SOW and augmented reality artivism

Abstract

As part of geography’s creative (re)turn, art interventions can serve as a powerful force for transforming individuals and their imaginaries, particularly at the age of the anthropocene. This paper develops a critical account of SOW – an augmented reality (AR) public art intervention taking form of a giant female pig appearing in six sites linked to industrial pork production across England. It explores the conceptual work AR does at the intersection of art and activism – artivism – through analysing SOW as a spatial and political agent in performance of witnessing the industrial meat complex but also prefiguring alternative food production futures. SOW as an AR intervention reconfigures how activism is enacted in public space: she serves as a nonhuman witness while also enabling affective attunement between humans and nonhumans at the industrial pork production sites. The paper discusses how SOW’s witnessing aims to ‘bring to the fore the overlooked and to challenge the settled’ by making the invisible spaces of industrial pork production visible and challenging power regimes within them. It also considers SOW’s potential for creating moments of nonhuman encounter that generates affective responses, activating different ways of knowing through a co-creative, embodied experience.

Introduction

Every year around 70 billion land animals are slaughtered for human consumption, ¹ which is projected to increase to 120 billion by 2050. ² Emel and Neo ³ describe the socio-ecological consequences of the industrial meat complex – from its contribution to climate change and biodiversity collapse to the human consequences of its search for ‘exploitable’ labour and environments. Industrial meat production both constructs and is constructed by the global capitalist economy. Meat is ‘hegemonic’ ⁴ and the process of ‘meatification’ ⁵ is linked to the capitalist expansion and its pursuit of profit. It is important to understand that industrial meat is much more than a product of individual consumer choices. It is shaped by numerous political economic factors, such as animal feed subsidies and other policy support for industrialisation; meat-focused nutritional advice and marketing campaigns; slaughtering practices and working conditions aimed at efficient meat production; and the externalisation of its socio-environmental harms. Weis ⁶ describes it as the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex, showing how industrial agriculture and industrial meat production are interlocked and how a large proportion of agricultural production worldwide is dedicated to supporting the industrial meat complex.

Modern industrial meat complex demands an urgent intervention that unsettles its status quo and makes visible its largely invisible geographies and relations comprising them. Simultaneously, such an intervention can also catalyse transformations of individuals and socio-political imaginaries, particularly in light of geography’s creative (re)turn, ⁷ where art practices open possibilities for constructing futures in the making, knowledges in progress, new ways of being in and relating to the world. ⁸ Recent cultural geographical research has explored the transgressive potential of art interventions to challenge prevailing social norms ⁹ and encourage change-making and political critique. ¹⁰ This is particularly urgent in the food system context in the anthropocene. ¹¹ Hawkins et al. ¹² suggest that creative geographies offer a bridge between knowledge and action in the destabilising times of the anthropogenic environmental crisis and offer critical spaces for challenging the existing power dynamics and prefiguring alternative futures.

To that end, this paper develops a critical account of SOW – an augmented reality (AR) public art intervention taking form of a giant female pig appearing in six sites linked to industrial pork production across England. It explores the conceptual work AR does at the intersection of art and activism – artivism – through analysing SOW as a spatial and political agent in performance of witnessing the industrial meat complex but also prefiguring alternatives to it.

Most of us are familiar with augmented reality (AR) through the popular mobile game Pokémon Go released in 2016. Using their smartphones, players can locate, capture, and train virtual Pokémon, with their physical environments being augmented with in-game content and graphics. AR has been used extensively in activist campaigns ¹³ and as an art medium, ¹⁴ and has also been recognised by geographers for its role in place production and experience. ¹⁵ It is suggested that AR can have a significant impact on innovating geographical knowledge, ¹⁶ particularly at the time of the anthropocene, as we are witnessing the acceleration of irreversible human impacts on the Earth: it can help reassessing our role on this planet and appreciating the interconnectivity of human and nonhuman lifeworlds. ¹⁷

Consequently, this paper explores how artivism through AR functions as a tool for spatial critique and prefiguration, in the context of the anthropocentric food system. SOW reconfigures how activism is enacted in public space: she serves as a nonhuman witness while also enabling affective attunement between humans and nonhumans at the industrial pork production sites. The paper discusses how SOW’s witnessing aims to ‘bring to the fore the overlooked and to challenge the settled’ ¹⁸ by making the invisible spaces of industrial pork production visible and challenging power regimes within them. It also considers SOW’s potential for creating moments of nonhuman encounter that generate affective responses, activating different ways of knowing through a co-creative, embodied experience.

