“Stimulus Interactiva” – Immersive culinary art experience by Creative Chef Studio at Powerhouse Arts

Mon, Oct 7 - Mon, Oct 7  2024

Powerhouse Arts, 322 Third Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215

The immersive experience traces culture, heritage, fabrication, and ancestral storytelling across temporal and geographic lines.

On October 7, 2024, Powerhouse Arts (PHA) presents Stimulus Interactiva, an immersive experience by Dutch artist Jasper Udink ten Cate of Creative Chef Studio that will celebrate the diverse community of artists and supporters in attendance.

PHA’s mission is to embrace, celebrate, and produce art projects in support of creative expression. Through its one-of-a-kind, robust arts fabrication facilities and community of artists and fabricators, the organization seeks to bring to life ambitious arts initiatives that may otherwise not be possible.

The PHA Artists Celebration is an annual gathering of the myriad artistic collaborators in New York, inviting artists, arts professionals, and patrons of varying identities, nationalities, and cultures that distinguish this city as a critical arts ecosystem.

Each year, PHA will partner with an artist or collective of artists to commission an artistic experience that challenges the audience to ponder and set in motion ways to pave a more inclusive, accessible, and equitable future for the artists in our city. Proceeds from the Artists Celebration are critical to supporting PHA’s mission and programming.

For the premiere celebration, Udink ten Cate’s Stimulus Interactiva will spark connections through the cross-pollination of art, food, and collaboration while shining a light on PHA’s extraordinary world of fabrication capabilities. This program is supported as part of the Dutch Culture USA and FUTURE 400 programs by the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York.

Head of Culture Pauline Genee applauds the love that went into this unique Dutch-American collaboration that brings together history, culture and food: “It brings history into the present; joins the talents of Dutch and New York artists; and celebrates food that sustains the earth and all of us; And it showcases what art does best— connecting us.”

About Stimulus Interactiva by Jasper Udink ten Cate

Through an immersive, site-specific installation and guided gastronomic experience, Stimulus Interactiva offers participants a unique opportunity to reconsider New York City’s ancestral history through the lens of food. The bean is at the heart of the experience, functioning as a metaphor and a prompt to consider the complex indigenous history of New York and the diasporic histories of so many communities who today call the city home. Udink ten Cate collaborated with PHA to bring to life a sculptural installation of ceramic beans to complement the immersive dining experience; an exhibition made possible by PHA’s state-of-the-art fabrication facilities and unique equipment offerings, specifically such as the hydraulic RAM press.

Taken as a whole, the experience further underscores and acknowledges the ancestral heritage of New York City and its native Lenape inhabitants, prompting participants to consider the ways in which the stories of marginalized communities are critical to the cultural fabric of New York City, and an imperative component of its vibrant future.

Through my art, I try to connect my audience with nature. I strongly believe that connection with nature and the environment brings to light stories that need to be told. Stories that address serious topics, but also
hopeful and positive messages to educate and stimulate wonder and amazement.

The bean is a unique plant originating from the American continent. Unlike other plants, [beans] enhance the fertility of the environment in which they are planted. Beans therefore serve as a metaphor for the fertility artists and creatives can provide for their environment around them. Theirs are stories that travel the world and take shape and reflect identity. It is these very stories that define who we are as individuals and as a community – Jasper Udink ten Cate.

Co-creation: The production process

PHA’s robust fabrication facilities (including facilities for printmaking, ceramics, and public art) support the creation of ambitious art projects across various media, at scale. For Stimulus Interactiva, artist Jasper Udink ten Cate collaborated with the Ceramics fabrication shop at PHA to develop over 400 sculptural beans to support his artistic vision for the immersive initiative.

