Week1: Data portraits of a potato

The fresh potato we buy at the market will most probably have left very different traces in our digital data-architectures than the frozen sliced potato that is used for the famous ’Mitraillette’ in the closest snack bar. Also the sweet potato, the potato flour or the machines that are used to harvest the potato, and oh yes, the people who cultivate and distribute them, all of them are represented with labels and numbers in databases about export and import in the European Union, in Belgium, in the Region of Brussels and who knows, also in the town of Brussels? Big treaties are being negotiated based on these numbers, like f.e. the TTIP, The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between Europe and the US.

In collaboration with people from the neighborhood, but also with an expert like Karin Ulmer, who has been following the European and international food policies for more than ten years, as a lobbyist for an NGO that defends the interests of local farmers from third world countries in the EU. We will create playful but critical portraits of the potato in all its data connections and disconnections.

At the origin of the idea of the Portrait of a potato work session is a conversation with Karin Ulmer. She was explaining her frustration with the growth-by-trade paradigm. She tries to construct counter arguments to the dominant discourse that prevails in European law-making but each time it seemed that this discourse is mainly determined by data. Would it be possible to create different perspectives by de-correlating and re-correlating these data? By creating unexpected interventions and connections?

Presented with the impressive datasets like the European Commission Exporthelp or the Worldseed databases, we feel the need to take a certain distance, to find our scale. We are not experts and our knowledge about these subjects is limited. We needed the “right” object to start with. In the conversation about the flows of capital and the maneuvers of the agricultural industry, a very simple object appeared as an example: the potato. The humble potato seemed a very productive starting point for many reasons:

• This very unspectacular tuber won’t outshine its relationships.
• It has a strong local identity and travels a lot. And in interesting company.
• It is an object everyone encounters in daily life (at least in Belgium), it doesn’t belong only to the realm of statistics. We can go from the dataset to the local shop and back again.
• The correlations that one can develop starting from the potato are not obvious, it requires work and imagination.
• We appreciate the shape of its roots naturally inclined to create subterranean networks.
• It has its own geo-politics, Belgium has exported 247.195‬ € in potatoes to the Syrian Arab Republic.

How do we want to work? Some suggestions

• smuggle unusual parameters into the datasets linked to the potato (export/import, seeds, health, food), and look for less obviously related datasets.
• trace the legal status of the potato and see which new relations can emerge.
• talk and interview the people who produce and sell it. And question back our datasets from there.
• investigate its chemical composition and its “edible” properties. If we see it as an element to produce alcohol or as the French fry on the McDonald menu, we can attach to it very different relations. Seen as one or the other, we find it entangled in a very different web of connections.
• compose a corpus of texts that will serve as a base for textual analysis during the second week.
• create a neural network of potato images.
• assemble a cartography of the potato. Trace its journeys, the zones where it is produced, stored, consumed, thrown away.
• taste the potato in its different states. Organize a gastronomic session.
• let’s watch together the potato-scene in Jeanne Dielman of Chantal Ackerman
• stretch our capacity of bearing boredom
• ...