Description
This paper examines and experiments with scale and the materialities of scale as world-making practices that shape human-cow relationships in dairy farming. Through camera interfaces installed in cow barns, farmers carry their cows with them wherever they go—miniaturised and embedded in their mobile devices. Here, we approach the digital portable cow’s materialities not merely as structural properties of the photographic subject but as surface conditions, where the scale, resolution, textures, and technical affordances of digital imaging actively mediate human-cow relations. As farmers pan, tilt, or zoom their cameras, the cow—reduced, augmented, fragmented, and reconfigured on the screen—generates new relational systems in which her digital materialities and textures shape how she is perceived and engaged with. Challenging dominant historical visual representations of cows in the food industry, this paper explores how the material and textural conditions of digital imaging—its resolution, depth, scale, and sensorial qualities—reshape the meanings of cows in dairy farming. Drawing on archival research, ethnographic fieldwork with dairy farmers in France and the United Kingdom, as well as Portable Cow, a limited-edition 3D-printed artwork that began as a miniature exhibition of images and objects in a box before being enlarged on a gallery wall, we examine how the textures and sensorialities of digital cow images function not as mere representations but as active agents in human-cow relationships. By foregrounding the photographic materialities of cow scale, we reveal how textural and technological specificities inscribe new modes of care, perception, and control in contemporary dairy farming.| Period | 17 Jun 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Out of Scale - From “Miniature” Material Cultures to the Anthropic Principle |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | London, United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |