Fermenting Data Aarhus 8000-8220

If we think of the city to be like a vessel, a container of sorts, we could ask questions about it. Starting with obvious ones: how does it look like? What is it made of? Who made it and when? What does it contain?

If we went along with this game of asking questions about the city, we could attempt answering them by starting to imagine the city as a vessel. Perhaps it is a crucible, a shape of a melting pot. A ceramic or metal container traditionally used for smelting that is for obtaining metal from its ore. Often reminiscent of a cooking pot it comes in many different shapes and sizes determined by the process it is to be used for.

The melting pot is a metaphor describing the process of assimilation when diverse society becomes more homogeneous, losing its distinctiveness. What is at stake?

The term “melting pot” was used in United States as a poetic description and the vision for American society grown out of the mix of nationalities, ethnicities and cultures. The play Melting Pot written in 1908 by Israel Zangwill popularized this metaphor in a utopian vision of United States as an ideal republic and a new promised land.

Melting range, melting pot, melting point, melting ice, melting ice-cream. [1]

Arts and design researchers, Loren Britton and Isabel Paehr, investigate melting as a metaphor and as a physical and chemical process where different materials MELT.

Standing here among growing trees, bushes, vegetable gardens, apartment blocks. Seeing people, birds and insects, there is no trace of melting. Rather verbs like ‘growing’ and ‘cultivating’ come to mind. What has grown here? Who has been growing things here?

But let us consider yet another verb altogether and with it another metaphor: “fermenting”.

Cabbage, this humble plant, which often is used for fermentation, has been cultivated for thousands of years. Native to Europe, this species was named Brassica oleracea by Carl Linnaeus, the father of classification system of Animal and Plant kingdoms, in 18th century.

Cabbage is also known as part of cruciferous vegetables together with broccoli, cauliflower, brussel sprouts, kale, bok choi and many others. You can find all of these vegetables here in this bazaar. Can you see them? If not, go and find that part of the market where vegetables are sold. Look at the broccoli: its pale green colour of the stem and darker green of the flowers. Broccoli is like a miniature tree.

When cooked it becomes brighter and the green seems fluorescent. Unless it is too long in boiling water when it looses its vibrancy and much of its goodness.

Cabbage, like the rest of cruciferous vegetables contains essential vitamins and minerals including vitamins A, C and K, and minerals such as magnesium, potassium, calcium, iron, and selenium. It is full of fiber, which is so important to gut health, microbes feast on fiber. It is also full of antioxidants which protect your body from free radical damage and oxidative stress. Vitamins, minerals, brassicas, cruciferous vegetables are different categories which help to group things together. Such groupings result from classification systems, which are intended to arrange and organise similar or related entities.

In this market, look how sellers organised their vegetables.

For example, are all cruciferous vegetables grouped together? because of how the flowers in plants belonging to this family have cross-like appearance. Yet while all brassicas are cruciferous vegetables, not all cruciferous vegetables are brassicas, see a common radish which is not a brassica but it is a cruciferous vegetable.

We also know about a “a certain Chinese encyclopedia” invented by the writer Jorge Louis Borges, in which all the beasts of the world are divided into 14 categories:

Those that belong to the emperor

Embalmed ones

Those that are trained

Suckling pigs

Mermaids (or Sirens)

Fabulous ones

Stray dogs

Those that are included in this classification

Those that tremble as if they were mad

Innumerable ones

Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush

Et cetera

Those that have just broken the flower vase

Those that, at a distance, resemble flies

Borges plays with the idea of an objective taxonomy and introduces doubt into the conception of categories as firm values. And so this is a phantasmagoric taxonomy, proposing fantastic names for unspecified beasts, that might or might not have anything to do with reality. Yet, in its weirdness, the lists provokes pragmatic questions: who names what/who? Under what conditions and with what tools they are defined and named? For what and who these names are created?

Naming a child is a ritual in which a family takes part, but it used to be an event that involved much bigger communities in a village, a tribe.

