technophilic, human cultures. From this practice, understandings between humans also emerge, suturing widening rifts among our own species.
YOUNG CHEFS
In Young Chefs, Slow Food I wanted to capture the young chefs at New England Culinary Institute grapple with creating and cooking a locally sourced dinner including pork sourced from a local farm. I discovered that many of the young millennial chefs were deeply connected to their own local food history. Their passion for the colors, smells, textures, and taste of real food was intoxicatingly clear throughout the day that I spent with them.
Mini-doc shot in East Montpelier, Vermont. Edited on Premier Pro, CC.
Cow Sauce
I think a lot about how we eat, what we eat, and where it’s from. And what we eat, eats. It’s not the food, it’s what the food eats, ie, the nutrients or lack thereof, and the toxins in the soil and water and air as well as the levels of CO2 affect the quality of the food (thank you, Sam Meyers.) Have we asked all the questions before we make our judgments? Do we realize that our food data is largely derived from conventional agriculture? Do we know if local pasture-raised cows are worse for environmental and human health when doing a full life cycle energy and health analysis than Italian olive oil, Spanish clementines, Californian strawberries, and Peruvian blueberries? What is the impact and all the collateral impacts of the cargo ships on the ocean? What is the impact of the container trucks on our highways? Is a local farmer’s life healthier than a truck or ship driver’s? If we eat local, how does it affect our economy, our communities?
Mini-doc shot in East Montpelier, Vermont. Edited on Premier Pro, CC.