THE MOMENT YOU TASTE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL

EMILIE BALTZ

The most beautiful moments we experience with food go way beyond taste -- they involve all of our senses. Emilie Baltz creates masterpiece moments of synesthesia, tapping into her talents and expertise as a food technologist, multimedia artist, experience designer, and educator.

Baltz merges food, design, performance, and technology, often together with an interactive or experiential component. She is trained in storytelling, modern dance, screenwriting, and industrial design.

Baltz creates multi-sensory performances for both public museum exhibitions and private institutions.

“I am a technologist, artist & experience designer with a focus on food and sensory storytelling,” Baltz explains. “I create playful and unconventional work that moves people to discover new worlds one lick, suck, bite, sniff and gulp at a time.”

Based in New York City, Baltz mainly works out of the New Lab for emerging technologies.Cotton Candy Theremin is a spinning performance developed by Baltz in collaboration with Philip Sierzega. It remixes the interface of making cotton candy by transforming it into a multi-sensory orchestration of sight, sound, smell, touch and taste. Baltz also programmed several features of the device and produced segments of the track itself.

Cotton Candy Universe is Baltz’s 2nd iteration of “Cotton Candy Theremin.” It debuted at Panorama Music Festival 2016 as part of The Lab @ Panorama. As participants spin the cotton candy, they trigger sounds and visuals that create an immersive environment inside a 70 ft. planetarium dome.

As she continued to explore the interplay of senses, Baltz became Inspired by Kafka’s definition of theater as “melting the ice within, of awakening dormant cells, of making us more fully alive, more fully human, at once more individual and more connected to each other.”

The result, “Circuit of the Senses,” is a 5-course interactive dinner that encourages participants to touch, taste, smell, see and listen together as a community.

Designed for the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, this 120 person dinner party held in the main galleries of the institution engages museum patrons in reimagining the role that art plays in daily life by transforming a fundraising gala dinner into an edible playground.

Guests are assigned individual paths through the galleries and encounter interactive courses inspired by the five human senses: roasting marshmallows and hot dogs on singing grills, eating from bowls spinning on transparent ice tables, feeding from a live table and dining on clouds of rosemary vapor.

“‘The Circuit’ embodies my vision of creating experiences that stimulate playful, multi-sensory interaction that re-train adults in childlike discoveries of the world and reawaken curiosity in the everyday,” Baltz tells us.

“Circuit of the Senses” was developed collaboratively with local artists, chefs and mixologists: Amanda DeBoer Bartlett, Luke Edson, Dereck Higgins, Paul Kulik, Mark Powers, Tbd Dance Collective, Laura Clark and Jason Webb, and was produced by Alex Priest. See video.

Traces is an eating experience that uses the table as canvas, tracing the interactions of guests by engaging them in a hands-on dinner. Designed in collaboration with chefs Jose Ramirez-Ruiz and Pamela Yung, Traces was served directly onto a “stage”, created in the space by artist Courtney Smith, illuminated by Iván Navarro.

No utensils were used, only hands served up the tastes to an intimate setting of 20 guests hosted at Hotel Particulier Gallery.

Baltz is author of “L.O.V.E FOODBOOK“, recipient of Best First Cookbook in the World at the Prix Gourmand held annually in the Louvre, Paris.

She has presented her ideas at TEDx, DLD, PSFK Conference, Ignite Conference, Creative Mornings, GastroMagic, TODAY Show, NBC, Wall Street Journal, D-CRIT and more.

She one of the founding members of NEW INC, the first museum led incubator hosted at the New Museum and is also part of the founding faculty of the School of Visual Arts Products of Design MFA program, as well as the founder of the Food Design Studio at Pratt Institute.

She holds a B.A. in Film Studies from Vassar College and an Masters in Design from Pratt Institute.

Baltz has been commissioned by EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center), The Vitra Design Museum, New Media Scotland, Triennale of Portugal, Eyebeam, New Zealand Food Institute, Yale University, The Museum of Art and Design and The Museum of Sex.

Many of Baltz’s works are collaborative efforts, including with musician David Byrne, Chef Albert Adria, director David Lynch, Droog Design, and Limoges Porcelain.

LVMH, Microsoft, AOL, Ebay, F&W Media, Bombay Sapphire, Ketel One, Dupont, Panasonic, and PUMA, are just a few of Baltz’s commercial clients.

Read more about Beautiful Moments in Catching the Most Beautiful Moments Now and Most Beautiful Moments for Frogs.

And check out more beautiful things happening now in BN Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact Daily Fix posts.

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IMAGE CREDITS:

1. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz. “L.O.V.E FOODBOOK.” Courtesy of Schoenhofs Foreign Books.
2. Image: by Emilie Baltz. “Mata Hari” Cocktail. Courtesy of Employees Only.
3. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz. “Ice Ice Baby.” Interactive Experiment.
4. Image: by Emilie Baltz. “The Rosebud.” Courtesy of The Museum of Sex.
5. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz & Philip Sierzega. “Cotton Candy Theremin.”
6. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz & Philip Sierzega. “Cotton Candy Theremin.”
7. Image: by Emilie Baltz. “Provençal” Apéritif. Courtesy of Employees Only.
8. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz. “Circuit of the Senses.” Courtesy of Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
9. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz. “Circuit of the Senses.” Courtesy of Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
10. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz. “Circuit of the Senses.” Courtesy of Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
11. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz. “Circuit of the Senses.” Courtesy of Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
12. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz. “Circuit of the Senses.” Courtesy of Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts.
13. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz, Jose Ramirez-Ruiz, & Pamela Yung. “Traces.”
14. Image: by Emilie Baltz. “L.O.V.E FOODBOOK.” Courtesy of Schoenhofs Foreign Books.
15. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz. “PopStars.” Courtesy of Gastromagic at Outside Lands, SF.
16. Image: by Emilie Baltz. “L.O.V.E FOODBOOK.” Courtesy of Schoenhofs Foreign Books.
17. Image: by Emilie Baltz. “L.O.V.E FOODBOOK.” Courtesy of Schoenhofs Foreign Books.
18. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz. “DIS.COURSE.” Courtesy of EMPAC (Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center).
19. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz & Philip Sierzega. “Cotton Candy Universe.”
20. Image: by Emilie Baltz. “Bloody Yoishi.” From “L.O.V.E FOODBOOK.” Courtesy of Schoenhofs Foreign Books.
21. Image: by Emilie Baltz. Untitled.
22. Image: by BN App - Download now!
23. Image: Designed by Emilie Baltz & Philip Sierzega. “Cotton Candy Universe.”