Elements of Udink ten Cate’s site-specific Stimulus Interactiva were made possible through the state-of-the-art equipment at PHA’s Ceramics Shop, including a hydraulic RAM press. The RAM press is a powerful tool that allows artists to produce a large quantity of unique, high-quality artworks efficiently. Capable of pressing 100-150 objects per day, the RAM Press is a mechanical hydraulic press suitable for creating a variety of projects such as plates, bowls, tiles and art objects that can be made in a two-part mold. The RAM process produces high quality, uniform pieces at a lower cost compared to other methods of production.

For an artist working on a large production run of unique artworks, the RAM hydraulic press reduces the manual labor involved in shaping each artwork by hand. This allows the artist to focus on more conceptual aspects of the project, such as experimenting with firing techniques or incorporating the sculptures into the immersive elements of the broader project.

The artist begins by designing and sculpting a prototype of the artwork, which is then used to create a custom plaster mold. Each mold can be highly detailed, allowing for intricate surface textures and forms. Once the mold is prepared, the hydraulic press ensures that each piece is formed with uniform pressure, resulting in consistent thickness and quality across all artworks. This is essential when creating a large production run where each piece needs to maintain consistent specifications. Once developed, Udink ten Cate worked with PHA’s Ceramics department to introduce variations in each production run, including the application of custom glazes.

The RAM press supports artists by blending the efficiency of industrial production with the creative flexibility needed to keep each artwork distinctive, helping artists to realize ambitious projects at scale.

Select Bean Varieties

Black Nightfall Dry Pole Beans are a rare 19th century heirloom with semi-pole habit. Black Nightfall beans are very tasty with a rich and nutty flavor. They are described as a very easy and trouble-free bean to grow. This is not a tall climbing variety but will benefit from a trellis opportunity if present.

Cherokee Trail of Tears. Palatable as both a green or a dry bean, this variety has a shiny, black skin. The variety is prolific and grows on vigorous vines. This heirloom was brought from Tennessee by the Cherokee people as they were marched to Oklahoma by the US federal government in 1839 over the infamous “Trail of Tears” that left so many dead and inflicted suffering on countless others.

Candy RC is a selection of the American Bean Collector Russel Crow. The large kidney-shaped seeds are super sweet in color. The stalks grow to approximately 1 meter high and are not considered climbers, they require support.

The Prairie Appaloosa is a beautiful, mottled heirloom from the Southwestern United States and Mexico. The variety is also called “Zuni Shalako”. The Zuni tribe grew this bean and used it in their winter ceremony where it was given to the Shalako Kachina.

About Jasper Udink ten Cate and Creative Chef Studio

Creative Chef Studio is globally recognized as the leading expert in multi- sensory storytelling and experience design. Based on the multi- disciplinary Art, Design, Music and Food concepts of founder and artist
Jasper Udink ten Cate, the studio specializes in creating emotionally compelling experiences that have the capacity to become a memory for a wide variety of audiences. These ‘experiential recipes’ are often served as a food experience, using ingredients like nature, physics, coding, music, philosophy, product design, biodiversity, fashion, graphics, painting and any kind of other discipline you can imagine. The main team consists of Founder and Artist Jasper Udink ten Cate and Business Director/Producer Jeroen Prins. For more information about Stimulus Interactiva and the artist, please visit the Creative Chef Studio website: https://creativechef.co/who-is-creative-chef/.

About Powerhouse Arts

Powerhouse Arts (PHA) is a not-for-profit organization committed to creative expression. Our purpose-built facility hosts an extended network of art and fabrication professionals and educators who work together to  co-create and share artistic practices vital to the wellbeing of artists and the communities to which they belong. PHA envisions a society in which creative expression is celebrated and supported as central to personal
and civic development.

About FUTURE 400

FUTURE 400, a 2024/2025 initiative of the Netherlands Consulate General in New York, endeavors to honor 400 years of Dutch-New York history with honesty and integrity, creating space for others who share this common heritage to voice their feelings and experiences at this monumental moment. Partners from cultural to commercial fields, from the New York area to the Netherlands will come together to create new work and new opportunities that will continue to write the next chapter of our shared story, our collective…FUTURE 400. More information: www.dutchcultureusa.com