companion species

Bagpipe creature on life support

holiday brainstorming...

 Seth's diagrams of new performance sequences for VEAL

VEAL music rehearsal 12 18 2012:

blastocyst lyre + bagpipe creatures

Yesterdays music rehearsal starts animating the installations

Testing out their new legs..

Veal heads

Office = workshop.

Sound sketches for VEAL by Loren Dempster, IVF Lyre

"IVF Lyre," an installation in the upcoming performance VEAL. This image comes from our design process.

Below are two sound sketches by Loren Dempster, one of which was recorded while playing the prototype Lyre in our Union Square office.





"Percussion"



"Looped pipes"

What kind of surfaces constitute a "next nature" for our installation?

The herd is growing...

Milling process

First step of the milling process for our bagpipe creatures.

An Early Concept of Mass Mechanical Slaughter

This is a blueprint from R.Stephen Ayling’s 1908 text Public Abattoirs: Their Planning, Design, and Equipment, (found in Otter's chapter of Lee's 2008 edited volume Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse). 

Otter attributes the plan to Benjamin Ward Richardson, founding member of the Modern Abattoir Society, but Ayling attributes the design to a Bertram Richardson, who was only a member of the MAS. (It’s unclear if Bertram was related to Benjamin.) Ayling says the drawing was made “some years ago,” so we assume it was done sometime in the 1890s. 

Ayling’s book includes many plans for centralized slaughterhouses, including the first large-scale plans for La Villette, the slaughterhouse built by Napoleon III in 1867. None of the plans however include the possibility for mechanical killing, by which we mean a machine-induced process or tool--augmenting the human hand--used to kill a living being. This could be the first concept of mass mechanical slaughter in the West; or, at the very least, a pre-cursor what would eventually become the concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO).--Text by David Backer

Isolation Drum

Bodies

Tatooed blastocyst

"Fallen Soldier"

Conceptual map of the VEAL performance

Early sketches of bagpipe sheep

Concepts of the back gallery

Weekly meetings

A Tuesday morning crit.

The Drum, getting bigger

Bagpipes taking shape

Empathic objects, early image

Early visions of Veal, 1

Narratives

Artifact of an early planning discussion

Narratives/sketches

deanimalization

hammocks of scrim

red, intestine-like string

Grandin-inspired floor plan

scrim, reapplied

(pre)Veal(ed)

Veal Farming

"Of all the forms of intensive farming now practiced, the veal industry ranks as the most morally repugnant. The essence of veal raising is the feeding of a high protein food to confined, anemic calves in a manner that will produce a tender, pale-colored flesh that will be served to the patrons of expensive restaurants...It is worth our attention because it represents an extreme, both in the degree of exploitation to which it subjects the animals and in its absurd inefficiency as a method of providing people with nourishment."

--Peter Singer, from Animal Liberation, p.129

Singer also talks about the specifications of veal calf confinement:

A crate 750 mm wide (2 feet 6 inches).
This crate is made of wood slats.
No hay in the crate.
68 degrees Farenheit in the crate.
Calves are in the create for up to 15 weeks.
In the crate, calves can't
     stand up
     turn around
     scratch or touch their bodies
     see other calves (eg. their mother)

A question: how do we perform this?

Second wall.

Early images and precedents into categories, (from left to right):

MACHINE

BAGPIPES 

SLICING

LAGOON

BUTCHER

MIRRORS

PLAN

FURNITURE

First pin-up

Danny sits next to our first series of images.