Sixteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

The calamitous warnings of climate science have been latched onto by a growing roster of biotech start-up companies who propose to invent lab-grown meat alternatives to the ecologically disastrous livestock industry. They use solutionist hype to promote ‘sustainable,’, ‘eco-friendly,’ ‘cruelty-free,’ ‘clean meat’. This moralized marketing, however, masks a continued reliance on animal agriculture. The fact remains that mammalian cells and tissues are grown in vitro using fetal calf serum, a blood-derived nutrient. Is it really possible to grow meat without banking on the bodies of nonhuman others? Might there be more tasteful material? In Bioart Kitchen: Art, Feminism and Technoscience, Lindsay Kelley asks, ‘What do new technologies taste like?’ The work I will present proposes one answer to her prompt, centred on a technofeminist contextualization of the research-creation project, Mooncalf (2019-). Mooncalf is a series of wet lab experiments and artistic outputs that showcase the potential viability of human menstrual serum for culturing mammalian tissue. These experiments present a direct provocation that problematizes the cellular agriculture industry as it pertains to the production of ‘clean meat’ and instead works towards a proof-of-concept ‘unclean’ meat prototype. Mooncalf is a symbolic precursor or speculative promise meant to facilitate a cultural taste for feminist biotechnologies.