Moving Image, Technologies and Ecologies of Food Regimes

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The proposed doctoral project investigates the intersections between technology and ecology in industrial food regimes, through the use of moving image. This practice-based thesis critically analyses current technoscientific solutions drawing on three case studies: - Production: Automation in greenhouses and imaging technologies in agrilogistics. - Distribution: Dark Kitchens, Data Gaze, and circulation of food within the platform economy. - Consumption: Perception and representation of food, cellular agriculture, and future foods. My research project will draw on Harriet Friedman's notion of 'food regime', which examines the strategic role of agriculture and food production in shaping the world capitalist economy. Through an experimental filmmaking practice, I will examine the role of image production within the food sector, looking at the emergence of new visual and scopic food regimes. - Production: Automation in greenhouses and imaging technologies in agrilogistics The first section looks at contemporary high-tech greenhouses in one of the largest agro-food clusters of Europe. Through the making of an experimental film, I will speculate around the following question: Can contemporary greenhouses be understood as cinematic devices where visual production becomes indistinguishable from agricultural production? Greenhouses are understood as actors, as machinic architectures where more-than-human entities -animals, plants, robots, polytunnels, grow lights, and sensors- form a complex technological mesh; where video cameras produce datasets to regulate the growth of vegetables and fruits. Drawing on the notion of 'operational image', I will look at the implementation of machine vision and the introduction of a new kind of image-based harvesting: data harvesting. - Distribution: Dark Kitchens, Data Gaze, and circulation of food within the platform economy. The second section will look at the proliferation of food delivery technologies in urban contexts, through the observation of dark kitchen clusters and their surroundings in the city of London. Dark, ghost, or cloud kitchens are shipping containers equipped with industrial kitchens and temporarily set up by food delivery companies in strategic areas of the city. With the increasing demand for food delivery, precarious riders proliferate around these temporary kitchens. The corresponding moving image work will focus on revealing the material infrastructures behind these 'lean platforms', questioning the alleged immateriality of digital networks and cloud interfaces. How does the "Data Gaze" interfere in the arrangement of cheap food distribution? How can we reveal its mechanisms through the practice of filmmaking? Strategies for data harvesting are fostering the progressive expansion of food delivery corporations beyond their original mission, turning food into a subterfuge for the financialization of data. - Consumption: Perception and representation of food; cellular agriculture and future foods.This section will chart the impact of innovations in the 'future foods' sector by examining the role of technology in recent developments of plant-based meat alternatives, cellular agriculture, and microbial- based proteins. I will draw on Guattari's notion of 'mental ecology' in order to explore the relationships between food perception, and the ecological and technological chains that precede it. On the one hand, I will look at the advertising sector, analyzing the ways in which food commodities acquire 'palatability' through image production. On the other, I will film a number of corporate innovation projects such as cellular agriculture and 3D printed meat startups. The resulting work will consist of an aesthetic exploration of the current formal and material transformations of food products.