Virtual Realty Exhibit Blends Art And Food At Miami Art Week 2022 – NBC 6 South Florida

A one-of-a-kind mixed-reality dining experience is open to the public at Superblue Miami during this year’s Art Week.

Aerobanquets RMX combines art and gastronomy to provide a unique culinary experience featuring a menu by a Michelin-starred chef.

In groups of up to 16, guests enter a space designed by Italian interdisciplinary artist Mattia Casalegno that “evokes a dining room set in the future.”

Wearing Meta VR headsets, guests embark on a virtual reality journey narrated by Top Chef’s Gail Simmons, while eating from a specially created menu of amuse-bouches by Chef Chintan Pandya. Pandya is a Michelin-starred, James Beard Award-winning chef from New York’s top restaurants Semma, Dhamaka, and Adda.

Complete with regular and vegan options, the menu features dishes such as a “mousse of roasted hopes,” “a pearl that tastes like the first time you ever bit your lip,” and a tart that evokes the “whistle that the wind makes through a door lock on a cold autumn afternoon.”

“It was magical,” one guest tells NBC 6. “It was just so extraordinary to lose oneself in something that is so familiar but to bring this element of mystery to something we do every day without thinking.”

Presented by Meta Open Arts, Aerobanquets RMX was created in 2018 as a way to uniquely engage all of the senses, according to Superblue. 

Casalegno says the multi-sensory experience is inspired by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “The Futurist Cookbook,” a 1932 collection of surreal recipes and proclamations about the future of food.

“In 1932, The Futurist Cookbook proposed an antidote to the panic of the complicated climate at the time, by encouraging optimism at the dinner table,” said Superblue Senior Curator Kathleen Forde. “In 2022, it is our joy to bring Aerobanquets RMX to Superblue to prompt that spirit again, yet with a multisensory, mixed-reality twist.”

The mixed-reality experience is designed to bring art and food into a new dimension by combining virtual reality with fine dining.

“How do you visualize taste? What is the shape of spice? What is the color of flavor?” asks Casalegno. “I conceived Aerobanquets RMX as a total feast for the senses, a multisensory journey, a tool to reprogram all our perceptive expectations.”

Casalegno hopes that anyone who participates in the project “will be more open and receptive to the complexity and beauty of the flavors, colors, smells, sounds, and feelings food can arouse.”

Produced by Flavor Five Studio, the experience is live from Nov. 28 to Dec. 4, and tickets range from $58 to $200 per person, depending on the time of day. Tickets are on sale now at superblue.com/aero.

Kelly Blanco takes us inside Aerobanquets RMX at Superblue, an art and culinary experience that has made its way to South Florida.