Fieldwork–or more specifically, participant observation–has always been what I love most about my research, and event-based fieldwork has been an important part of my current project. This year’s National Agricultural Fieldays gave me a thorough introduction to agricultural technology and rural computing in NZ, and the Merino Shearing and Woolhandling Competition showed me a new dimension of human-animal relations. But I’ve been waiting all year for the 149th Canterbury A&P Show, and that’s where I’ll be Wednesday-Friday this week.
Today’s NZ Herald has a story about The Show that does a great job of conjuring the event:
“Look at the power in this Angus bull. It looks like a Mac truck and there’s a tonne o’ meat in him. He’s got a nice expression on his face, a calm temperament, a fine pair of testicles. This is a helluva good-looking bull.”
“This South Devon cow, she’s bright-eyed and feminine. And she has nice feet, firm on the ground, and a pretty, chubby calf. There’s a good udder set on her, too.”
Six judges for the Beef All Breeds competition have made their winning choices. They talk about the animals with knowledge, enthusiasm and humour. I’m a city slicker and had no idea that an Angus bull could be so interesting or cattle judges such showmen. The judges, and most of the male onlookers, wear their R.M. Williams boots and belts, their best jeans and town-shirts – cotton, ironed nicely, sleeves rolled up and the top two buttons open showing a tuft of chest hair.
I’m at the Canterbury A&P Show. A&P means Agricultural and Pastoral so this show is all about things rural; the country comes to Christchurch. There are no competitions for sewing, baking or growing and arranging flowers that some shows have … The focus is animals.
[...]
In the livestock pavilion, a vast, covered area, I inch between myriad pens, starting with cattle, moving on to goats, pigs, llamas, alpacas then, finally, sheep. It smells of hay, lanolin from wool and coconut sunscreen from the people walking by. Some animals have rows of ribbons tied to their pens. Others haven’t been lucky and sit, blink and chew, waiting to go back to their fields.
The show is on for three days and these hundreds of animals must be fed and watered; 30 tonnes of grass is trucked in and an enormous amount of hay. There is even a milking machine to which dairy-cow owners dutifully take their prize cows twice a day. The logistics behind this (and the mucking out that must go on because the pens and animals are all immaculate) is impressive.
[...]
I find a shady seat near farmers who are drinking Speight’s and yakking with their mates in a low-toned rumble. Some hold their winning certificates and happily accept congratulations. It’s convivial and friendly in a blokey way. As I leave I notice I’ve had a nice sit-down in the Sheep Exhibitors’ Club.
The Sheep Maternity Ward is nearby and I, with a flock of wide-eyed children, watch a lamb being born. It’s a grunty, messy, bloody process and the floppy, dazed lamb that slides out seems to be yellow. Mum is licking it in a jiffy and when I return half an hour later the smart wee thing is staggering around its mother’s wool looking for a nipple.
I, too, need food but the A&P Show is no place for a vegetarian. Avenues of food stalls are selling pies, hot dogs, burgers, beef sandwiches, beef noodles and lamb kebabs; nothing, anywhere, that is remotely vegetarian. I settle for a ham roll and pull out the ham.
[...]
The Canterbury A&P Show has delighted visitors for 149 years; the first one was held in 1862. It’s a fun day out and a rare insight for townies – these days that’s most of us – into heartland New Zealand.
Yes. My animal and meat-loving self is super excited. Stories and photos to follow!
“We will follow Rosemary through lambing, weaning, docking, shearing, drenching, dipping and more. The aim is to get urban children and adults excited about what rural New Zealand has to offer and to teach everyone something new about the life of a sheep in New Zealand.”
On 28 July, 2011, Rosemary the composite ewe–”My mum is a coopworth breed and my dad is a growplus [sic] breed”–gave birth to three lambs, named Sage, Thyme and Mint. Rosemary’s Facebook page allows you to follow the family on their farm in the hill country of the Tararua District, and learn a little something about sheep:
“Did you know there are over 900 different breeds of sheep in the world!?”
“Did you know sheep have poor eyesight but an excellent sense of hearing? To keep Sage, Thyme and Mint in tow I make a bleating sound. My lambs can identify me by my bleat rather than my luscious locks of wool.”
“Did you know sheep grow two teeth a year until they have eight?”
