Our Daily Dread is a work concerned with the mechanization of food production as we reach critical stages of overwhelming the planet’s ability to feed humans, domestic pets, and other livestock. Robots now assume a more significant role in food production, and this has implications for all living and sentient creatures harvested by these robots.
With the machine nature of our global food production, robotics and machine technology has supplanted the human hand in food production. Our just-in-time economy is an emergent web of bio-demand and machine supply, where food is depleted from shelves; bar codes to computer databases are already dispatching the next mouthful to the backs of semi-trucks port to our shelves and biologic mouths. This work was commissioned by the STRP Festival in Eindhoven, invited by Vivian Van Gall.
For a video of how the installation looked at the opening, you can find that here.
The family farm, the foundation of our civilization, is transforming into distributed corporate cyborg production machines that begin to display an early form of machine hunger for more production and faster food consumption. As web-connected, distributed robotic devices now replace our formerly direct and caring relationships with the farm animals and plants we love to eat; this has far-reaching implications for the nature and health of our food and the treatment of sentient farm animals.
The installation will be an immersive robotics installation of 10 new sound and motion robots that also involve a large-scale video component and installation of cow ears.
Each work consists of a delicate and beautifully sculptured ear of a pig or calf suspended from the columns in your space and supports from the room’s ceiling. As the viewer approaches the ears, sensors, motors, and linear actuators allow the work to reach 1/2 to 1 meter.
Other sound works with sensors play pre-digitized and rhythmic sounds of pigs honking and cows lowing, and at other times, the sounds of machines (the actual robots) mixed in with the sounds of slaughterhouses, chicken coops, milk bottling plants, and hay thrashing machines.
In the background will be a backlit video screen playing a large image and close-up of a boxer dog chewing and crunching a cow’s ear. From an extensive meshwork will be 200 ears, chicken feet, cow hoofs, and pig ears hanging from monofilament, and when the viewer/interactant enters the space, the ears will lurch.
EXHIBITIONS
LA MAISON d’AILLEURS, MUSEUM OF SCIENCE FICTION, UTOPIA & EXTRAORDINARY JOURNEYS Yverdon-Les-Bains, Switzerland Sept-Mar 2010-11
PURDUE UNIVERSITY GALLERIES West Lafayette, Indiana. Mar 3 –Apr. 20, 2008
The Autotelematic Spider Bots, Augmented Fish Reality, Our Daily Dread, Farm Fountain, and Machinic Diatoms. Invited by curator Craig Martin. Catalog produced.
STRP FESTIVAL, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, Nov 22-25 2007
Worldwide premiere and commission of Our Daily Dread. Invited an commissioned by curator Vivian Van Gaal.
CREDITS
Design and 3D modeling: Ken Rinaldo
Construction: Laser Reproductions
Hardware: Ken Rinaldo
Software: Ken Rinaldo
HARDWARE/TECHNIQUE
The brains and microcontrollers control an MP3 player using an ultrasonic sensor to activate one of 10 different constructed sound reels. Each sound ree is about 13 minutes.
SHOW DIMENSIONS
On-wall with plugs nearby. Single screw hanging.
KEYWORDS
3D modeling, interactive, robots, animal rights, non-violence, autonomy
BIBLIOGRAPHY
DO ROBOTS DREAM OF SPRING? – The Art of Ken Rinaldo at the Maison d’Ailleurs. Retrospective with forward by Bruce Sterling and Patrick Gyger. Yverdon-Les-Bains: September 19, 2010, to March 20, 2011