Emerging Trend

As veganism and environmental activism has emerged, substitutes for meat products that are both ethical and sustainable have emerged as well. I’m particularly interested in cultured meats, as the products they make aren’t substitutes, rather, they are created by culturing animal cells in vitro (Gaydhane et al. 2018). On the agricultural front, I am interested in this process becoming more economically viable and sustainable, as it could prove to be beneficial in reducing carbon emissions produced by the agricultural industry yearly (Bailey 2024). On the technological front, it can lead to a better understanding of replicating cell structures, and hopefully lead to a future where we are able to synthesize entire organs, which would be instrumental for organ transplantation.

In-Class Studio Time

For this week, we mostly focused our efforts in class on drafting and finalizing a clear picture of what we wanted our performance sketches to look like. Our group settled on the idea of an AI assistant helping an old lady with her daily tasks. Taking inspiration from one of the previous performances, we decided to utilize the screens of our classroom and make use of lighting to signify a transition of spaces. We also planned to make use of OBS and took inspiration from last weeks VJ lecture to immerse the audience in our performance by providing them with a point of view of the characters.

Weekly Reading

This week’s reading focused on our relationship with our objects at home, particularly those that are increasingly smarter and may suggest and dictate actions that are beneficial to us. The project depicts Thomas, an old man used to living in an organized mess struggling to deal with the orders imposed by the smart objects meant to help him. This project is remarkably similar to the performance sketch my group is working on, so I believe we could get inspiration from it in terms of the adversarial relationship between the human and object.

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References

Bailey CB (2024), Cultured meat is just too expensive to produce to scale up? That could change dramatically, and soon, Genetic Literacy Project, viewed 29 August 2024, https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2024/08/29/cultured-meat-is-just-too-expensive-to-produce-to-scale-up-that-could-change-dramatically-and-soon/

Gaydhane MK, Mahanta U, Sharma CS, Khandelwal M & Ramakrishna S (2018), ‘Cultured meat: state of the art and future’, Biomanufacturing Reviews, vol. 3, no. 1.

Uninvited Guests — Superflux 2016, Superflux. https://superflux.in/index.php/work/uninvited-guests/#