Kitchen Computing

My wife and I spend a lot of time in the kitchen. So much so that this season, we’ve undertaken a quasi-gut transformation, even though we rent. We’re just getting to halfway through but it’s already given me a place to reflect on when I feel most like myself.

“Kitchen computing” is what I’m about now. That’s a feeling and a location. Being in the kitchen has reignited my desire to build systems, because it centers what Hwang and Rizwan call "intimate systems of personal meaning”. It’s helping me reorient my relationship with digital systems into something more inhabitable and bespoke, like a home cooked meal.

Building again though has meant a lot of learning. Getting things to work continues to frustrate me. I can’t vibe code completely, any more than I can execute a recipe without understanding its ingredients and techniques. When I’ve found a groove, it’s come from focusing on what I already am, over what I wish I already was.

I am already at ease in the kitchen. Kitchen computing looks to replicate that, inspired by how I approach cooking: experimenting, tasting, and developing a collection of subroutines, flavor combinations, and paused ideas to which I often return.

So if I can make the computer keep the time, I can supply the rhyme. It can provide structure so I can act spontaneously and "solo". Or it can help suggest adjacencies and novel connections in latent space that I can explore.

In this way, Kitchen Computing is also about exploring a multidimensional space of possibilities for growth. This echoes Michael Levin's framework, where intelligence is the ability to navigate the landscape of possible configurations towards adaptively valuable regions, progress happens through adjacent moves, and the journey responds to changing conditions and feedback.

Kitchen Computing feels like the basis for a little lab and life. I’ve also come to it for more than myself. “A Dance for Two” is the working code name for a joint life and business project I’m developing with my wife. Over the last year, we’ve increased how much of our life we share through Instagram stories. We now have a small but engaged community of people we share our food with, on the path to running a cottage food operation from this transforming kitchen. Our videos, most often from a fixed viewport above our kitchen counter, have become part of our life imagined as a tiny TV show. We want to share it with more people, organizing a few seasons of our lives around it to see if it could be what we become next.

[^1]: Illustrated by Jules Férat for Jules Verne’s L'île mystérieuse (1870)