Although there are many collaborators and friends of the Center, Cat and Zack have formed the heart of the team in most locations. The Center is currently at work on the “Spice Mix Super Computer” for AND’s Mobile Republic.

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On our adventures traversing the globe, we have not stayed anywhere for more than 4 months in the past 2 years. With such a nomadic existence, ‘where we make’ is always changing.

On a flight: a good place to think, read and sketch, and catch up with stuff offline.

We have developed a variety of strategies for concentration and focus. For example, Zack works best early in the morning at a coffee shop with headphones on listening to drone music, while Cat works best in the peace of the late night when it seems the world has gone to sleep there are no other distractions (except for the occasional snore from Zack).

Just in the last week, we have worked at Bold Street cafe in Liverpool, on a plane, a train, in an airbnb room in Manhattan, and right now at a house with a large kitchen garden in Connecticut, charging our computers along the way and catching wireless connections where we can. These strategies have worked to greater or lesser effect in all of our temporary accommodations over the last year:

CANADA (Vancouver)
INDIA (Bangalore, the Koorgi Region)
IRELAND (Dublin)
NETHERLANDS (Amsterdam, Leiden, Rotterdam)
NORWAY (Oslo, Stavanger, Bergen)
SINGAPORE
SWEDEN (Stockholm, Uppsala)
UK (Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, London, Milton Keynes)
USA (Portland, New York City, Connecticut)

Our amsterdam apartment and office, while working on Pray for beans Project. The closer the deadline, the bigger the mess!

Every place we visit is an opportunity to connect unexpected dots. Moving around so much means we can exchange ideas, artifacts and recipes between seemingly unconnected places and people. I am sure we wouldn’t be making a Spice Mix Super-Computer in the UK if we hadn’t spent time in Bangalore being drawn into spice-rich karnatakan cuisine. Our Smog Tasting project in Bangalore was prompted by a quote in Harold McGee’s “On Food & Cooking” which seems like a particularly American approach to food. And so on.

Smog Tasting took us to the rooftops of Bangalore for a week of in-situ cooking.

The AND festival’s Mobile Republic is a microcosm of our last year. So far we have visited Manchester, Liverpool and London to work on the project, and we will be taking the caravan on the road to 4 locations in northern England. Taking on a project like this in an unfamiliar place is always a challenge because the simple tasks, such as sourcing various materials, become research efforts in their own right. The upside is that we generally see the places we visit from an unusual perspective. There can’t be many visitors to Liverpool who have strolled along Edge Lane to visit the B&Q.

The sign with no sign on edge lane by b&q, Liverpool, source: google maps

We do not have a permanent home or studio. We have attempted to consolidate our travel kit to the absolute essentials, but it is hard to bring an entire kitchen with us!

Here is an example of our other work space in the Netherlands: the kitchen of a restaurant that we took over for one evening. (Photo Credit: Lucas Evers)

Following food stories around the globe has been amazing, but we are looking forward to finding a landing spot and opening up the Center for Genomic Gastronomy as a non-nomadic entity. Maybe 2013?

All images are courtesy and © The Center of Genomic Gastronomy

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Want to take a look at more suggested blogs by artists? Look here.

Ty Dale is a graphic artists based in Vancouver, Canada. His illustration pattern series is a bold statement in colour and shapes. See the rest of the series here.

There are only 2 days left – get yourself featured in our 50×50 promotion and in the running for cash prizes. Find out how here.

Although we love and support Toronto fashion, we include content from all over Canada and the rest of the world. WORN hasn’t missed the fact that there are scads of fashion magazines out there. But we feel something is missing: opinion and intelligent commentary that’s untainted by advertisers’ demands.

WORN discusses the cultures, subcultures, histories, and personal stories of fashion. We strive to embody a place between pop culture magazine and academic journal that opens new avenues in art and fashion theory by hovering where these two ideas intersect, connecting with fashion scholars and artists. We pay attention to how what is worn is made, interpreted, transformed, disseminated, and copied.

WORN isn’t just a publication – it has been so much more. The girls and boys who work at WORN – or “Wornettes” – are a real family. We support each other emotionally and do fun things together and every so often we do bicker, but only in the way you can do with family members. I guess that makes WORN our baby? I’m not entirely sure on the metaphor. Let’s just say that we are all proud, loving parents of WORN and that every issue contains a bit of proverbial DNA from each of us.

Here are a few photos from our most recent events and a photo of Issue 12 which was just published this month.

These houses were built by settlers coming from Europe at the beginning of the 20th Century. For the sum of $200 you could buy 200 acres of land. People crossed the Atlantic with families and all they owned, bought a wagon and headed out into this vast wilderness.

This is the Lunt residence – built in about 1910 – the Lunts emigrated from Liverpool

The Albertan climate is such that there is very little water, very cold winters and a growing season of approx 3 months. The european migrants came from a tradition where mostly too much water was the issue and the cahllenge was to keep lnd drained so that crops and houses did not rot.

The new farming communities were short lived with most people either returning to Europe or heading for the towns. But the climate means that the marks left in this landscape endure….machinery abandoned in a scottish filed will be rusted solid in a year yet we saw machines that had lain for nearly a century and you could still turn a gear cog.

Wooden houses endured distrted only by the wind and the weight of snow. Poking at a window frame I dislodged a wad of cloth which presumably had been used to prevent a rattle or stop a draugnt more a century ago.

Much of my work is concerned with actively engaging with with the processes of erosion and weathering in materials….I found the Prairie utterly compelling and repelling simultaneously…..It is fascinating to me, that part of our cultural identity and how we see ourselves should be wrapped in our perception of the way things age and weather down…………as our Canadian friend Heather said of her country ‘we don’t rot we shrivel’.

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Hidden Spaces – a month of blogs by members about their hidden space – whether they be real, imagined, unbuilt, cut-off from the public, demolished, spiritually significant or politically sublimated. Read more from the series.