A virtual, female pig has appeared on top of Barclays’ Canary Wharf HQ, two Tesco stores in London and Liverpool, DEFRA and other locations in a new experimental augmented reality (AR) app created by artists, Naho Matsuda and collective A Drift of Us.
SOW AR, which is free to download from today via the Apple Store or Google Play, has been created as a symbol of protest and resistance, exposing companies and the government’s links to industrial meat production. The project has been supported by Greenpeace UK as part of the NGO’s Bad Taste project.
Taking the form of a digital sculpture, SOW AR invites the public to visualise the connections between our industrial food system and the destruction of climate and the natural world. While using the app on a smartphone the public can expect to encounter the huge, sometimes sleeping, sometimes huffing, twitching or squealing female pig.
SOW can be seen watching and weighing down on the buildings of some of the UK’s biggest corporate and government actors in our industrial food system. Barclays financed the world’s biggest meat company and notorious forest destroyer, JBS, to the tune of £4.8 billion between 2015 and 2022, Tesco refuses to drop JBS as a supplier, and the government has failed to prevent deforestation-linked products from entering the UK. Meanwhile, JBS is planning to list shares on the New York Stock Exchange, which would give the company access to more money to further expand.
SOW can also be found at animal feed supplier Cargill’s soya plant in Liverpool, and at a newly opened Danish Crown plant in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, where Europe’s biggest pork producer will process cheaper and solely imported pork from Denmark.
The project builds upon a rise in the use of AR in contemporary art in public space. These include works such as Nancy Baker Cathill’s, “State Property” (2023), an exploding uterus floating above the Supreme Court, and a protest artwork addressing the evisceration of abortion rights in the US. Similarly, SOW AR is used to captivate audiences and incite meaningful dialogue, encouraging the public to playfully engage with and question the world around them.
The artists are experimenting with the rules and possibilities of AR, moving beyond traditional brand subvertising techniques within this new digital medium. Once downloaded, the user’s smartphone camera turns into a director lens in the app, encouraging people to record the digital sculpture in a changed reality.
Artist Naho Matsuda said:
“SOW is a female breeding pig, she’s monstrous and beautiful at the same time. But similar to the industrial meat industry, SOW is only visible if you choose to look.
“Working with visual artist Luigi Honorat, [3] we have created SOW AR, a digital sculpture that identifies the key players in the violent and exploitative supply chain of industrial meat, and especially pork, production.
“We hope people will travel to see SOW in the places we’ve identified. It becomes a bit of an adventure to visit these sites since some of the locations are inconvenient to get to and may appear anonymous, sitting on large industrial estates not designed for visitors.”
“AR technology is rapidly evolving and offers new and experimental ways to share art in an ephemeral but powerful way. We hope SOW helps viewers to visualise the invisible structures in their everyday lives and to imagine a world where power is divided differently.”
The artists’ virtually disruptive app highlights how all of the institutions featured are complicit in the destruction of climate-critical ecosystems like the Amazon rainforest, which is not only decimating unique and important wildlife species, it’s forcing Indigenous communities off land they have owned for centuries. The global industrial food system is also impacting nature, our health and the cost of living here in the UK.
Earlier this month, the UN reported the worldwide cost to health and the environment caused by industrial food production to be £8tn a year. FAO-OECD’s latest projections also reveal global poultry consumption is set to increase by 15%, pork by 11%, and beef by 10% by 2032. A new report from McKinsey also warned that up to 80 million hectares of additional land, equivalent to all of Brazil’s cropland by 2030, would be needed for the world to meet the projected demand for food, animal feed and fuel.
Daniela Montalto, Greenpeace UK forests campaigner, said:
“Stopping climate and nature breakdown demands transformative changes to our food system. SOW AR is an inventive way of making this connection explicit, showing that only by cutting our meat production and consumption will we free up enough cropland to feed people first, reduce livestock emissions and create more space for nature.
“Industrial meat companies, UK banks financing them, and supermarkets whose supply chains are driving the destruction of critical ecosystems, must be government-regulated, forcing them to align with international goals for climate and nature protection.
“The government must also support UK farmers to transition to climate-, people- and nature-friendly farming. Meanwhile, imports of soya and other animal feed crops that drive deforestation must be banned and the 10 million tonnes of annual UK food waste must be reduced, with what’s left used as animal feed.”
Download SOW AR App for free on the Apple Store or Google Play.
Visit sow-project.com for more information.