SOW at DEFRA.

Source: Image credit – Jack Taylor/Greenpeace.

The paper starts with discussing SOW by combining Richardson’s ¹⁹ concept of nonhuman witnessing with Papacharissi’s ²⁰ thinking on affective publics into a theoretical framework to examine how AR artivism creates new forms of spatial critique and prefiguration within the industrial meat complex. It then explains the idea behind SOW AR app and how she can be encountered. It is followed by documenting SOW’s testimony at six sites linked to the industrial pork production across England before presenting some concluding remarks.

Artivism, nonhuman witnessing and affective publics

Among many, one dimension of creative geographies’ interventionist potential has been evident in the work on public artivism. ²¹ Zebracki ²² critically evaluates the intersection of public art and activism and suggests that it is confrontational, subverts dominant modes of thinking and questions the legitimacy of ruling powers. Duncombe ²³ shows that through combining the political message of activism with the affective potential of art, artivism can ‘foster dialogue around uncomfortable or overlooked topics’, ‘turn watchers into doers’ and ‘create disruption’ by ‘challenging how people commonly think about an issue’. Echoing Zebracki and Luger, ²⁴ SOW as an AR public art intervention explores the critical geographies of digitally created and mediated public art. Here it is done by connecting Richardson’s ²⁵ concept of nonhuman witnessing with Papacharissi’s ²⁶ thinking on affective publics.

Richardson ²⁷ states that as socio-environmental crises intensify, the notions of witnessing and testimony become ever more important, and they are amplified by the adoption of new technologies and practices. Yet, historically, the former have been reserved for humans only, leaving nonhuman witnesses largely out of frame. Richardson ‘brings nonhuman entities and phenomena into the space of witnessing’, ²⁸ thus incorporating previously ignored nonhuman knowledges, subjectivities and experiences into practices of witnessing and explorations of who counts as a witness. This is particularly important in the context of the industrial meat production, where nonhuman animals are objectified and treated as commodities: SOW as an AR public art intervention bears witness to the excessive violence of the industrial meat supply chain. Richardson stresses the importance of creative works for pursuing nonhuman witnessing, with aesthetics paving the way for speculative worlds to develop – once again, making it crucial for the mission of prefiguring alternative food production futures.

Richardson also states that the process of nonhuman witnessing is a relational one – happening through material, technical, media-specific situated relations – whereby humans can be included but do not occupy a central role. According to him, witnessing creates an intense connection between the witness and the event that goes beyond a mere encounter; it allows to respond to the unfolding socio-environmental crises relationally. Affect plays a crucial part here as ‘the experience of witnessing is always affective’ ²⁹ : it opens new ways of creating meaning and relationality that can reshape our ethico-political worlds in fundamental ways.

This expands the question of how SOW as an AR public art intervention creates an affective bridge that may catalyse prefiguring more hopeful food production futures. Papacharissi ³⁰ defines affective publics as ‘networked public formations that are mobilised and connected or disconnected through expressions of sentiment’. Affective publics include both human/technological interactions but also the outcomes of such interactions – both material and affective. While Papacharissi’s research draws on social media platforms such as Twitter, affective publics thinking takes an innovative turn when applied to public artivism and SOW specifically, given that digital public art intensifies the spatial-material world through creating new social practices and performances, ³¹ often in an act of ‘coming together’ in ‘hybrid spaces’. ³²

Papacharissi ³³ posits that affective attunement allows one to ‘feel their way into politics’ and find their own place within a particular structure of feeling. One then becomes part of affective atmospheres understood as ‘properties, competencies, modalities, energies, attunements, arrangements and intensities of differing texture, temporality, velocity and spatiality, that act on bodies, are produced through bodies and transmitted by bodies’. ³⁴ Such affective atmospheres defy sensory hierarchy, which is particularly evident in the case of art: Hawkins ³⁵ suggests can foster ‘an understanding of the experience of art grasped not as a solely intellectual act, but by the complex perception of the body as a whole’.

