This video documents the premiere of Alison Knowles’s Identical Lunch Symphony on 5 May 2012 at the Logan Center for the Arts at the University of Chicago. Knowles devised this realization on the basis of George Maciunas’s previously unrealized proposal to blend the components of The Identical Lunch to make a kind of fish soup. For this performance, she enlisted some friends and a group of students at the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Each participant brought a blender and pressed the buttons in response to Knowles’s conducting gestures. Each blender emitted a distinct whirr, depending on age, brand, model, etc. At the end of the symphony, Knowles and the participants served the mixture in paper cups to the audience members, only some of whom were willing to try it.
Courtesy of the Smart Museum of Art.
