This is Meal Machine, a hi-tech greenhouse that is designed to automate care, optimize plant growth and minimize waste by parasiting off of the economy of the apartment. In its discursive capacity, Meal Machine stages critical discussions on food and its production through enfolding and materializing its relations with such issues, breaking down old Western dualisms such as culture/nature. In its material capacity, the machine itself becomes a physical living entity for residents to contend with, helping to free the homestead from the misplaced nostalgia of many radical homemaker projects or avoid the deterministic and enclosing rhetoric of the ‘sustainability’ canon. In this way, the greenhouse is both an enabling and constraining ‘machine’, producing projective menus and coordinating new social rituals around its harvest cycles.
At the end of each harvest a ritual meal will take place for full consumption of the yield designed by a projective menu. This will also function as an event to invite in new seeds for its following cycle along with any proposals, adjustments and critiques for future menus and planting cycles.

Maiko Tanaka

Meal Machine is a project developed by Arend Groosman and me, Doris Denekamp in Casco’s Grand Domestic Revolution apartment in Utrecht. In India I would like to elaborate on the idea of a food producing cyborg. This first Meal Machine has an automatic watering system controlled by a time clock and additional lighting with red and blue led strips. I would like to research the possibilities of sensors to automate the growing process even further. I am looking forward to meet people who know more about these technologies to discuss the possibilities of the Meal Machine.

Inspiration:

http://www.wireplant.com/

http://www.instructables.com/id/Garduino-Gardening-Arduino/