Food for Thought or at Least Sitting

At the SLSA (Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts) conference, I took part in the annual Fluxakucha panels and talked about my Flux-Feast class. This was an art class where we basically ate weird food, or had weird food-related experiences, all semester, based on the Fluxus idea of Flux-Feasts. The Fluxakucha panels are based on the concept of a Pecha Kucha–each presenter shows 20 slides for 20 seconds each on a Fluxus subject, for a total of 6 minutes and 40 seconds.

While I talked about the class, the people in the audience and I engaged in a Flux-Feast ourselves.

I provided 21 selections of food–20 for the audience plus one for myself–and lined them up along the edge of the stage. Each food package included many small pieces of that food. I asked the audience to select which one I would eat and invited them to choose one for themselves. These foods included Cheetos-flavored popcorn, jalapenos, pickle slices, mushrooms, dark chocolate, Gushers, red hots, backberries, blueberries, sesame seeds, spray cheese, pepperoni, macademia nuts, pocky sticks, mashmallows, and more.

Then I described the prompt: to put one of their pieces of food in their mouth every time I advanced the slides, keeping each piece of food in their mouths the entire time until the presentation was complete. They would thus collect 20 pieces of their food in their mouths by the end of the talk.

I also participated, sticking one blackberry (the food selected by the audience) in my mouth each slide. It was increasingly challenging to speak as the presentation went on. The nature of the Fluxakucha meant that each slide was timed, and I couldn’t stay on a slide longer than 20 seconds even if I was having trouble speaking, drooling, or laughing because of the many blackberries in my mouth. I did manage to more or less say what I wanted to say, although the exact contents were somewhat altered (some might say mangled) due to the conditions.

The members of the audience reported various conditions from their own experience. 20 Gushers were, for instance, not too bad; 20 red hots built up a lot of saliva; 20 sour Smurfs were too big to fit in and ended up having to be eaten along the way.

Here is a photo of myself right at the end of the talk.