And so, if you were to create a list of categories for your ferments, what would they be? Who would be part of this naming? What would be the protocol? How would they be known and presented?

So what if we imagine smart city differently. Not by abstracting a location and mapping it into a metaverse managed by a machine that can do counting and calculating. What if we allow for embodied experience of many different inhabitants and things to be part of this new vision?

Is smart city a network of sensors that feed statistics, or is it a city that cares, and where sensing and sensed bodies empathically relate to each other?

How such a place would look like? What would it contain? Who and what would there be a space for and under what conditions? In what ways would the terrain change and be altered? Who and what would be able to access certain locations and at what terms? What would be the values of this smart city and who would establish them?

If you are not inside the library building, step in and look for Andromeda and in there look for Fermenting Data RAM.

These fermenting jars are locations. Sites of life-sustaining chemical reactions that generate energy. You can observe how cabbages and salt become a host to microbes as the fermentation progresses.We can’t see these microscopic organisms with a naked eye, but we know they are there. In millions. Can you smell the change they provoke? Soon enough you will be able to taste it. Once eaten, they will continue their good work in my gut supporting my digestion, boosting bioavailability of nutrients, and my body’s healthy inflammatory response.

What could be the good work that can be done while living the good life supported by microbes?

Plant, minerals, microbes and I. We create patterns, in time, in bodies, in places. We inhabit each other while also being part of other configurations. At home, at work, in school, on the street, in a jar, in the garden, in the city, on social media platforms, in governments, what are the patterns of good life there? What is the good work that is done there? Who does it and under what conditions? And for whom?

Fermenting data: Aarhus 8000-8220 is a speculation about data in the city, and a collaboration with artists and other humans and nonhumans to process, preserve, intervene, and invent fermenting data practices as changes, movements and transformations that can be tasted, smelled, listened to, eaten. In the times when digital transformation and datafication of everything and everyone seems inevitable, let us demystify data and computational processes that work on data, by engaging with them before they are data. Before they are understood as a raw fact and when they are always in relation to something and someone. By going to the source of any data: bodies, things, relations, and interactions of all kinds, and by becoming part of fermentation/transformation.

Inspired by fermentation, a metabolic processing of matter, let’s re-imagine a city and its transformations while following a simple recipe for sourkraut.

Sauerkraut is a staple in any Eastern European kitchen. In the long winter months fermented cabbages stored in jars, on shelves in the basement, would keep the family going healthy and nurtured throughout the cold season, until the next spring. Wooden barrels full of sour kraut (kapusta kiszona) and pickled cucumbers are always present in the markets and groceries most of the year.

What follows are instructions what to do next to start your ferment. You can also find these instructions at fermentingdata.net

1) You can use any cabbage: white, green, or red. To prepare the cabbage remove outer leaves, leaving some big leaves to use as a follower. If dirty, rinse the cabbage in water. Half, and then quarter the cabbage removing the core.

2) Chop or shred the cabbage and place it all in a large bowl . Remember bigger pieces need longer time to ferment.

3) Add salt and massage into the leaves. Taste to see if it requires more salt and add it if necessary.

4) Leave the cabbage to soak in salt and release water. Or continue massaging to get the process going. You will see more and more water at the bottom of the bowl and the cabbage becoming softer. Squeeze a handful of cabbage after few minutes of massaging. If water drips freely you are almost ready. While massaging cabbages and waiting for them to release water observe the the city or its parts. You can go out onto your balcony, or get closer to the window to watch what is happening outside. What can you see? Which buildings, bodies, are visible? And what is not in the picture? Are these bodies of people, bodies of water or other bodies? How do they move through the city? Do they remain the same or can you observe some change as they move? Taste your salted cabbage as you watch the city. Record your observations in some way: by drawing, noting, writing, counting. You might want to use these as your labels.

