Making White Sauce

2 minute interactive animated video © 1993

The basis for this animation was made with just the 4 images above found in my old high-school textbook The Teen Guide to Homemaking. I'd always had trouble making the translation from a recipe, with it's cryptic text and diagrams, to the fabulous dishes shown. Now, I was being told that no woman was worth her salt unless she could make white sauce. Even back then, I wondered why one would cover up perfectly good food with this gooey, fattening sauce, but when I looked at the images years later it reminded me how white bread my education had been. More importantly I realized how something as seeimingly innocuous as a cooking class was, in fact, complicit in spreading the message that assimilation was of the utmost importance and that racial and ethnic difference was shameful.
"The basis for all creamed dishes [assimilation into dominant culture] is white sauce. White sauce is simple to make provided a few simple rules are followed [girl, you'd better tow the line]." The Teen Guide to Homemaking.

In response, I decided to make this animation where the figure moves very stiffly and where, in the end, the white sauce is poured over three ethnic dishes: tacos, perogies, and sushi (the only colourful things in the whole animation). In the interactive installation the viewer was asked to make the same gestures as the cook. Light sensors detected the viewer's motion and fed information back to the computer. Only when the gesture was similar would the Quick Time movie proceed. The viewer's interaction served as a metaphor for complicity in perpetuating Western European cultural dominace.
Click the image left to see a short segment of this animation. (700k)