news/events

Artist Talk + OSFW @ UCLA, Spring 2015


OS Food Fermentation Workshop: May 11, 2015 12:00-1:00 pm

The OS Fermentation Workshop (OSFW) is part of artist duo Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint’s Edible Ecologies project—a series of “social sculptures” that work collaboratively with local communities (human, bacterial and ecological). Taking place thus far at community gardens, academic institutions and public spaces, the OS Fermentation workshop involves participants in a process of reviving the ancient practice of fermentation as an alternative to industrial methods of food preservation such as refrigeration and pasteurization. It functions simultaneously as a slow-cooking class, a community-building ritual and a conceptual art experiment in which both wild bacteria and food democracy are the core concepts. The tangible outcome for participants is jars of fermented veggies, which the artists envision as an unfinished and interactive artwork.

Public Artist Talk: May 11, 2015 5:00-6:30 pm

Working collaboratively as EcoArtTech since 2005, Leila Nadir and Cary Peppermint are a hybrid artist-scholar team whose environmental art projects take the form of architectural interventions and urban wilderness tours, net art and public performances, scholarly articles and poetic essays. Their talk will be of interest to scholars and practitioners across the humanities as well as in environmental studies, art-science collaboration and science and technology studies. It will also provide the opportunity for students to learn about the artists’ ambitious and multimodal body of work. This event will be especially interesting to those interested in the applications of new media to creative engagements with food and the environment.

Nadir and Peppermint will focus in their talk on The OS Fermentation Workshop (OSFW), which positions art as an urgent and critical social intervention operating between utility and imagination.