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See you at 1
The Digital U presents the online performative project See you at 1 by Jennifer Katanyoutanant. For the project’s presentation, artist Katanyoutanant conducted a live mukbang session online February 23rd, Sunday, at 1pm GMT and invited all to join her at the dinner table to share a meal.
See you at 1 was the result of Katanyoutanant ongoing research into the online audiovisual culture of connection. In her own words, the artist described that her initial attraction to the phenomenon of mukbang revolved around food consumption and waste, while simultaneous how it mirrored a culinary ‘last golden age of seafood’ (Katanyoutanant, 2020) that restaurants and food goers are experiencing. However, through Katanyoutanant’s continual research, she’s pushed passed the detritus that forms around viral content to a simpler beginning for mukbang, one that is linked to piercing the lonely vail of a digital screen infested world and a response to mental health concerns.
Mukbang, similar to concepts from the region such as a hikikomori, or teen keitai culture and the telecocoon; all derive from a society in the embrace of digital technology, yet with a growing sense of isolationism due to the same screen-based devices. In this case mukbang, in the simplest terms, is about regaining a communal feel and a sense of togetherness through eating a meal with another – all of which is mediated through a screen.
As part of Jennifer Katanyoutanant’s project, she and artist Charles Paul developed a chatroulette styled platform which she’s designated as a ‘roulette dinner table’, where audiences and users are encouraged to connect with other random individuals during mealtimes and experience their own mukbang session.
Jennifer Katanyoutanan’s See you at 1 was the fourth exhibition within the Digital U’s Extreme Views Pt.2 online exhibition series, exploring environmental collisions.
The fact that screens have become such a huge part of our physical reality means that we never really have to stop consuming content. There is an expectation to always be consuming, and now with algorithmically generated content, there will always be a source. One single medium, YouTube, has the power to both push trends and decide what gets pulled into the average user’s main view. Excessive consumption and the endless, viral content compound each other. I like to think of it as mukbang culture jamming. It counters the endless viral consumption by creating a platform where people can end the cycle and start connecting with one another, directly, over the same shared interest in food.
– Jennifer Katanyoutanant
The Dinner Table
Artists Katanyoutanant conducted a live mukbang session online on Sunday 23 February, 2020 at 1pm GMT and invites all to join her at the dinner table to share a meal.
Jennifer Katanyoutanant Bio
(Jen)nifer Katanyoutanant is an interdisciplinary artist working in interactive mediums such as AR, VR, installation, and game design. She often engages with tangible manifestations of complex data structures through playful, sensory interactions, and highlights the tightly wound link between individual and global systems. Jen has been awarded fellowships and residencies from organizations such as Goethe Institute, Saari Foundation, Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM and Ortung Hintersee, and has spoken about her work at outlets such as Ars Electronica, the Center for Human Computer Interaction at the University of Salzburg, Chulalongkorn University, Thammasat University, and others.