Meat of the Future

I'm working on an essay about death of one of one of the installations in the Museum of Modern Art's Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit. 'Victimless Leather' -- a tiny jacket made of living tissue -- kicked the bucket last week.

[WARNING: clicking the above exhibit links may make your mind go all wobbly like the elastic in old underwear. The site is WAAAY over-designed. You've been warned.]

At the center of the installation was a Barbie-sized garment made of pink biodegradable material suspended inside a glass chamber. The chamber was small, and spherical - think Christmas at Dr. Frankenstein's. The fabric served as scaffolding for skin tissue (engineered from mouse stem cells from Columbia University) to grow upon. A peristaltic pump kept the jacket saturated with rosé nutrient-rich fluid (numnum), and also removed waste. (Cell poo? Dead cells? Not sure). The glass container kept germs away and the humidity constant, and a heat lamp held the temperature at a steady 37 degrees Celsius, whatever that means. All of this made for an environment that was maybe too hospitable. Apparently, the skin grew too fast, clogging up its environment. So the curator killed it.

I'm at the tail end of too many hours of link-clicking in the name of research. Here are some of the weirder things that I found:

• Bovine Myology and Muscle Profiling. video clips of how muscles of the cow are cut into discrete "steaks."
• New Harvest. Meat of the the Future.
• The In-Vitro Meat Consortium. Recently held an international conference on the Meat of the Future
• PETA is offering a $1 million reward to the first scientist to produce and bring in vitro meat to market. The most awesome thing about this reward is that it only kicks in after the entrant has been able to "manufacture the approved product in large enough quantities to be sold commercially, and successfully sell it at a competitive price in at least 10 U.S. states,” which pretty much guarantees that whoever wins won’t actually need the million-dollar prize by the time they are qualified to receive it.
• My last item is also PETA related: Ionat Zurr, one of the "wet biology" artists behind Victimless Leather, describing reactions to Disembodied Cuisine, where she and Catts grew little frog steaks in the lab: "At that time we received an e-mail from People for Ethical Treatment of Animals.... The organisation's leader had a project proposal: that we should take a biopsy from her and grow from her tissue a steak that she would eat. The idea was to protest the eating of animals, but this would be an act of cannibalism, which we did not like, and we refused." more→

That is all.

For now.