Every year, Ferran closes his restaurant El Bulli for 6 months and moves to Barcelona to research ideas for his next season. This video shows their painstaking, detailed,
inch by inch, drop by drop research during those quiet months, with no production and no audience but the maker-researchers themselves.
This shows patience, exactitude, intricate teamwork and rigorous documentation that we would do well to emulate in our own research atelier.
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Adria Ferran listening to suggestions by the French sommelier.
The difference between art research — as in TML or Synthesis — and art production as in a stage production for a “show” with an audience other than the makers.
26:49
Thats just the sort of input we want
Our problem is, there are a thousand combinations.
Now we know which direction.
At the moment, the taste doesn’t matter to us.
That comes later.
At the moment, what matters
is whether something is magical
and whether it opens up a new path.
And letter, in the restaurant, the dishes are created.
Constructed.
Yes.
Now it’s more research,
and there [at the El Bulli restaurant] it’s more: research with creativity.
27:25
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Senior chef advising junior chef on how to document work more meticulously so as to make the research available for others, later, to use in production. — Document your own code and your own practice with this rigour converts hacking
into research, generating information that is portable and sharable beyond the event of its first birth.
40:41
HERE THERES NOT EVEN A RECEIPT YET
Here there’s not even a receipt yet.
Let’s write the recipe here.
Thats the same dish.
Yes but let’s separate it,
So you can see the two ideas.
At El Bulli, we won’t find anything any more.
Then somebody else should write it.
Nobody else, just more text.
Let’s not scrimp on text.
For dummies, so to speak.
At least for me.
Yes, and I’m dumb too.
I’m dumb and I want things detailed.
Ferran: You should already start sorting the reports according to 1, 2, or 3 stars…
41:33
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