kitchen kitchen — MAGDALENA KOVARIK

Felt Sound is an interactive installation on the culture of food, its tools and rituals. By touching the different cooking utensils their typical sound appears and creates a superposed kitchen atmosphere. Role: concept, design, UX, fabrication, physical computing.

Food, its consumption, and the surrounding culture is closely connected with the act of preparation and the tools we use for this. Food is culture. All around the world people eat and people cook. They often use the same tools, but prepare completely different meals with them. These tools, their appearance, stories and sounds are what somehow connect us.

The sonic kitchen wall featured in the video is part of the group exhibition Kitchen Kitchen. My responsibilities in the context of this exhibition included concept development and corporate design. Touching the pink segments of the tools triggers particular sounds. At its most basic level the installation is about the absence of food and about how the sounds of preparation evoke emotions and memories that let you almost smell it. The exhibition is designed in the set-up of very typical kitchen room, which the various exhibits are part of. It is only the interactive exhibition pieces - the kitchen tools - that are physically present and that constitute an affordance, or invitation to be played with, to be touched, and with which to create an actual "kitchen symphony". The rest of the kitchen is represented as black outlines on the walls. Part of the sonic kitchen wall is the kitchen window - a drawn window frame surrounding a screen showing panoramic views from kitchen windows from all over the world. These ambience sounds from different places complete the sonic kitchen soundscape.

Listen to the different sonic kitchen tools!