Ocula (Dec 2019)
Visori e galline nel Web of Beings. Second Livestock fra goliardia, semiologia e filosofia
Abstract
Second Livestock is the pioneering invention of Austin Stewart, of Iowa State University. It is a viewer for hens, connected to an insulating cabin, which would introduce the latter into a decidedly better virtual world than the one in which they are forced on intensive farms. Of this invention there are only botched traces -images, texts, an introductory video - in a dedicated website, and everything suggests that it is a joke, or more precisely an artistic exercise aimed at polemizing the conditions of farmed poultry. In this essay however we treat Second Livestock deliberately as a realistic prototype, investigating the specificities of animal-centered-design and the relative contradictions of this paradigm. Second Livestock is analyzed starting from what the project is given to us in textual terms, and at the same time the semiotic analysis is flanked by all the philosophical and ethical problems that arise. The analysis can tell us many things about the current state of the debate on the animal condition, the relationship between technology and ideology, the status and the imagery connected to the geo-media. The result is a new paradigm of reading of the current media society, which is no longer the exclusive one of the web of things, but which we rename, in the light of the observations made, web of beings.
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