Tasting Tendrils – Digital Delicacies & Edible Encounters
Research class by Mathias Mu
Within the context of Tasting Tendrils, a collaborative project exploring the sensory, social, and sculptural possibilities of food and fabrication, this research class invites participants to sense, grasp, reach, and respond. Through taste and touch, we gradually stretch artistic and technological potential, arousing the senses one by one. Inspired by tendrils—organic forms that curl, cling, and adapt—this class embraces failure as form, accident as method, and taste as a sculptural gesture.
Over the course of a week, we will cook, experiment, and play with organic ingredients—stirring together textures, viscosities, and flavors to shape temporary edible forms. These recipes will be used to explore 3D printing techniques with organic materials, where form is not imposed, but co-defined through a dialogue between hand, material, and machine. Through extruding and molding, we’ll explore how these unstable substances behave, flow, collapse, resist, or surprise. Here, agency is shared and forms emerge through interaction. Like tendrils, these fragile and temporary forms serve as metaphors for artistic processes that resist permanence and control.
The class culminates in a shared moment of tasting and presentation. Together, we will curate miniature exhibitions of ephemeral, edible forms on ceramic 3D printed plates that resemble and act as exhibition spaces. Each plate serves as an intimate stage for reflection, storytelling, and ritual where ideas and gestures unfold. We eat our research; we play with form. In doing so, we reimagine digital techniques not only as sustenance, but as an interface for artistic inquiry.
Mathias Mu
Mathias Mu (1991) is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher based in Antwerp (BE). In his practice, Mu embraces speculative world building, digital folklore and technoromanticism in relation to nature, as well as digital fabrication techniques like 3D printing, exploring their potential for artistic expression within the context of contemporary art. Mu creates objects, digital environments, interactive installations and sound works. His work questions the increasingly blurry boundaries between the organic and the artificial.
Mathias Mu is researcher at the Academy and coordinator of the Academy's Mixlab.
mathias.verhoeven@ap.be
>> This research class is part of the Research Week during the annual research festival ARTICULATE.