Affective publics emerge in unique ways and leave distinct digital footprints. ³⁶ In the case of SOW, affective publics materialise through SOW AR app (described below) and may leave distinct digital footprints of screenshots and videos of their interactions with the pig at one or several sites. The viewers can also learn more about the sites where she appears as well as the overall industrial pork supply chain in England through the app and project website. SOW invites deliberate involvement from her audience, she recasts spectators as collaborators, co-creators. ³⁷ New, co-produced content can travel in spaces of digital engagement, provide vicarious experiences of SOW for those who have not encountered her in real life, ³⁸ making her performative and ever ‘floating’. ³⁹

Papacharissi also shows that digital footprints are fluid enough for people to generate their own interpretations and meanings of them. She notes that as an event or an encounter is taking place offline, a parallel version of it connects affective publics online. This binary becomes intriguing in the case of SOW: she exists in a hybrid space that disrupts the disembodied logic of being in the world through dissolving the anthropocentric binary thinking: the physical/the digital, the subject (human)/object (nonhuman), artist/producer and public/user. Her hybrid presence therefore blurs the lines between artists, publics, activists and non-activists. ⁴⁰ Such ‘hybrid spaces’ enable ‘new modes of open (yet critically attuned) engagement with embodied experience, with urban and natural landscapes, and with digitally mediated public space’ ⁴¹ and open up new ways of feeling and relating, inviting an embodied re-thinking of materiality. ⁴² SOW’s testimony therefore layers different ways of knowing to create an immersive experience that helps to ‘unlock and animate new potentialities’. ⁴³

In relation to that, Papacharissi suggests that affective publics have potential to disrupt dominant political narratives by presenting underrepresented viewpoints. ⁴⁴ This is pertinent in the context of challenging the industrial meat complex and the role of nonhuman animals in it. SOW invites the viewer to contemplate the potentials of future human/nonhuman relations in meat production, generating new prefigurations and surprises, reverberating. Papacharissi notes that these disruptions contain both empowering and disempowering potential for those participating in them – just like those engaging with SOW can feel both emboldened or disheartened about the futures of meat production – but sees this ambiguity as productive. In this sense, one’s affective attunement can lead to different degrees of engagement with the issue but simultaneously does not guarantee a particular outcome.

To summarise, SOW creates an embodied, affective experience and AR artivism can become one of several methodologies for generating ‘provocative awareness’ ⁴⁵ and prefiguring alternative food production futures in the anthropocene. Digital spatial turn ⁴⁶ offers space for exploring the entangled geographies of and relations with nonhuman world ⁴⁷ : the new ways of seeing, thinking about and relating to nonhuman others ⁴⁸ as well as reflecting on the complexity of power regimes that underpin those relations. Building on the frameworks of nonhuman witnessing and affective publics, the rest of the paper will elaborate on how SOW as an AR public art intervention is performing a unique form of artivism. SOW constitutes a nonhuman witness to the industrial meat complex, generating affective networked formations that challenge human/nonhuman binary through digitally mediated encounters. SOW operates simultaneously as a witness, a testimony, and an affective catalyst – agencies that are facilitated by the specific affordances of the AR technology.

Sow AR

A screenshot from SOW AR project website.

Source: <https://www.sow-project.com/>

SOW emerged from an ongoing art/food system research collaboration with a visual artist Naho Matsuda, aiming to intervene with and unsettle the modern industrialised food system through play and provocation. SOW was among the three interventions commissioned for the Bad Taste project. Bad Taste was looking to devise creative interventions that confront the role of industrial food in the climate crisis. SOW was selected via an open call process that ran in December 2022; it was developed collaboratively and supported by a group of independent artistic advisors within Bad Taste. SOW was launched publicly in December 2023.

SOW appears in six locations, each of them having an association with industrial pork production in England. She can be spotted on top of the Barclays bank headquarters in Canary Wharf; on the rooftops of Tesco on Bold Street in Liverpool and Tesco Superstore on Morning Lane in London; towering over the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) in Westminster London’s government area; in front of the meat processor Danish Crown factory in Rochdale; on top of the Cargill Tower in the Liverpool Docks.

To meet SOW, one first needs to download a free-of-charge SOW AR app that enables viewing and interacting with her. The app is available to download from various third-party platforms (such as the App Store and Google Play). The app was built using Google’s ARCore platform and draws on the smartphone’s Visual Positioning System (VPS) and Global Positioning System (GPS), to generate the AR content. The app also includes information about the project, industrial pork supply chain in England, instructions for using the app, as well as links to the project website that provides more detailed information about industrial pork farming and the making of SOW.

