vicarious life

Vicarious Life is an online platform for and about eating. Designed to be accessed during a lunch break, to be had in peace, quiet and digital company, Vicarious Life offers a respite. The content is curated to offer a broad diversity, from eating poetry to video clips and eating images, yet also including more serious text excerpts about issues such as nutrition and food science. Vicarious Life collects and reframes, juxtaposes and displays all manner of fun, quirky, serious and serene information about people, food and mainly eating.

The basis of each issue is built during a real life dinner. A selection of people are invited to join the publishers for one evening on content discussion. All researched material, be it photographs, film stills, illustrations, articles or other texts, are printed and laid out to cover a dining table. As food and drink are shared throughout the evening,
the guests’ conversations build up around the presented research. Notations and crumbs allowed, the pages will gain a second layer of thought and digestion through the process.

After the dinner the processed pages are collected and gathered. From these the publication issue will grow – further editorial meetings will most likely add a stain or two, as the final layout is built up. By the end of the issue building process, the pages will be bound by a map of the final layout and will be kept as a one-off archive publication. Each online issue is built up similarly to the table setting, with layered images, spoken dialogue, illustrations of main quotes and a the dinner time all visible as visitors click their way vicariously through the dinner.

Concept: Orlando Lovell
Coding: Tatjana Petschl
Illustrations: Alice Peach