5) Now You can start adding some herbs, such as dill, or roots such as ginger or turmeric, or other spices of your liking. Can you see, taste, smell any changes as you add those to your cabbage? Now, start moving the cabbage into a jar pressing it tightly inside and making sure that air bubbles are not captured and that there is enough brine to cover the shredded leaves. Don’t fill the jar all the way up and make sure to leave some space in a jar. Fermentation will make things bubble and rise. Make sure that all the cabbage is under the brine. You are creating an environment for good microbes who will grow if there is no oxygen in the jar. Otherwise, you might risk your ferment moulding which will not be good to eat.

6) Leave the jar out of direct sun in room temperature to ferment for at least a week. Observe what happens to your ferment on daily basis. You can start taste pleasant sourness around 4-5th day. You can speed or slow the process by putting your jar in a warmer or cooler place. When you think it is ready (it taste sour to your liking), put the jar in the fridge.

When chopping cabbages, leaving them to rest, or when eating ferments, terms like: data, jar, city, class, sensing, body, smart city, cabbage, they all become embodied, part of practice that is forming and that forms, organises how we understand what we touch, taste, see, make.

cabbages (pl), cabbage (sgl) – green, red, white, hard, open, flowering, dirty, when cut in half displaying patterns, grown in the garden, bought in the shop, given by a friend, cooked, put in a fermenting jar.

Genus: Brassica Species: oleracea Family: Brassicaceae

Fermentation defines a metabolic process where under specific conditions (in this case no oxygen) microbes create energy, alcohol and lactic acid from sugar and starch. Some say that in its most basic fermentation is a controlled decay. Lyn Margulis, a scientist and a researcher of microbial forms, defined fermentation as a microbial invention, an unprecedented feat that humanity has not matched. Together with photosynthesis, oxygen breathing and removal of nitrogen from the air, fermentation is a miniature chemical system that has been part of the making of this planet.

Inspired by fermentation, let’s consider a city, a country, a planet, a pot, a jar, a field, a garden, a forest, a kiln, a computer, database, datasets as locations for and containers of transformations. Trans-formation. Change, movement where one kind of matter turns into another, where bodies become another. Positive change that makes , builds, creates life and destroys it.

And now, let’s take the process of fermentation to tell stories from the city and its surroundings. To tell stories from the jars as fermenting happens. To tell stories of things and bodies with computers, with people, microbes, neural networks, data, databases, buildings, districts, bodies and bogs.

Fermenting data: Aarhus 8000-8220 is a speculation about data in the city, and a collaboration with artists and other humans and nonhumans to process, preserve, intervene, and invent fermenting data practices as changes, movements and transformations that can be tasted, smelled, listened to, eaten. In the times when digital transformation seems inevitable, let us demystify data and computational processes that work on data, by engaging with them before they are data. That is by going to the source of any data: bodies, things, relations, and interactions of all kinds, and by becoming part of fermentation/transformation.

Sphagnum, "peat moss" organism that is abundant with water. Sphagnum time is the duration, bodies take time and occupy space. Time is filled with matter. Space expands inwards Fluid, moving, just passing for ever….

Desire for a smart city is often told in a way that imagines a city as a computer, a continuously processing machine that is fed data. Streets, apartment buildings, districts, gardens, the way people move through the city, birth rates, deaths, all are registered, indexed and processed. Weather is sensed, bicycle journeys counted, domestic animals chipped and garbage segregated. For life in the smart city to be managed and organised requires that it becomes a data flow, where each interaction becomes a source for a number or coordinate. Counting feeds into statistics that becomes a formal narrative of the real.

But life goes on. It happens, and continues even if not captured in a database, or defined with a number. It is part of bodies and their memories that occupy the city in buildings, on the streets and in parks. In rivers contained within concrete banks and hiding electric scooters and bikes abandoned on a rowdy night. On the shores of the city beach where the sea brings jellyfish every summer. The experience of the stinging tentacles on the swimming body are part of this city life too.