Eli Miller

"To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author... ...beneath the work: when the Author has been found, the text is 'explained' - victory to the critic." -Barthes Image Music Text pg. 147 I have been pondering the role of authorship in terms of my project expecially due to the collaborative and regionally/historically influenced nature of cooking. Who owns a recipie? and further who gets to decide what becomes the final iteration on it when countless versions with small tweaks exist. In the information era you can't even invent a new half decent recipie with out it being already created by some food influencer 3 years ago. I find in trying to make fun unexpected uses for fruit as the theme of my course meal, there may be something close to original, but what is...

I was lucky enough to attend a wonderful artist talk in the Lawrence University Wriston Gallery this past week conducted by the esteemed Jiayi Young: A multi-disciplinary new-media artist, associate professor of design at the University of California, Davis, and to top it all off... a Lawrence University Graduate herself. She walked around the gallery which she reported was displaying her work at about a fifth of its usual scale which should be taken into account. The first piece she introduced titled "What does the Bot say to the Human" quantifies the frequency of non human interaction on websites like twitter and visualizes it as fluorescent green liquid dripping through mechanically stoppered tubes into a system of small lights. The movement of the lights begins almost natural but slowly becomes corrupted and speratic. I believe the word she chose was "Irritated" which felt super congruent to what I was watching. Personally I found myself fascinated at the w...

When considering the different configurations for the plating of a dish or when imagining the aesthetics of seven or more different ingredients as a finished product, sketches and the imagination can really only go so far. For my project I am experiemnting with AI image generation software because it sits in a strange pocket of the uncanny valley especially in terms of food. The ability to generate a seemingly photo-realistic imagination of the description of your course is helpful in one way, but ChatGPT or ClaudAI will never be able to taste or see an ingredient at all, which bleeds through into the image generation heavily. Lets take a close look at this example AI image which I fed the doccument I have been brainstorming my 5 course meal ideas into. Certain things will catch your eye immediately: To start, the labels look absolutely insane and list odd mixed letters for the top two courses, labeling them both as the first-bite. As we know, text is still and will likely fo...

I found myself helplessly caught by the theater of fine dining and more specifically Micheline starred course meals that showcase creativity in the flavors, textures, and overall showmanship of the dining experience. I have always wanted to design a meal like one of these and prove that anyone can make fine dining accessible if they get creative enough. I will find a playful theme that ties all the courses together and brings in the reading for our New Media in Art Class: Image-Music-Text by Roland Barthes to inform intentional decisions about the guests' expectations of the food and how to subvert them. I will doccument the process with a journal and through photography. I also intend to make a professional menu on good paper and really go all the way with it. With my sketchbook/journal in particular, I plan to draw out ideas for plating, and brain dump flavor combinations and cross out what I think will or wont work. Many professional chefs use a big white board but that is f...