But it’s the longer, everyday life stories and photos that make it special:
15 August, 2011
“We have been out enjoying the snow! We are lucky that our paddock is not a higher altitude one, only a light dusting of snow for us.
I know Farmer Anne has been very busy moving her other ewes down to lower levels to keep the ones who are lambing away from the deep snow and cold winds. I am lucky I am a composite eve of two breeds that grow a lot of wool and grow it slowly. I only need shearing once a year, so I still have a thick warm fleece on to protect me from this cold weather.”
27 September, 2011
“Today Minty, Thyme and Sage got EID (electronic identification) ear tags put in their right ear. Our farm has joined the FarmIQprogram where every lamb will be individually monitored for growth.
It is a quick one action pierce of the ear and the two pieces of the tag are squeezed together and will hopefully stay in the ear for life. The electronic part of the tag is yellow and the back parts are green for ewe lambs and white for male lambs.”
“The main theme gathers together the work of a number of artists, scientists, and academics who over the past decade have relentlessly contributed to the creating, researching, and theorising of the cross-fields between nature and robotics. The issue resembles a journey of discovery into a fascinating alternative reality where the boundaries nature and technology are deceptively and at times disturbingly blurred.”
“Through the propelling enthusiasm and deep anxieties characteristic of recent post-humanism approaches, interspecies communication has become something of a chimerical entity. We all, in one way or another, communicate to animals, especially with our closest pets. The cat and the dog have co-habited with us long enough to allow the development of a shared syntax made of body language, sounds, habits and rituals which enable a bi-lateral communication. Anthropomorphism plays, of course, a part in our communicational exchanges with animals. When do we really see the real animal, or when do we just see ourselves reflected in it?”
In our globalized, highly-industrialized society, human and nonhuman animals are enmeshed in surprising and often troubling ways. “Pharm” goats are living factories for the production of pharmaceuticals; honeybees are explosive-detectors in the “War on Terror;” and household pets – clothed and escorted in strollers – have become humanized companions. What do these sorts of enmeshments mean for us and our “human condition” as well as for our non-human animal counterparts? What do they mean for relationships among species?
The Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center and Program in Science and Technology Studies (STS) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison is sponsoring a three-day conference to bring together advanced graduate students in animal studies, science and technology studies, and allied disciplines (English, History, Anthropology, and Fine Arts among others) to discuss the relationships between animal studies and STS. We welcome papers or projects that explore the overlap of humans and other organisms as well as their mutual interaction with technology. Each participant will present a pre-circulated paper, article, creative composition, or dissertation chapter for constructive feedback in a roundtable discussion with peers and with scholars from the University of Wisconsin.
Our keynote speaker will be Susan Squier — Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English at The Pennsylvania State University; acting director of its Science, Medicine, Technology in Culture program; and author of Poultry Science, Chicken Culture: A Partial Alphabet.
Mornings will include facilitated discussions on animal studies and STS as well as sessions on participants’ written work. In the afternoons, participants will attend field trips to sites of human-animal enmeshment in and around Madison. As part of the conference, artwork on the conference theme will be on display in a juried exhibition and honored at the keynote reception. A free public film screening of a movie on the theme of human-animal relations will conclude the conference weekend.
Modest travel stipends may be available from the Holtz Center at the University of Wisconsin to offset the costs of lodging, meals, and travel. The option to stay with local students will be available, should participants wish to do so.
Please send a paper proposal of 250 words and a curriculum vitae to Peter Boger at boger@wisc.edu or Jen Martin at jamartin4@wisc.edu by December 15, 2011. Accepted papers will be due April 30, 2012. Visual artists and creative writers of fiction, nonfiction or poetry should contact Heather Swan for more information at hsrosenthal@wisc.edu.
“Substantial increases in prices are being offered to farmers by New Zealand Merino in two and three-year contracts for fine wool, soon to be followed by Merino meat contracts at attractive prices. The higher contract terms flowed on from the extraordinary increases in market prices for wool and lamb during the past 12 months, said NZ Merino chief executive John Brakenridge.
For him, after 15 years of unrelenting effort to create premium markets for Merino products, the latest surge repositions the sheep as a multi-purpose animal.
It was also a wonderful springboard for the $36 million Primary Growth Partnership (PGP) with the government, which was the first of its kind, signed in May 2010.
