Transcending Sensory Realities: Frederik De Wilde’s Taste of You as Artistic Praxis and EU-Funded Innovation SMARTham
Frederik De Wilde’s Taste of You emerges as a multifaceted project, hovering in-between the realms of contemporary art and speculative innovation, rooted in the EU-funded STARTS.EU project SMARTham, in collaboration with Capanna Proscuitti, SirmiumERP, GLUON and IN4ART.
This project fits within De Wilde’s broader discourses on data-driven aesthetics and sensory apparatus investigations and speculations in contemporary art, aiming to measure and translate the sensory and emotional experiences of food consumption into interactive audiovisual outputs, with a particular focus on traditional products like Parma ham.
By employing electroencephalography (EEG) to capture brain activity during eating, and integrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for both practical applications (e.g., noise filtering) and speculative inquiries (e.g., AI-generated taste perceptions), Taste of You probes the boundaries of sensory experience in virtual and WEB3 environments.
Artistic Process and Output: Sensory Data as Aesthetic Material
De Wilde’s artistic process in Taste of You is fundamentally rooted in the translation of sensory data into aesthetic experience. By using EEG to measure brain activity during the act of eating Parma ham, the artist captures the raw, embodied information of gustatory sensation—an inherently intimate and subjective process. This data, however, is not merely a scientific artifact; it becomes the material substrate for De Wilde’s artistic intervention. The transformation of neural signals into a digital visualization layer reflects a post-natural ontology, where the boundaries between the organic (human sensory experience) and the synthetic (digital representation) blur. The resulting audiovisual outputs, which vary in response to differences in input data, are not static representations but dynamic, interactive experiences that invite viewers to engage with the sensory residue of another’s consumption.
Rendered through the lens of data and artificial intelligence, what De Wilde proposes is fundamentally informational, requiring a body to express itself. Here, the “body” is the digital visualization, a spatialized embodiment of the eater’s neural experience, which viewers can navigate in real-time or non-real-time formats. This process recalls the work of artists like Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who similarly employ biometric data to create immersive, participatory installations, yet De Wilde’s focus on gustatory sensation introduces a novel dimension, probing how taste—a sense notoriously difficult to digitize—can be abstracted and reimagined in virtual spaces. Critically, De Wilde’s artistic output challenges the viewer to reconsider the nature of sensory experience in an increasingly data-driven society. By externalizing the internal act of tasting, the work disrupts the primacy of individual subjectivity, suggesting a collective sensory archive accessible through digital means. However, this abstraction also raises questions about authenticity and loss: can a digital visualization truly capture the visceral, embodied nature of eating, or does it merely simulate a hollow facsimile? This tension underscores the speculative nature of De Wilde’s practice, which does not seek to replicate taste but to reimagine it as a data-driven aesthetic phenomenon, potentially accessible in the Metaverse or WEB3 environments.
EU-Funded Innovation: Practical and Speculative Technological Ambitions
In contrast, the EU-funded framework of the SMARTham project, from which Taste of You emerges as a spin-off, prioritizes innovation-driven objectives that extend beyond the aesthetic realm. Collaborating with Capanna Proscuitti (a traditional Parma ham producer), SirmiumERP (an enterprise resource planning entity), GLUON (an art oriented non-profit) and IN4ART (an innovation hub), the project seeks to measure food-related sensations and emotions with scientific precision, leveraging AI and machine learning for both practical and speculative ends. The practical applications are evident in the use of AI for noise filtering, ensuring the accuracy of EEG data by mitigating external interference—a crucial step for any data-driven application aiming for reliability and scalability.
More ambitiously, the project explores speculative questions: can AI create its own “taste” and emotional perception related to food consumption? This inquiry aligns with broader trends in AI research, where machine learning is increasingly applied to sensory prediction, as seen in tools like VirtualTaste, which can predict sweet, bitter, and sour sensations based on molecular structures (European Food Research and Technology, 2022). However, SMARTham pushes this further by integrating neural data, aiming to reproduce sensory experiences in interactive audiovisual formats that could be deployed in virtual environments. This objective reflects the EU’s STARTS initiative, which champions the synergy of science, technology, and the arts to foster innovation, particularly in addressing societal challenges like the digitization of sensory experience in a WEB3 and Metaverse context.
The speculative dimension of the project is particularly provocative, as it imagines a future where AI not only interprets human sensory data but generates novel taste perceptions. This aligns with recent developments in virtual reality, such as the e-Taste device, which replicates flavor profiles using chemical concoctions in a gel medium (Popular Science, 2025). Yet, SMARTham’s focus on emotional perception introduces a layer of complexity, as emotions are inherently subjective and context-dependent, challenging AI’s capacity to authentically simulate human experience. This speculative ambition, while technologically forward-thinking, risks overpromising on AI’s capabilities, given the current limitations in understanding the full spectrum of taste perception, particularly for complex sensations like umami or saltiness (European Food Research and Technology, 2022).
Differentiating Artistic and Innovative Trajectories
The distinction between De Wilde’s artistic process and the EU-funded project’s innovation-driven goals lies in their respective aims and methodologies. Artistically, De Wilde prioritizes the aesthetic and conceptual implications of sensory data, using it as a medium to explore post-human and post-natural themes. The output is not intended to be a functional tool but a provocative experience that questions the nature of taste, embodiment, and digital mediation. In contrast, the SMARTham project is oriented toward practical and speculative innovation, aiming to develop methodologies that could have industrial or societal applications, such as enhancing virtual food experiences in the Metaverse or informing food production through data-driven insights into consumer emotions.
This divergence highlights a broader tension in art-science collaborations: while De Wilde’s work thrives on ambiguity and critical inquiry, the EU-funded project seeks measurable outcomes and technological advancement. The artist’s focus on aesthetic variety and speculative futures contrasts with the project’s emphasis on precision and scalability, revealing the differing priorities of artistic expression versus innovation. However, this tension is also productive, as it allows Taste of You to operate as a liminal space, bridging the visceral and the virtual, the subjective and the collective, the artistic and the technological.
Conclusion: Toward a Sensory Speculative Future
Frederik De Wilde’s Taste of You exemplifies the potential of art to engage with emerging technologies while retaining a critical edge. By distinguishing the artistic process—aesthetic translation of sensory data into speculative visualizations—from the EU-funded project’s innovation-driven goals—practical and speculative applications of AI in sensory reproduction—this analysis underscores the dual nature of the work as both a creative and technological endeavor. In doing so, it invites us to reconsider the role of taste in a data-driven, post-natural world, where the boundaries between the real and the virtual, the human and the machine, are increasingly porous. As we navigate the speculative futures of the Metaverse and WEB3, De Wilde’s work serves as a poignant reminder of the sensory richness we risk losing—and the new forms of experience we might yet imagine.