As stated in the previous section, digital artworks ‘erratically ‘travel’ and become mutated through networked public spaces’. ⁴⁹ Being aware that they may be co-opted and reappropriated out of context, ⁵⁰ sufficient contextual information both on the app and project website is provided. Here, in line with Anderson, ⁵¹ SOW does not offer simplistic solution-oriented discourses to the problem of industrial meat production; instead, herself and her testimony invite the public to attune to ‘how we organise ourselves politically and socially, and how we define ourselves in the broader ecological assemblage’ as well as ‘how we relate to technology and science’ more broadly. In the context of complexity of food production in the anthropocene, SOW creates more questions than she answers, and these questions are currently being explored in workshops that create public encounters with SOW. ⁵²

Therefore, SOW as an AR public art intervention bears witness to the normally invisible industrial pork supply chain and unsettles power dynamics associated with anthropocentric spatial orders of the industrial meat production. She also encourages knowledge production rooted in relational ontologies, creating affective attunement to the industrial meat complex designed to stimulate critical thinking, with potential to inspire action.

The next section presents and narrates SOW’s testimony.

SOW’s testimony

SOW’s testimony does not have a designated starting point. Here she first witnesses the most powerful political and financial industrial meat stakeholders (Barclays bank headquarters in Canary Wharf and DEFRA in Westminster) and then makes an appearance in places that have a more visible link to the architecture of the industrial pork supply chain – Cargill Tower in the Liverpool Docks as the supplier of animal feed, Danish Crown factory in Rochdale as one of the leading meat processors, and Tesco supermarkets in Liverpool and London as culminations of SOW ‘becoming’ meat to consume. SOW invites the public on a multisensorial journey. Each site is unique in its generation of affective attunement – from the hustle and bustle of London locations to the eerie quietness of Rochdale and industrial hum of the Liverpool Docks. In each of them, SOW can be seen – she is giant, she is in action, offering what Vannini ⁵³ sees as a potential waiting to be actualised. Her female body shares its power to produce certain effects and affects, be it expected or unexpected, intended or unintended. Sometimes she is asleep, sometimes she twitches her ears or moves her tail, blinks her eyes. Yet, SOW can also be heard – sometimes she huffs, sometimes she squeals and screams painfully loud.

Barclays Tower, Canary Wharf

SOW is looking around Canary Wharf – east London financial district – from atop the Barclays Tower, twitching her ears. She is huffing and puffing, as she fixes her gaze on the Billingsgate fish market, not noticing all the bank workers arriving at the building to start their day. They do not see nor hear her either. If they had SOW AR app and pointed it at the rooftop as they were entering, they would see SOW’s bottom hanging off the building, wagging her docked tail. SOW bears witness to Barclays Tower to make the link between the financial sector and industrial meat production visible.

In the context of SOW’s testimony, this site is not the most obvious one. But it is brimming with the power of invisible financial flows that serve as crucial enablers of industrial meat production in the era of neoliberal capitalism. Financialisation – understood as the growing influence of financial stakeholders – has reconfigured the geographies and power distribution within the food sector more broadly. ⁵⁴ It has transformed food production into a tool for capital accumulation, placing greater emphasis on shareholder value, driving priorities around short-term financial returns and ultimately driving the concentration of corporate power and control in the hands of very few actors. ⁵⁵

For that reason, SOW’s presence at Barclays bank headquarters is significant. If one attunes to the atmosphere of Canary Wharf, the sense of powerless anger is palpable: high street British banks such as Barclays and HSBC provide billions in loans to the industrial meat firms. Between 2015 and 2020, global meat (and dairy) companies received over $478 billion in backing by over 2,500 investment firms, banks, and pension funds headquartered around the globe. ⁵⁶

Barclays in particular is the bank of choice for one of the world’s most destructive companies in the food sector – the biggest global meat corporation, JBS. During 2015–2020, Barclays was the largest financier of JBS, providing the corporation with £4.8 billion in corporate loans, bond issuances and revolving credit facilities. ⁵⁷ JBS track record is tarnished. In addition to contributing to the damages associated with industrial meat production, they have also been consistently accused of human and Indigenous rights abuses, including land grabbing, child and slave labour, and violations of workers’ rights. ⁵⁸

SOW’s bearing witness to Barclays’ contribution to the industrial meat complex is invisible to most. Yet, her everlasting, haunting presence there points towards the co-constitutive relationship between the financial and the ecological, uncovering the smooth flows of the financial capital into the industrial meat complex.

