Will This Multisensory Loop Ever Stop?

Experts say that besides smell and taste, music, color, and aspect of a dish play the main role in the way we perceive each meal. Food is no longer seen as something we consume to suppress our hunger. It has become a multisensory experience with the power to pamper our taste buds, to feed our appetite, and to gently tickle our imagination.

Hungarian agency White Rabbit Budapest and art director and illustrator Benze used these unconventional ingredients and, by adding a higher dose of music and color, they cooked up an exquisite interactive dish, one that engages more senses that one can imagine.

Gastropolis Mesmerizing Cooking Experience | Click to enlarge

The team embarked on a culinary journey that ends in Gastropolis, a Hungarian cooking school that boosted its online presence in an original way. To attract new students, the institution consulted with the artists and together they designed a fictional route that creatively links East Asia to Western Europe.

The voyage unfolds online and enables viewers to go beyond the place they live in and enter an exotic world. Again. And again. And again. This is what the school’s website does for you. It features the same delicious, visual and audio elements over and over again, only to trick you into thinking that you’ve become a part of a complex sensory-spiritual cooking experience.

Once you access the webpage of Gastropolis, which stands as the ‘pièce de résistance’ of the “Get Mesmerized” campaign, you get trapped in an endless culinary loop, where the visual and audio effects fuse to form a chaotic ensemble that harmoniously untangles when it passes through the gates of your mind.

Psychedelic soundtrack created by DJ Titus, one of the most famous DJs in Hungary, complements the gastronomic scenario, sending you into a mind-blowing adventure where you can almost feel different smells and tastes swirling around you.

All of your senses are awakened and respond to the virtual stimuli, giving you the sense of being exposed to five different cuisines represented within the hallucinatory online experience: Japanese, Indian, Hungarian, Italian, and French.

To reach this mesmerizing result, the artists have worked for almost a month. The virtual experience required 53 individually drawn vector files. The team’s work also included conceptualizing, scripting, designing, drawing, coloring, rendering, and building the technical background. Quite a piece of work!

As for the music, the artists reveled that all the sounds were recorded at the cooking school “and only the sounds generated by the actual kitchen equipment were sampled.”

If you want to get mesmerized, then www.gastropolis-cooking.hu is the best place for you. But we have to warn you! If you’re really looking to register as a student at the school, you have to be patient and wait until the loop ends. That means that you have to go through the whole two-minute-long experience before you’ll be able to find the school’s contact info.

Even though the idea of a loop seems cool, it might prove to be an obstacle for those who want to get what they want as quick as possible.

“Cooking is a complex sensory-spiritual experience. Working with various ingredients, being exposed to smells and tastes, taking part in the act of creation – it puts everyone into a different state of mind,” says the team who believes that the school’s new website is a “mesmerizing experience no one has seen before – and every hypnotizer would envy.” Here is a glimpse of what the experience feels like: