Big Apple Recipes
Snoweria Zhang
View Project
Living in New York City can be as exhilarating as it is annoying. Inspired by Fluxus happenings and cook books, Big Apple Recipes devises three “recipes” using common household objects to recreate the data landscape of NYC living. Through “music,” “tea,” and “prints,” this project explores the collective lives of New York City through sound, taste, and touch.
Since the pandemic prevents a conventional gallery format, Big Apple Recipes situates abstract datasets in objects available in most households to grant visitors an intuitive way to understand the data at hand. Each section contains a snippet of the data, a detailed recipe for making the data experiential, and an example video of someone using the recipe. The artist invites improvisation and participation from home with #bigapplerecipes.
This project is inspired by Snoweria’s visit to the National Gallery East Wing in Washington D.C. I.M. Pei’s impressively thin wall has drawn many visitors’ touch, and a small section of the Tennessee marble adopted a sheen as a result. The cumulative handprints roughly resembled the shape of a normal curve flipped on its side. Knowing that human height is normally distributed, the artist reasoned that the shape of the sheen is caused by everyone touching the wall at a level intuitive for their height. This seemed like a simple connection, but Snoweria loved the physicalization and grounding of what is otherwise abstract data. This is what Big Apple Recipes aims to do.
DATASETS
311 Noise Complaints
Air Quality