DEFRA, Westminster

SOW peeks over the edge of a glass panelled roof of the DEFRA building, adding pink to its colourful palette. Her eyes blink and she slowly props herself up, looming large in a rather compact environment of a narrow Marsham street. SOW bears witness to DEFRA to bring her voice to a place where political decisions about nonhuman animals are made but where nonhuman animals themselves do not appear. Yet, she does it in a playful, absurd way, attuning the viewer to the multiple contradictions that exist within the Westminster.

In their own words, DEFRA is the UK government department responsible for safeguarding the natural environment, supporting the UK’s food and farming industry, and sustaining a rural economy. DEFRA works on farming policy and regulation of farming.

SOW looks at DEFRA’s work in relation to herself and other industrially farmed animals critically. Her witnessing is a nod to the hidden processes taking place behind the closed doors: that governments are providing a steady stream of subsidies for industrial livestock and animal feed production in many countries. ⁵⁹ According to a British animal activist movement Animal Rebellion, ⁶⁰ the UK spends £3 billion a year on farming subsidies, of which at least half £1.5 billion is spent on livestock.

SOW also takes a more systemic approach to policy-making, linking industrial meat production and deforestation (which will also be discussed below when SOW appears at the Cargill Tower). Her testimony at DEFRA highlights the fact that the UK government has delayed banning imports of products linked to deforestation and degradation of forest and vital ecosystems (such as soya): the Environment Act 2021 – which bans imports of products linked to illegal deforestation – has only recently come to force and has its legal loopholes. ⁶¹

The UK government has also failed to adopt measures to reduce meat and dairy production and consumption in its Food Strategy published in June 2022. ⁶² Instead, they are working on adding to what Hansen et al. ⁶³ call the ‘new geographies of global meatification’. Together with Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB), DEFRA are working to both expand existing export markets and to identify new export markets for pork. In 2022, they announced the opening of a new export market to Chile worth £20 million, having already gained market access to Mexico, for fresh pig meat, and continuing to expand the UK’s access to the Mexico market to include pig by-products. ⁶⁴

SOW now bears a not-so-silent witness to this decision-making and, while still excluded from the process, tries to disrupt the frictionless functionings of the spaces of political-economic power with her presence. By bearing witness to DEFRA, she reminds the viewer that she too is an integral part of the political system. ⁶⁵

Cargill Tower, Seaforth, Liverpool Docks

SOW’s normally towering figure appears small from a distance, as she hangs awkwardly on the highest tower at the Docks in Seaforth. Her facial expression and body movements are barely detectable from afar. The tower is Cargill’s soya processing plant, a 40-minute bus ride from Liverpool city centre. SOW marks the main gateway for soya entering the UK on her counter map as the starting point of her metabolic intensification. ⁶⁶ She is here to testify to both her own labour under contemporary capitalism, as well as what Turnbull and Oliver ⁶⁷ call the entanglement of the corporeal with the planetary.

Soyabeans are produced on a large scale to be used as a protein source in animal feed. 76% of the world’s soya is used to feed farmed animals and 28% of this is fed directly to pigs. ⁶⁸ It takes a lot of land to produce soy to feed the staggering amount of industrially animals farmed: 131 million hectares, meaning that about one third the size of the European Union is estimated to be used to grow soya globally. ⁶⁹ In the UK, almost 90% of soy imports goes to feeding industrially farmed chickens and pigs.

SOW connects her own metabolism to the macro-scale dynamics of power. She is at the Cargill Tower and Cargill is the largest direct importer of Brazilian soya to the UK and the biggest private company in the United States. They are the third largest meat processor worldwide and the third largest greenhouse gas emitter of all global livestock companies. ⁷⁰ In 2023, Cargill made $177 billion in revenue – the highest ever for the 158-year-old company. ⁷¹ Yet, Cargill’s supply chain has been repeatedly linked with deforestation for soya in climate and nature critical ecosystems in South America. ⁷²

Weis ⁷³ describes this link between industrial agriculture and industrial meat production as the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex, showing how the two are closely entangled and how a large proportion of agricultural production worldwide is dedicated to supporting the industrial meat complex.

SOW’s metabolism is one of the components of her becoming ‘lively capital’ ⁷⁴ and here she invites the viewer to look closely at industrial pork farming metabo-politics ⁷⁵ and attune to her position in it. Her presence at Cargill Tower exposes the co-constitutive relationship between the economic and ecological and lays bare the multiscalar power relations that govern them.