“It gives farmers and NZ Merino a lot more fuel in the tank, as it is important for the country that we don’t put all our hopes on milk,” he said.
“We think sheep still have enormous potential for this country, in wool, meat, lanolin, leather, nutriceuticals and other product streams.”
Brakenridge said those products tended to be exported as commodities, whereas the PGP aimed to investigate ways of adding value and creating brands.
“We break it down into niche markets and look at the intrinsic values and stories for each of these potential products,” he said.
Brakenridge said the PGP was “amplifying” the existing NZ Merino fibre programmes, as well as looking at marketing and communication trends.
A brand-partner summit held in California recently discussed new products and the promotion of these on social media.
The Silver Fern Farms Merino meat partnership is positioning fine sheep meat with niche placement in premium world markets, with brand market research, chef training and communication back to farmers.
A new Merino meat brand would be launched in the next couple of months, he said.
Brakenridge said the wool and fibre contracts gave price certainty to farmers faced with genetic or management changes to make to broaden their production base in the future.
He agreed that the purchase by Merino Growers Investment Ltd of the rest of NZ Merino from PGG Wrightson did have the potential to unify the Merino industry.
However, intending suppliers to NZ Merino still had to believe that it was working in their interests and that they philosophically supported a grower-owned broker and marketer, Brakenridge said.
NZ Merino handles about 80% of the Merino clip and 50% of the mid-micron clip and about half of the fibre volume goes into longer-term contracts rather than through the auctions in Melbourne.
The huge disruption of the Christchurch earthquake had made the scheduling of an annual NZ Merino conference this year very difficult, Brakenridge said.”
I love this new Kiwi TV advert so much that I’m willing to overlook that it’s a bank advert and just focus on how sweet a story it tells about a boy and his sheep:
The moral of the story: You don’t have to kill your sheep to get a Nintendo DS. (Also, females of all species are fickle.)
Or, as Ben says, “Teach a boy to kill a sheep, he has a DS. Teach a boy to shear a sheep, he has a new game every growing season.”
In an era of xenotransplantation and human-sheepchimera, Revital Cohen‘s Life Support project (RCA Design Interactions, 2008) asks “Could animals be transformed into medical devices?” and “Could a transgenic animal function as a whole mechanism and not simply supply the parts? Could humans become parasites and live off another organism’s bodily functions?”
Interesting questions, and I find myself deeply affected by Cohen’s Dialysis Sheep concept:
A patient suffering from kidney failure gives a blood sample to the lab, the scientists cut from the patients’ genome the regions that code for blood production (bone marrow tissues), and immune response (the major histocompatibility complex). They then extract the genome from the nucleus of a somatic cell taken from a sheep and substitute the corresponding regions of the sheep’s genome with the DNA cut from the patients’ genome.
This recombinant DNA is then inserted into the nucleus of a pre-prepared sheep egg cell. Cell division in the egg is initiated and after a few divisions implanted into the receptive ewe.
The surrogate ewe gives birth to the transgenic lamb, which is given to the donor patient.
During the day, the dialysis sheep is free to roam in the patient’s back garden, graze to cleanse its kidneys, and drink water containing salt minerals, calcium and glucose.
At night, the sheep is placed on a special platform at the patient’s bedside. The transgenic sheep’s kidneys are connected via blood lines to the patient’ s fitsula (a surgicaly enlarged vein). During the night, peristaltic pumps remove waste products from the patient’s blood by pumping it out of the body, through the sheep’s kidney (a natural, organic filtering system) and returning it, cleaned, to the patient.
This happens over and over again throughout the night. Each time the “clean” blood is returned to the body, it picks up more waste products from the cells it circulates through, and brings these newly-collected toxins back to the sheep’s kidney to be removed.
The sheep urinates the toxins.
Okay, first things first. When I say I’m “deeply affected” by this design, I mean that despite being struck by the beauty of some of the images, I am utterly horrified and disgusted by the concept. (How could someone think it’s acceptable to use an animal like this when we have machines that can do the same thing?!) But I’m also intellectually fascinated by it, and can’t stop thinking about it.
In principle, I share the desire to (re)vitalise what can be utterly dehumanising medical processes. For example, Elio Caccavale‘s Utility Pets (2003) project asked “What if we shared our homes with pigs bred to provide replacement human organs?” and part of the intention was to imagine a close relationship and emotional exchange between patient and organ donor. I like this idea and no more harm comes to the pig before it is killed/sacrificed than to a typical meat animal.
