Two meatgrowers meet in a processing plant. They move automatically through each day, longing for one another, as the viewer—a silent friend and confidant—looks on. This is the premise of artist Rindon Johnson’s Meat Growers: A Love Story, commissioned by Rhizome and Tentacular 2019. The virtual reality play is set in the year 2100, in a post-Green New Deal Napa Valley where there are no more paved roads, trees abound, and all the strip malls have been turned into food forests and meatgrowing plants. Gender is never mentioned, and race is ambiguous. The viewer’s character carpools to work in a solar VW bug, listening to their colleague’s enthusiastic monologue, and watching the verdant landscape roll by.

The work will premier at Tentacular 2019 in Madrid this November, and will be presented as part of Rhizome and the New Museum’s VR platform First Look in early 2020. The work is commissioned as part of Rhizome’s 2020 research theme Making Kin, which aims to reconsider the relationship between nature and technology and the role of networks and infrastructure in a time of climate crisis. 


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