Turkey-shaped Jell-O® Mold: 2009 Competition Winners (including David Byrne!)

Every year in New York, Boing Boing buddy Danielle Spencer organizes a Turkey-shaped Jell-O® Mold art competition that rivals the great art showcases of our time — think of it as the Venice Biennale of holiday-themed foodplay.

The 2009 edition winners have been selected, and Danielle has published critiques and appreciations of each masterpiece. There’s an awful lot of je ne sais quoi goin’ on. Justin Downs crafted a Jell-o turkey Death Rattle that purrs when you pet it, with an embedded capacitive circuit (inset, at left). Then, there’s David Byrne‘s conceptual baby-food entry. Cindy Sherman’s entry sounded tastiest: “white chocolate with chopped candied walnuts filled with cranberry/pomegranate flavored gelatin (no added sugar) with raspberries.”

Above, “Live Feed,” by The Builders Association:

With the hard drive as proscenium, The Builders Assocation mounts a spectacle that exposes the “transparency” of contemporary technology. The turkey appears to be giving birth to an iPod Nano, which plays–on endless loop–a video of a turkey. We are frozen in time, yet the video evokes remembrances of cluckings past. In this way the Builders brilliantly capture the intersection of synchronic and diachronic axes while forcing us to interrogate our relationship with turkeys and technology.

Turkey-shaped Jell-O® Mold: 2009 Competition

[A note for lawyers: this is just unofficial fun, and Jell-o/Kraft Foods has nothing to do with this, other than having created an iconic and enduring American food ingredient.]