Autistic chocolate

June 29, 2006

Chocolate hat © Ann de Gersem, photo C. Baele

A pink chocolate teapot hat? Pistachio green chocolate teacups with fur and pink foil? Dark chocolate whiskey snifter crystal ashtray bling? Ann de Gersem, a Design Academy Eindhoven MFA student graduates today with a collection of chocolate objects she designed in collaboration with the autistic employees of a Belgian chocolate factory. De Gersem, who isn’t autistic, wondered if the way autistics think could serve as a departure from conventional design methodology. Could autistic thinking lead to a new form of authenticity in design?

Chocolate hat © Ann de Gersem, photo C. Baele

De Gersem’s project, primarily the bit about designing within a culture that is not accepted as normative culture, the culture of autism, has broad implications. De Gersem’s Au(then)tism collection offers a visual language created in collaboration outside the culture of the neurologically typical. Writer, curator and activist, Ine Gevers wrote about this in 1999 in her essay, (En)countering the Culture of the Norm, for a one day seminar of the self-same title initiated by artist collective de Geuzen. Autists, according to Gevers, can be defined as those who are differently brained and whose language and/or (social) behavior deviates from the norm. By working with autistic people, de Gersem touches on the heart of what it means to design for ‘normative culture’ and therefore strikes at the heart of what is generally practiced as design.

Speaking of ‘normal’, normally designers graduate from design schools and get to work designing landfill as quick as you can say, ‘industrial designers should be more proactive in altering their practice of designing the Himalayas of waste’. But this is what I love about de Gersem’s approach. It’s not so much that her chocolate objects are ephemeral (discouraging the production, acquisition and accumulation of thingie-thingies), but that the method of their concepting and manufacture is designed to occur within the context of heterogeneity. In striving for authenticity, de Gersem embraces pure difference as a design technique. Design for differentnesss.

Frieda pours warm milk from a chocolate teapot © Ann de Gersem, photo C. Baele

Ine Gevers continues,

• Accepting the culture of autism might reveal the necessity of learning about their shared insights and way of interpreting the world, and facilitate respecting differences. Further, thinking the autistic ‘Other’ beyond medicalisation, placing the autistic community into different constellations with other (sub)cultures, helps understanding the heterogeneity of people sharing certain patterns of human behavior instead of stereotyping only.

Dark and milk chocolate whiskey snifter ashtray bling © Ann de Gersem, photo C. Baele

So can we think of autsism as a culture? That’s a fiddly question! Read the front page of any newspaper anwhere at any time to smell the fetid disagreement about what a culture is or what should be its defining characteristics. The smartypants-hive-brain that is Wikipedia thinks thusly:

• … most cultural anthropologists as of 2006 define a culture as follows: (1) Culture is based on symbols, abstract ways of referring to and understanding ideas, objects, feelings, or behaviors -— and the ability to communicate with symbols using language. (2) Culture is shared. People in the same society share common behaviors and ways of thinking through culture. (3) Culture is learned. While people biologically inherit many physical traits and behavioral instincts, culture is socially inherited. A person must learn culture from other people in a society. (4) Culture is adaptive. People use culture to flexibly and quickly adjust to changes in the world around them. (Source: Encarta article on culture.)

  According to these definitions, autistics are perhaps in the beginning stages of forming a real culture. Many features of what are commonly called cultures are visible in the autistic culture. There are shared beliefs, organisations, language, and art that are specific to the group, and there is a tendency to marry within the group. Autistic culture can be learned… Amy Nelson (Aspies for Freedom) wrote a proposal on November 16, 2004 that the Autistic community are a social minority group and therefore should be considered as such by the United Nations.

Nelly and Wies in the salon © Ann de Gersem, photo C. Baele

If you still think de Gersem’s work is about autistic people, why don’t you substitute the word ‘autistic’ in this entry for Kurdish or Palestinian or Kirghizian or Afro-American or Afro-Carribic or Islamic or Syrian Christian or Sikh or Chicano or even Anorexic and you will immediately understand that designing with and for subcultures is a really hot issue. The autistics must be nodding Mona Lisa smiles at the notion of being the poster-child of this positively radical (design) notion. What page of the Talmud was it that says, ‘Culture is difference’?

• Writer, curator and acitivist Ine Gevers writes about the culture of autism (1999) in an essay titled, (En)countering the Culture of the Norm.
• Ann de Gersem’s Life Dress in We-Make-Money-Not-Art
• Design Academy’s Fun Lab, initially an institute for studying the future of ‘fun’, is a postgraduate course in experience design.
• Jim sinclair: Autism is not an impenetrable wall
  You try to relate to your autistic child, and the child doesn’t respond. He doesn’t see you; you can’t reach her; there’s no getting through. That’s the hardest thing to deal with, isn’t it? The only thing is, it isn’t true.
  Look at it again: You try to relate as parent to child, using your own understanding of normal children, your own feelings about parenthood, your own experiences and intuitions about relationships. And the child doesn’t respond in any way you can recognize as being part of that system.

  That does not mean the child is incapable of relating at all. It only means you’re assuming a shared system, a shared understanding of signals and meanings, that the child in fact does not share. It’s as if you tried to have an intimate conversation with someone who has no comprehension of your language. Of course the person won’t understand what you’re talking about, won’t respond in the way you expect, and may well find the whole interaction confusing and unpleasant.

• From Wikipedia: The autism rights movement (which has also been called autistic self-advocacy movement [1] and autistic liberation movement [2]) was started by adult autistic individuals in order to advocate and demand tolerance for what they refer to as neurodiversity. The movement is supported by some neurotypicals including parents of autistic children. The movement is controversial and has been criticized by some parents of autistic children who disagree with its anti-cure and pro-neurodiversity views.
• Neurodiversity Weblog
• Online test at Neurodiversity dot com. (An Interactive Exercise in the Recognition of Emotions from Facial Expressions). Sadly, I didn’t do very well for a neurotypical person.
  Your score to date
  correct: 16 wrong: 13 hit rate: 55%
  
  
• And proving that autistics DO have a sense of humor, the Institute for the Neurologically Typical

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A recipe for Terrine Geologique

June 27, 2006

Although June is internationally recognised as the month of striation and I’ve been determined to pay hommage, I’m starting to feel like a 1980’s Romanian dictator, force-feeding nut-cheese recipes to her people. Maybe it’s because I’m feeling guilty about taking so long to write that entry about Ceaucescu, textured soy and the Romanian Otaku exhibition over at Mediamatic. Any day now. And after this one, I swear I mean I promise to stop with the nut cheese photographs. I’m just trying to be thorough.

Recipe after the jump. Vroom vroom!
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A nut cheese nut case

June 25, 2006

On the left, homemade pine nut paté with borage flowers. One the right, walnut paté with raw cocoa nibs. Normally this sort of food preparation is reserved for vegans, hippies and raw foodists. I am none of the above, a red-blooded porkatarian, I am. One of my readers disclosed that she thought that I was a man until a friend told her differently!

Anywho, this year I became an enthousiast of slightly fermented nuts, and I know, that’s just plain faggy. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! The nut flavours are delicate and would certainly go well with dairy cheeses. Note how I didn’t say, ‘real’ cheese?

(The leaves at plate’s edge are rose and mirin pickled shiso or perilla.)

To make these cheeses, follow the recipe for cashew cheese here, and substitute pine nuts or walnuts for cashews. Do not omit the sea salt, but do leave out the kimchi juice. Kimchi juice will make the cheese really cheesy – and these cheeses deserve to be a little sweeter than that. Instead, add a few glugs of maple syrup or a slab of honeycomb whilst blending.

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