+ PROJECT

CRAFT | MEATS | AI

Alexandru Damian & Capanna Prosciutti

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SUMMARY

In today’s food system, where speed and convenience dominate, the slow crafts that define true quality have become nearly invisible.

Crafts | Meats | AI began from that problem: Prosciutto di Parma takes a minimum of fourteen months of salt, air, and patience, yet nothing on the supermarket label tells what those months meant — what changed inside, what patience built, or who made it possible.

I joined the Capanna family in Parma through the Hungry EcoCities program to make that invisible process visible again. Together we explored how traditional, PDO-bound methods — sea salt only, natural ventilation, minimum fourteen months — shape a product that is biologically distinct from its industrial look-alikes.

The collaboration moved beyond storytelling into scientific documentation: X-rays, MRI scans, and histology revealed the internal architecture of time itself — fine parallel fibers, thin connective tissue, even salt gradients — contrasted against clustered fat and irregular density in accelerated samples.

In blind trials, AI models could distinguish fourteen- from twenty-four-month cures using only lab data, suggesting that the passage of time leaves a measurable signature.

To translate these findings into an experience, I created a book that physically embodies the process it describes: pages salt-printed with Capanna’s own sea salt and silver chloride, slowly revealing images when exposed to light — just as a ham cures when exposed to air.

The text was written line by line with a pen plotter, and an embedded NFC tag opens a digital assistant trained on the book’s insights. The result is both documentation and artifact — a fusion of analog craft and intelligent systems, where salt binds data to matter.

The project argues that slowness can be progress: that time, skill, and restraint are forms of intelligence as vital as any algorithm. Through science, art, and collaboration, Crafts | Meats | AI restores visibility to the patient work behind real food, reminding us that tradition and innovation are not opposites but partners in understanding what it means to make something well.

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“We look forward to collaborate with Alexander Damian. His modern artistic approach embraces photography, enthusiasm for food, AI and digital technologies., an interesting way to demonstrate how art and new IT tools and merging tradition and innovation can be integrated.”

Capanna Prosciutti team