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Paper short abstract

We discuss how the taste of food as an "epistemic object" was investigated through an "artistic" research process in the context of a citizen science project with "gustographic" investigations and a participatory exhibition offering experiments for shaping one's own ways of tasting.

Paper long abstract

The paper reports on an exhibition on "Taste!" that was done in October 2020 at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. The exhibition comprised a series of experiments allowing participants to experience how the taste of food changes when they modify elements of the situation of eating (e.g. soundscape, use of artefacts, body posture, social interaction, mental frames). As such the exhibition was an aesthetic installation, it exposed sensory experiences, and it exposed the participants' agency in creatively shaping these experiences. I discuss the exhibition as art (aesthetic practice of creating intense sensory experiences) providing a different lens to epistemic objects (what is taste? how does it happen?). The exhibition was part of the citizen science project "Schmeck!", which investigated how the aesthetic experience of food comes about, how it is influenced, and if and how it can be changed (for example, with a view to sustainability, i.e. learning to relish seasonal, regional, vegan, insects etc.). We developed an "auto-gustographic" research approach and found that it is "the situation that tastes" not certain food objects or biographically determined subjects. Tasting appeared as a complex aesthetic practice, too complex to be instrumentally controlled - but therefore open to creative experimental shaping. That is what the exhibition was to convey, not in words, but in the medium of sensory experience itself, as embodied findings made by participants themselves (published as Voß/Guggenheim 2019: Making taste public; Voß et al. 2023: Provoking Taste, in Voß et al. (eds.) Sensing Collectives).