PAUL VAN HERK

Tuda Syuda (meaning “back and forth”) is a speculative and AI-based platform that concurrently generates new food dishes and landscape-scale interiors across a ring of abandoned Soviet farmland surrounding Moscow. It takes advantage of Russian government incentives for local and high-tech agriculture that have been expanding rapidly since the EU sanctions in 2014.

Central to the platform are two co-operative AI systems called Chef & Farmer that run a relentless ‘negotiation’ of request and suggestion between each other. Chef requests the necessary ingredients from Farmer to generate experimental new dishes for human subscribers, while Farmer manages the complex elemental arrangement of its growing sites through extensive IoT and spatial sensing. Farmer also suggests new hybrid food products that are in line with what its synthetic landscape ‘wants’, and Chef suggests new hybrid growing spaces that it thinks will produce the culinary qualities it seeks. 

 

Both AIs misunderstand the other’s conceptions of food-ness and landscape-ness because of their different sensing inputs, causing highly compromised outputs that are optimised yet strange. As Farmer needs humans to build its synthetic landscapes and Chef needs humans to feed, human users order dishes (and thus landscapes) from the outer layers of an immersive rolling interface that renders the negotiation visible in real time. Via the ‘deep’ interface, the experimental tendencies of earth ecologies and taste-making are accelerated and drawn more tightly together.

 

Completed in 2018 at Strelka Institute, Moscow. Exhibited at Dutch Design Week, The Wrong Biennale and Elcin Centre Yekaterinburg and presented at many others. It features in the 2021 book “The New Normal” by Strelka Press.