SOW
geospatial AR public art intervention, 2023
SOW is a female breeding pig, she’s monstrous and beautiful at the same time.
But similar to the industrial meat industry, SOW is only visible if you choose to look…
SOW is a giant pig that lives in the digital realm and appears in Augmented Reality (AR) through your smartphone in specific locations linked to industrial pork production across England. Taking the form of a digital sculpture, SOW is a symbol of protest and resistance and you can only see her through your phone’s camera superimposed onto your environment.
SOW AR, which is free to download via the Apple Store or Google Play, exposes companies and the government’s links to industrial meat production.
She can be seen watching and weighing down on the buildings of some of the UK’s biggest corporate and government actors in our industrial food system. Barclays financed the world’s biggest meat company and notorious forest destroyer, JBS, to the tune of £4.8 billion between 2015 and 2022, Tesco refuses to drop JBS as a supplier, and the government has failed to prevent deforestation-linked products from entering the UK. Meanwhile, JBS is planning to list shares on the New York Stock Exchange, which would give the company access to more money to further expand.
SOW can also be found at animal feed supplier Cargill’s soya plant in Liverpool, and at a newly opened Danish Crown plant in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, where Europe’s biggest pork producer will process cheaper and solely imported pork from Denmark.
The project builds upon a rise in the use of AR in contemporary art in public space. SOW AR is used to captivate audiences and incite meaningful dialogue, encouraging the public to playfully engage with and question the world around them.
With this project I am experimenting with the rules and possibilities of AR, moving beyond traditional brand subvertising techniques within this new digital medium. Once downloaded, the user’s smartphone camera turns into a director lens in the app, encouraging people to record the digital sculpture in a changed reality.
I am the lead artist of this project and worked in collaboration with the collective A Drift of Us. The App was built by Luigi Honorat. And the project has been supported by Greenpeace UK as part of the NGO’s Bad Taste project.
