Tuda Syuda (meaning “back and forth”) is an AI-based platform that concurrently generates new food dishes and landscape-scale interiors across a ring of abandoned Soviet farmland surrounding Moscow. It takes advantage of Russian government incentives for local and high-tech agriculture that have been expanding rapidly since 2014.
Central to the platform are two co-operative AI systems called Chef & Farmer that run a relentless 'negotiation' of request and suggestion. Chef requests the necessary ingredients from Farmer to generate experimental new dishes for human subscribers, while Farmer manages the complex elemental arrangement of its growing sites through extensive IoT and spatial sensing. Farmer also suggests new hybrid food products that are in line with what its synthetic landscape 'wants', and Chef suggests new hybrid growing spaces that it thinks will produce the culinary qualities it seeks. Both AIs misunderstand the other's conceptions of food-ness and landscape-ness because of their different sensing inputs, driving correlational outputs that are both optimised yet strange.
Human users order dishes (and thus landscapes) from the outer layers of an immersive interface that renders the negotiation visible. Back and forth, the experimental tendencies of earth ecologies and taste-making are drawn more tightly together.
Recent project presentations and exhibitions of Tuda Syuda include: ‘NSU Circle 2: Cybiosis’, NIDA Art Colony, Lithuania (2019); ‘Frankenstein Exhibition’, at Baltan Laboratories for Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven, The Netherlands (2018); ‘Three projects about future’, Elcin Center, Ekaterinburg, Russia (2018); ‘The New Normal Project Presentation’, Strelka Institute, Moscow Russia (2018); and ‘Future of Food’, Danilovsky Food Market, Moscow, Russia (2018).
Publications of research and content from Tuda Syuda include #02, Kapitál, Slovakia (2019); Fictional Journal, Germany (2018) and Strelka Magazine, Russia (2018).
The featured project was developed as part of the New Normal education programme at Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design.
Project by Thomas Grogan, Paul van Herk, Ivan Puzyrev & Liudmila Savelieva