But using an animal as a blood filtering machine is different, and using a sheep to do this invokes an additional set of cultural connotations that are conspicuously (purposefully?) absent from Cohen’s project description.
Most notably, it is impossible for me to overlook the fact that sacrificial lambs play an important role in Judeo-Christian religion. Furthermore, John the Baptist referred to Jesus as the Lamb of God, whose sacrificial death washed away the sins of the world (John 1:29). Such imagery can be seen in one of the most famous pieces of European religious art: Jan van Eyck’s The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, or Ghent Altarpiece (1432), which depicts the sacrificial lamb surrounded by fourteen angels, and groups of male clergy, female martyrs, Jews and pagans.
More generally, lambs bound for sacrifice also appear in many Renaissance religious paintings and sculptures, such as Agnus Dei by Francisco de Zurbarán (1635-1640).
To conjure a lamb or sheep, then, as a cleansing machine is doubly powerful. Cohen’s images above show the sheep effectively bound by medical tubing instead of rope, but also bathed by soft light and lying in straw like so many lambs in nativity scenes. It may not be killed by the act of serving as a dialysis machine, but arguably its (quality of) life is still sacrificed; and while the lamb itself is not resurrected, another being effectively is.
Now maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I’m interested in how critical design can move people, or how it affects who we are and who we can become. Although this is more a matter of potential rather than actual engagement with design, I think it is related to the matter of audience, or whose potential we’re talking about. As Emily Dawson put it in her EASST 2010 paper, “Speculative design and the issue of public participation” (abstract, pdf):
“While some speculative design projects seek out alternatives platforms for engaging with diverse publics, for example workshops in community centres or with patient groups, there is a persistent tendency towards the exhibition as the central engagement format, often coupled with an online element. It is clear from decades of research in museums and galleries that exhibitions, both physical and online, are a fantastic way of preaching to the choir, and little else. Speculative design projects in this vein may not reach beyond an already interested audience of designers and scientists.”
As part of this already interested, and educated, audience I realise that my engagement with Cohen’s Dialysis Sheep is most likely atypical. Visiting an RCA Design Interactions degree show, or keeping up on art and design blogs, betrays my interests and education. In other words, as a researcher, I am part of a very narrow kind of public and I have no idea what other members of other publics would think of Cohen’s concept. For example, did the designer consider showing it to dialysis patients and their families? And what could be gained from such interactions?
Looking at the issues from another perspective, what can a movie like 2006′s Black Sheep do for public understanding and debate that Dialysis Sheep can’t?
One of the most fascinating things that has emerged from the first few months of Counting Sheep research is that designers and non-designers are responding to our designs quite differently. These differences in audience response have led me to seriously question my intention to hold an exhibition next year, and I find myself increasingly turning to diverse publics and means of interaction with our work. After all, if I’m seeking public engagement with the technosocial issues at hand then I need to be clearer on what kind of public(s) I’m talking about–and other researchers and designers simply aren’t it.
For example, the first set of videos we made on NZ merino wool turned out to be rather didactic exercises in digital storytelling that tend to fall flat with designers and researchers, but utterly captivate other people. It was this response that led me to make our Story of NZ Merino Wool content available for Mix & Mash: The Great NZ Remix and Mashup Competition and share it with public educators and NZ merino industry stakeholders, instead of just exhibiting it or writing about it in journal articles. In short, I wanted people other than the usual suspects to see our work, and I wanted it to be possible for other people to do something with it. There is nothing particularly critical about these videos, but they are helping us see what we can do with other people and allowing for the possibility that critique doesn’t only originate from research and design practice. Our Kotahitanga Urban Merino Farm is a clearer example of speculative design, and will hopefully offer further opportunities along these lines. For example, I’ll be taking the project to the 50th annual Merino Shearing and Wool Handling Championships next month to discuss with participants and attendees, and it’ll be interesting to see where that leads.
For now, I’m just trying to figure out who critical and speculative design is actually for. What do you think?
We're available to speak with your organisation about the social and cultural impact of new technologies, and we're always interested in meeting potential collaborators and postgraduate students to help us think, do and make interesting things.
15 August, 2011
27 September, 2011
