Earlier this year, artist and programmer Jesse Hemminger organized a series of five potluck dinners at his apartment. He asked friends to bring something to eat or drink, and to bring a canning jar or empty glass spaghetti sauce jar. He also asked them to write and bring a piece of paper something that they were holding onto and knew they needed to let go of.
At the potluck, everyone filled their jar with shredded cabbage and salt. Hemminger let everyone know that the cabbage would ferment and transform into homemade sauerkraut. He collected all of the sheets of paper and later shredded, pulped, and transformed them into a fresh new sheet of paper which Hemminger planned to make into a piece of art.
Sauerkraut is acidic, and can become a battery similar to lemon or potato batteries that are often created as a science experiment in the classroom. The chemical reaction of the copper and zinc electrodes put into the acidic food creates an electrical charge. From his potluck event, Hemminger decided to make robots powered by sauerkraut. He also decided to have them draw on the paper that he made out of his friends papers written with the things they wanted to let go.
He has shown the sauerkraut robot drawing machines at a couple of gallery shows this year, and also this past weekend at the Ingenuity Festival in Cleveland. I was doing a project behind him, and I watched as lots of visitors checkd out his sauerkraut batteries and his robots as they made marks and drawings on the paper.
The small robots look like insects and have small pieces of lead attached to them. They hop or skip around on paper while making graphite marks on the paper. One draws lines, another makes circles. The resulting drawings are abstract and the food batteries are a play on the “power of food.”
Image Source:
The Sauerkraut Project Blog
Links:
Video – The Sauerkraut Project