The Walker Presents Virtual Mini-Lecture on the Future(s) of Food

The Walker Art Center presents Futures Focus and Design Labs, virtual mini-lectures and workshop events in conjunction with the upcoming exhibition Designs for Different Futures.

The Design Labs workshops and Futures Focus lectures will address a range of different topics from the exhibition Designs for Different Futures led by academics and designers in the field. All talks and workshops will be held at 7pm, will last 90 minutes, and will be hosted on Zoom. Registration can be found on the event pages. More details to come at walkerart.org

Futures Focus: Foods
September 17, 7 pm
Walkerart.org, Zoom registration required

Servers fighting for equal wages. Grocery store workers deemed essential during a pandemic. Restaurants transforming overnight to crisis response centers. Distillers serving up hand sanitizer instead of cocktails. Food is central to the heart of the Twin Cities and proving key in response to the current moment. As part of the Designs for Different Futures exhibition, this program will unpeel the possible future(s) of the food world as we know it. Hear from members of the local food community on realigning in these times and their views of food futures in the Twin Cities.

For this program, the presenters will each respond in the form of a PechaKucha to LinYee Yuan’s Food Manifesto, featured in the Designs for Different Futures catalog and exhibition.

Presenters include Marcus Kar (Youth Farm), Jonathan Janssen (Liger Hospitality, City Pages Best Bartender of the Year 2019), Gretchen Skedsvold (Henry and Son), Vicki Tran (baker and former server, Bar La Grassa), and Yia Vang (Union Hmong Kitchen).

Click here to register for this Zoom webinar.

“Food fuels our futures, whether what we ingest is the simplest and plainest soil-grown fare or is synthetically manufactured in a lab, and whether we cultivate and cook it with our own hands or outsource that task to others. And our eating habits affect more than just our bodies. Our food cultures have emotional resonance, and they shape the environments inhabited by many forms of life”—Michelle Millar Fisher, excerpt from the Designs for Different Futures catalogue, 2019.

UPCOMING RELATED EVENTS

Tree Futures (Design Lab)
October 1, 7pm

Racial Bias in Technology (Futures Focus mini lecture)
October 8, 7pm

Motherhood Futures (Futures Focus mini lecture)
October 15, 7pm

Family Futures (Design Lab)
October 22, 7pm

ABOUT DESIGNS FOR DIFFERENT FUTURES

The role of designers in shaping how we think about possible futures is the subject of Designs for Different Futures, a major exhibition organized by the Walker Art Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The presentation brings together some 80 dynamic works that address the challenges and opportunities that humans may encounter in the years, decades, and centuries ahead.

Thinking about our futures has always been part of the human condition. It has also been a perennial field of inquiry for designers and architects whose speculations on this subject—ranging from the concrete to the whimsical—can profoundly affect how we imagine what is to come. Among the questions today’s designers seek to answer are: What role can technology play in augmenting or replacing a broad range of human activities? Can intimacy be maintained at a distance? How can we negotiate privacy in a world in which the sharing and use of personal information has blurred traditional boundaries? How might we use design to help heal or transform ourselves, bodily and psychologically? How will we feed an ever-growing population?

While no one can precisely predict these futures, the works in the exhibition provide design solutions for a number of speculative scenarios. In some instances, these proposals are borne from a sense of anxiety, and in others of a sense of excitement over the possibilities that innovative materials, new technologies, and fresh ideas can afford.

The exhibition is divided into 11 thematic sections—Labors, Cities, Intimacies, Bodies, Powers, Earths, Foods, Materials, Generations, Informations, and Resources—and features an international array of designers from all fields. Among the many forward-looking projects on view, visitors will encounter lab-grown food, textiles made of seaweed, a typeface that thwarts algorithmic surveillance, a series of books that will only be available 100 years from now, an affordable gene-editing toolbox, a shoe grown from sweat, a couture dress made with a 3D printer, and a system that learns from our sewers.

Each of these projects—from small product innovations to large-scale system proposals—asks us to imagine futures different than what we expect, and in doing so, helps us craft a fascinating portrait of our diverse and turbulent present.

The exhibition will be on view from September 12, 2020 through April 11, 2021.