Meat Growers: A Love Story
2019 - Advanced Technology (Advanced Technology)
13:42 minutes
Rindon Johnson
The VR play Meat Growers: A Love Story by Rindon Johnson centers on two meat growers who work together in a meat processing factory in the year 2100. The setting is a post-Green New Deal Napa Valley where there are no more paved roads, trees abound, and all the strip malls have been turned into food forests and meat growing plants. The protagonists seem to move through their day automatically, yearning for each other, as the viewer acts as a friend and confidant, silently bearing witness to their desire. In the play, gender is never mentioned, and race is ambiguous. The viewer’s character carpools to work in a solar VW bug, listening to their colleagues’ enthusiastic monologues, and watching the landscape roll by. The conversation revolves around their relationship with the natural landscape around them, with disease, modes of production, and survival needs, but moves on to discussions of intimacy, and is suffused throughout with love and longing between the two. This VR play was staged using a game engine, and the ready-made aesthetics of this contribute to the sense that the work creates one version of the future (among many possibilities) being prototyped—a decidedly less than utopian version, but one that makes space for labor, love, and survival.
Rindon Johnson’s work in sculpture, video, poetry, and virtual reality deals with technologies that enable captivity and the harnessing and transformation of nature from a gender- and race-critical perspective. A central motif in his work is the cow, which has been bred for centuries with an eye to maximum profit and consumer pleasure. He often uses cowhide as a sculptural material, drawing out connotations that relate to the commodification of bodies and the attendant destruction this brings. A past collaborator of Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Johnson came to virtual reality through the practice of writing poetry. In both poetry and VR, Johnson observes, “worlds can be endless, limitless, emotional, tyrannical.” Thus, Johnson’s practice is unique for its thematic and material connection of the very old and the very new, the emotional and the embodied, and as a way of thinking through climate grief and crisis.
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