Considering precision livestock farming, Unleash Your Herd’s Potential (2019–2022) takes cattle as an animal broken to the algorithm and reflects on surveillance, exploitation and our relationship to nature.
Utilizing computer vision, AI and robotics, today’s automated dairy farm functions as a new kind of panopticon in which animals are subject to continuous digital monitoring. The extensive technology infrastructure enables quantifying all aspects of the cows’ life and the treatment of animals as a mere dataset. Unleash Your Herd’s Potential addresses the issues of applying surveillance capitalism on animals and consolidating the human-non-human distance through virtualization and gamification by rendering cows and their environment using photogrammetry. Employing this technique results in a work characterized by a 21st-century bucolic imagery in which the datafied existence of animals belongs to an increasingly technological landscape perceived through digital means.
Utilizing computer vision, AI and robotics, today’s automated dairy farm functions as a new kind of panopticon in which animals are subject to continuous digital monitoring. The extensive technology infrastructure enables quantifying all aspects of the cows’ life and the treatment of animals as a mere dataset. Unleash Your Herd’s Potential addresses the issues of applying surveillance capitalism on animals and consolidating the human-non-human distance through virtualization and gamification by rendering cows and their environment using photogrammetry. Employing this technique results in a work characterized by a 21st-century bucolic imagery in which the datafied existence of animals belongs to an increasingly technological landscape perceived through digital means.
Besides, the work comprises a collection of salt licks, providing a counterpoint to the images by bringing in materiality and the agency of the cows. Manufactured as cubiform blocks and given to the cows to gain essential nutritions, these mineral licks were shaped into anomalous, organic forms by the animals. Thus, they can be regarded as symbols of the rebellion against our endeavour to turn living beings into parameterized commodities.
Unleash Your Herd’s Potential was realized with the support of the Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Foundation, in the scope of the Pécsi József Photography Grant of the Ministry of Human Resources of Hungary.
Unleash Your Herd’s Potential was realized with the support of the Anni and Heinrich Sussmann Foundation, in the scope of the Pécsi József Photography Grant of the Ministry of Human Resources of Hungary.
