Speculative Futures | The Question of Taste

What food evokes home? Nostalgia? Love or abhorrence? In conversation with Melissa Karmen Lee, Director of Education and Public Programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery, The New Yorker Magazine staff writer Jiayang Fan will discuss emotion and repugnance in viral food trends, TikTok recipes and the presentation of cuisine associated with the aesthetics of social identities.

Fan and Lee will consider such wide-ranging subjects as millennial Asian tastes, devoted foodstuff museums (such as the Disgusting Food Museum in Malmö, Sweden, and the Museum of Ice Cream in San Francisco, United States), and how nourishment, depending on context and experience, can evoke both alienating and comforting emotions.

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Presented in conjunction with the exhibition The Imitation Game: Visual Culture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, the Speculative Futures Symposium examines artificial intelligence and the specific uses of technology in its multifarious dimensions. Across four different panel conversations, leading thinkers of today will explore the ethical implications of technology and discuss how they are working to address these issues in cultural production. Find out more »

The Speculative Futures Symposium is presented in partnership with the University of British Columbia’s Public Humanities Hub, the UBC Library and the UBC School of Information, the English Language & Literatures Department, the President’s Excellence Chair in Network Cultures and the School of Creative Writing, with additional media support from Canadian Literature.

This talk will be presented on Zoom and streamed live to the Gallery’s Facebook account here »

Questions? Submit them during the Zoom presentation using the Q&A function. You can also engage with your fellow attendees and panelists during the event using the Chat function.

New to Zoom? Learn how to register and attend a webinar here »

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Jiayang Fan is a staff writer at The New Yorker Magazine. She is currently at work on her first book, Motherland, forthcoming from FSG in 2023.

Melissa Karmen Lee is the Director of Education and Public Programs at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She has written several articles on the intersection between diaspora, art and literature for the Journal of Multicultural Discourses, Hospitality and Society, ASAP Journal, Canadian Literature and Yishu Journal. In 2011, she was a research fellow at the David Lam Centre at Simon Fraser University.