Danish Crown Factory, Rochdale

SOW’s loud scream breaks the silence of a remote Kingsway business park where a newly built bacon factory in Rochdale is situated. She is on her belly, sprawled across and blocking a spacious road leading to the factory. The factory belongs to Danish Crown, the biggest pork producer in Europe. The Danish Crown bacon factory on SOW’s witnessing journey represents the complex relations behind the sites where a pig becomes ‘a substance to be processed’ ⁷⁶ and is ‘rendered’ ⁷⁷ into a pork ‘product’. Domestic production of pork in England covers only 40% of domestic consumption, and imports for cheaper industrial pig meat, mostly from Denmark, are on the rise. ⁷⁸ To be able to offer a lower price point than British producers, the Danish Crown facility in Rochdale will be solely supplied with imported Danish pork. ⁷⁹

With her embodied yet ephemeral presence, SOW brings individual animal vitality into the location that creates both physical and emotional distance for the public from the reality of slaughter and processing and frames pigs solely as animal capital. Lifeless, disembodied terms such as ‘supply’, ‘imported meat’, or ‘processing plant’, hide the acts of killing and handling of animal bodies; through witnessing this site, SOW attempts to bring industrially farmed animal bodies back into public imagination. For, as Shukin ⁸⁰ suggests, capital accumulation through the means of animal bodies is not only about ‘the enclosure of animals as food sources; it involves splitting apart relationships and knowledges forged out of everyday living together of humans and animals’.

Yet, SOW also invites a reflection on how human/nonhuman relationships have been disrupted by revealing entangled geographies of exploitation that are present in Rochdale and other pork processing facilities. It has been reported that the area was facing an issue with unemployment and Danish Crown bacon factory is set to create 300 new jobs. ⁸¹ This evokes the earlier mentioned environmental justice concerns associated with industrial pork production, and parallels human and nonhuman exploitation. Blanchette, ⁸² among others, articulates how human struggles for justice and dignified working conditions in the industrial meat complex are closely intertwined with the conditions of nonhuman vitality. This time, SOW is not looking down from atop of a building. She is closer to the ground, inviting the public to reflect on the geographies and materialities of industrial capital exploitation in times of environmental peril.

Tesco Bold Street, Liverpool and Tesco Superstore Morning Lane Hackney, London

SOW tilts her head back, looks up in the air and lets out a loud scream once again. This time it fits in with the hustle and bustle of both supermarket locations, where SOW AR users can encounter her perched on rooftops while grabbing a quick bite in Tesco express or doing their weekly shop in Tesco Superstore. Supermarkets represent one of the most tangible points of connection between humans and pigs in the industrial meat complex – the act of pig meat distribution and consumption. Yet, SOW does not desire to elicit paralysing guilt or a sense of complicity in the public – she encourages to ask questions and reflect on our everyday choices.

In 2021, each British citizen consumed an average of 21.1 kg of pork, equivalent to 1,400 rashers of bacon. ⁸³ Adams ⁸⁴ proposes a concept of the absent referent to explain why pig meat consumption is on the rise, while pigs as living animals are becoming less and less visible. By using specific language, the ‘becoming’ of meat, the transition between animal and meat is disguised. Products made from pig available in supermarkets include steaks, meat for roasting, gammon, sous vide, pork chops, pork belly, pork ribs, bacon, burgers and grills, sausages, mince and sliced cooked meats. Echoing Adams, ‘pig’ is absent from these items offered for human consumption, making them detached from its animal origins. Pig meat becomes a gastronomic category that reveals little about killing and butchering of an animal. This leads to more processed meat not sometimes even being seen as meat: Benningstad and Kunst ⁸⁵ show that it was often not categorised as such when their respondents commented on the frequency of their meat eating.

SOW also bears witness to Tesco, among other supermarkets, for a reason. To return to the entanglement of the corporeal with the planetary, ⁸⁶ Tesco in particular is the UK’s worst supermarket for forest destruction, and they are fuelling fires in forests across Brazil. ⁸⁷ They have acknowledged that a reduction in meat and dairy is necessary to meet their climate targets. Yet they continue to buy British pork from suppliers owned by the above mentioned JBS, the biggest global meat corporation, complicit in the Amazon rainforest destruction.

