/Culture-Stew

Culture Stew / Kulttuurihaude /文化燉工作坊

Hack culture Finland + Taiwan

在這裡翻譯： https://hackmd.io/8xsp2rbwTCWJDdMS7ESfUQ?both

CultureStew_poster

Tuomo Tammenpää 多摩·當明伯

Cultural mash-up 文化的混搭 Finland and Taiwan, countries and cultures 8000 km apart. One with climate in the border of the arctic, the other close the tropics. Finland, big land - few people, Taiwan small island - lot of people. Finland bordering Big Russia, Taiwan, Big China. Potatoes, bread and coffee versus rice, tofu and tea. Heavy metal meets mandopop. Finns “chill” in the sauna, Taiwanese in the hot springs. Many differences - some similarities.

Hacks, tracks and recipes 改造,混音與配方 Knowledge emerges and gets transferred in cultural encounters. The Culture Stew is a three day workshop of learning, mixing, hacking and simmering pieces of Finnish and Taiwanese cultures. The stew is the umbrella concept - it gives us time for our ideas to mature in slow boil. The Stew also introduces a pair of kitchen appliances well-known in their respective countries. This gives us bit of technology to play with and hack around alternative energy sources. With tracks we remix Finnish and Taiwanese sounds. What will it be, Enka tango or Hokkien heavy metal. We shall see. Recipes is the documentation tool. Whether it’s about food, DIY hacking tips or musical structure, they are all recipes that store the knowledge to passed on and remixed later.

The rice cooker & the porridge warmer 飯鍋與悶燒鍋

The iconic Tatung rice cooker have eased the Taiwanese families in their kitchen for decades: Scoop in rice and water, flip the cooker on and forget it. Water was brought to boil and then automatically simmered ready. Easy for busy household. Later various dishes was created for the same device, introducing stackable pots over the cooker enabling different dishes to be prepared at the same time. The Tatung cooker can be still found in most of the homes, travelling even overseas with the exchange students and workers. With tens of millions of units sold, TV-shopping played a major role in Tatung cookers success. In Finland in late 1990’s new device was introduced to families to ease their cooking. “Aromipesä” ( Finnish for “Flavour Nest”) ads were running on TV-shopping channel. The product was a simple polypropylene container that could fit most of the standard cooking pot sizes. It’s insulation properties were excellent and the promise was to both save energy and time by just bringing your food to boil and leave it in the container for maturing without extra energy needed, and keeping it warm several hours, enabling the busy family to prepare their morning porridges in the the evening before or keeping food warm for the kids returning from school while the parents were still at work.

Both of these devices serve the same purpose, help the cook to leave food for maturing automatically freeing them to do other chores and keep the food warm for hours. We play with these similar kitchen devices together, mixing the recipes: Trying something very Finnish in Tatung pot and something very Taiwanese in the “Aromipesä”. To fully understand how both devices function we try to break down the heating process, temperature curve, insulation and challenge ourselves to make both work off the grid, without electricity from the wall. Technical, cultural and gastronomic hacks mixed together. Stew needs time. We embrace these hours for social interaction, discussions, music and the stories of the two cultures and cook something up for future hack cultures.

References

Cooker

TV-Shop

Inks & printng inks

Sourbread

Finland

Misc