Meat Machine

Dance of the Meat Machines will be 3D animation video with surround soundtrack. It will be a stand-alone piece, that will also be absorbed into a longer video piece, The Red Detachment of Women, set for production in 2015. It’s based on a dance sequence from The Red Detachment of Women Ballet-Film (1970), with 3D-animated butchery robots in place of female dancers, such as are used in contemporary large-scale meat processing plants. Their gestures may be, but not necessarily sourced by a live motion capture system, transmitting the movements of a dancer emulating the original dancers directly onto the virtual models. The soundtrack will be sourced from the sounds of meat processing – cutting, slicing, gears turning, machinery beeping – processed as notes and percussion in an immersive composition.

Dance of the Meat Machines is part of a greater re-imagining of The Red Detachment of Women, which I’ve been researching for the last two years. During China’s Cultural Revolution (1965-1968), only eight theater pieces were allowed to be performed. One of those was The Red Detachment of Women, in which a peasant girl joins the Red Army to kill the “enemies of the Crimson Path” – the ownership class of a feudally structured China. It was composed of spectacular set pieces coordinating large numbers of synchronized female dancers, the visual embodiment of absolute cultural coherence. All the set pieces represented military training and battles, abstractions of state-sanctioned violence demonstrating a linguistic slip between “red detachment” as military group and affiliation, and a literal ripping apart – of body part from body part.

This slip led me to research on contemporary factory meat processing in China: as in the ballet, the mechanized repetition of piercing, slicing, and ripping “detach” the worker from the violence of her actions, rendering them abstracted movements rather than acts performed on a fleshy body. But more, the gestures carry nationalistic urgency: meat-packing embodies China’s industrialization that’s at the center of its global power, while increased meat consumption is a visible sign of accelerated wealth. Revolutionary ballet stands on one side of a historical divide, while factory meat production stands on the other, but both carry the aspirations of a nation through synchronized flesh-rending. In this way I want to tell the story of China’s momentous shift in fortunes laterally – it’s not the story we already know, but it’s a subjective interpretation of China’s historical shift as one not of difference, but of sameness (synchronized female violence) resulting in difference (Communism to Capitalism).

Dance of Meat Machines specifically originates in watching videos of mechanized meat production. It’s striking how agile and alive-seeming the robots in high-end plantsare –they look like they are dancing, with finely attuned twists and turns of their massive frames. I’m intrigued by the idea that the machines are a polarized form of the female worker –their gestures are perfectly graceful, displaying no human jerkiness and fallibility, but in exchange for their grace the machines are large, lumpen elephants. The idea of a group of 40 of these machines dancing together in a vision of future meat production is irresistible to me, ridiculous and beautiful at the same time. Its humor and speculative exaggeration will embody the tone of the greater Red Detachment piece, which in turn are similar to my last two videos, The Machinist’s Lament (2014), and Safety First (Bad, Don’t Touch, Mercy!) (2013). Both were engaged in serious considerations of the economic and political desires of society, but they were just as serious about the irrational distortions and manic fabrications of desire. To address the latter is to reveal the fallibility of our economic and political beliefs, by exploring their intimate humanity.

I will be using the structure of the original piece to tell the drama of contemporary factory meat production – not only internally (“she is lost then finds her way” logic progression) but also externally, in the flexibility of resulting forms. As a key form of propaganda, the original was ubiquitous and multiform: it existed as a narrative film, large-scale ballet, Beijing opera, novel, poems, comics, posters, children’s books, albums, pop songs, and more. Therefore, all components of my video will be detachable, stand-alone as well as existing in various formats. Currently I’m working with Triple Canopy on a Labanotation score of pork butchery, which will take the form of live performance, digital project, print item (score notations), while functioning as the stage score for a sequence within the video.

Dance of Meat Machines will at a base level exist as a single-channel video short with multi-track sound – 5-10 minutes – and exhibited/screened as such. However, in line with the detachability of the structure, I also expect that the soundtrack will be able to stand on its own as a recorded track as well as a transcription for live performance for digital/analog instruments. The visual animation could also be parlayed into a performance for live dancers, with the dancers basing their dance on the 3D machines rather than the original ballet (a game of telephone, with gestures lost along the way).

https://vimeo.com/103332825
THE MACHINIST’S LAMENT, 2014
HD VIDEO
Running Time: 17 min, 47 seconds

Factories will bring back money.
Factories will bring back jobs.
Factories will make everything fit again.
In factories, everyone has their place.

Western industrial production is a site of magical thinking: an old history that will never return, an idealized construction that never really was. It's impossible to know what the true costs would be if it were to return - societal, environmental, and psychological – and yet, entire political campaigns are built around this.

This piece speculates on re-industrialization, and is a sequel to my 2013 video, Safety First (Bad, Don’t Touch, Mercy!). Like its prequel, it posits a non-specific future populated by female factory workers. The geometric aesthetics of power and the romance of industrial-era alienation, are paired with theoretical and fictional texts about alternate social economies.

Video footage was shot in Ohio, animation and soundtrack by the artist. Voiceover text sources include Industrial supply catalogs, OSHA safety manuals, Monique Wittig’s Les Guerilleres, and Adorno’s Minima Moralia.