SOW invites us, humans, to reflect on multiple materialisms of pig meat, space and eating, and the hidden, power-laden conditions of its making. Her presence at supermarkets serves as a culmination of all invisible animal metabolic labour that has been carefully curated to create nutritional value for humans. ⁸⁸

Final remarks

This paper has developed a critical account of SOW – an AR public art intervention – and explored the artivist work that AR enables in the context of the industrial meat complex. The paper has discussed SOW as a spatial and political agent in performance of witnessing the industrial meat complex but also prefiguring alternative futures through creating affective human/nonhuman attunements at six industrial pork supply chain sites.

Firstly, through her subversive presence, SOW disrupts spatial orders of the industrial meat complex and, echoing Richardson, ⁸⁹ bears nonhuman witness to its largely invisible geographies. Richardson ⁹⁰ states that ‘contemporary witnessing exposes the primacy of relations between bodies, events, environments, worlds, and objects, even if they are obscured, denied, disavowed, or absent’. SOW’s nonhuman witnessing offers an insight into ‘a world of many worlds, after the end of the illusion that there is only one’. ⁹¹ Artivism through AR represents a new form of nonhuman testimony that disrupts not just what we see, but how we understand nonhuman agency in a digitally mediated environment. In the context of SOW, the AR pig becomes a digital witness that testifies to the hidden sites and the systemic violence of the industrial pork production. SOW exercises her subversive potential for recognising and politicising industrially farmed animal agencies and subjectivities. She unsettles the expectations of what and who is ‘in place’ ⁹² in sites associated with industrial meat production. Unlike traditional forms of activism that rely on human advocates speaking for nonhuman animals, SOW embodies a form of testimony that emerges from the subject position of the pig herself–albeit digitally constructed. SOW’s augmented reality existence allows her to be simultaneously ephemeral and persistent, everywhere and nowhere – a kind of haunting presence that troubles the boundaries between virtual and material activism.

Secondly, SOW creates affective publics by changing one’s relationship to and creating new meanings around industrial meat production geographies, making visible the co-constitutive multiscalar links between political-economic, socio-cultural and ecological. Each site where SOW appears creates a different form of affective attunement ⁹³ – so that one can not only ‘rationalise’ about industrial meat production but also ‘feel’ with SOW as a witness to this process. Papacharissi ⁹⁴ suggests that affective attunement is powered by the intensity with which one experiences both reason and emotion. SOW’s presence as an AR public art intervention is intense. She is giant, she asserts her animate, lively body in places that dismantle animal vitality through commodification and economisation logics. She appears as an agential subject capable of making and re-making of space, challenging the objectification of nonhuman animals that makes the industrial meat production possible. The chosen sites ‘become’ through SOW from animal-less, anonymous spaces of power into spaces of power constituted through animal bodies as landscapes of production.

Thirdly, Richardson ⁹⁵ offers a provocation that nonhuman witnessing ‘insists not simply upon communication but on the demand for response and address’. Echoing that, Papacharissi ⁹⁶ also suggests that affective publics have capacity to disrupt dominant political narratives by presenting underrepresented viewpoints. SOW’s interventionist force expressed through AR offers novel ways of generating ‘provocative awareness’ ⁹⁷ about the industrial meat production and human/nonhuman relations in it. She stimulates inquiry in her viewers, simultaneously mobilising them to challenge the industrial meat production status quo. SOW does so by activating different ways of knowing in a transformative, immersive experience that invites co-creation and engagement with one’s senses. SOW defies anthropocentric binary thinking, blurring the lines between digital and material, virtual and actual, public and private, human and nonhuman, artist and public, activist and non-activist. SOW is not simply a technologically mediated encounter, ‘nor an object in relation to which we are servomechanisms, but rather a pathway through a relational ontology’. ⁹⁸ The entanglements she creates defy capitalist commodifying ethos and open avenues for reflecting on alternative forms of engagement with nonhuman agencies, within and beyond meat production spaces. She thus creates spaces of encounters derived from non-hierarchical practices of engagement, collaboration and embodied co-creation, encouraging human viewers to recognise our response-ability ⁹⁹ for the world we co-constitute.AR artivism therefore is a distinctive form of spatial and political practice. It reconfigures not only what we see but how we feel about and with nonhuman others, creating new possibilities for nonhuman solidarity in digitally mediated environments. SOW ‘aims to produce a new perception of the world and therefore create a commitment to its transformation’, ¹⁰⁰ while asking a broader question about the future of human and nonhuman coexistence, relationship and mutual responsibility, ¹⁰¹ vital in the context of industrial meat production in the anthropocene.