Date: September 10

Time: 5-6:30pm

Location: CBIS Auditorium

In the year 2000, Ionat Zurr and I grow our first piece of cultured meat as an artistic intervention. In 2003, we eat lab grown meat as part of our Disembodied Cuisine installation/performance, with other projects to follow. Our interest was always to do with the profound questions that the idea of growing meat from no bodies raise. This talk will explore and unpack our artistic projects that deals with the ways current applications of biological knowledge confuse our cultural understanding and relationships with the concepts of life, nature and land. It will present the ideas of Metabolic Rift Technologies and highlight the urgent need to culturally scrutinise Prometheanism; extractive approaches that considers Earth as a resource for human needs and wants where human innovation and technology will solve environmental problems. Metabolic rift technologies call for separation from nature following a similar mindset that leads tech companies to promote the Metaverse as a nature free site for human habitation, obscuring the environmental costs of such existence. The talk will conclude with another Promethean story, covering the discovery, at the Orkney Islands, of material evidence relating to the story of Frankenstein.