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Project Description:
Chiang Mai-based media artist Wuttin Chansataboot works across moving image, multimedia installation, and digital systems, exploring how perception, identity, and meaning are shaped through technological mediation.
In Nongpho, Wuttin turned this inquiry toward the declining business and culture of dairy farming, explored through site visits and interviews with local farmers. He finally chose to work closely with Cow 148 at Tienpanpong Farm in Village 7, soon to be retired for insufficient milk production. She became a symbol and lens onto the shrinking number of dairy farmers in Nongpho, a decline driven not only by low milk prices but also by a disappearing next generation, as the village’s youth leave for work in bigger cities and other professions.
With the kind permission of the Tiempanpong farm’s owner, Prajuab, Wuttin was able to closely observe Cow 148, install a CCTV feed, and arrange milk and blood tests for DNA extraction in collaboration with Mahidol University. Eventually, she was transported to PR Genetics’ facility for Ovum Pick-Up and In-Vitro Fertilisation.
These elements were re-elaborated for exhibition, rendering the biological and social vanishing of dairy farming visible and audible: droplets of raw milk, sourced from Cow 148, are released from an overhead udder module through four mechanical teats, falling onto vibration sensors that convert the impact into synthesized sound. The release pattern follows DNA code extracted from the cow’s milk as a sonification of the rhythm of life. Around this central installation, a live video feed connects the space to the cow herself, while a second video draws on interviews with farming families who, like Cow 148, may have no one to ‘continue their trade’. A liquid nitrogen tank holds Cow 148’s IVF-generated embryo, its cellular structure made visible through video and lightbox images, as a fragile, surrogate trace of a halted kinship, a lineage, and a livelihood, on the edge.
Together, these elements build a conceptual parallel between Cow 148’s impending retirement and the declining dairy business shedding light on a potentially disrupting life and cultural cycle.
On rural bio-art-work:
Wuttin Chansataboot’s practice belongs to what he himself describes as a subset of media art: bioart as an expansion of the artistic toolbox into the laboratory, where organic, living matter becomes both material and medium. In Vanishing Breed, he focuses on the biological infrastructure of cow farming, that quietly underpins a way of life, easy to overlook as distant and alien, but which is in fact central to Nongpho’s economy, ecology, and survival.
Science here is not foreign to the village, imported from outside. Veterinary care, genetics, and reproductive biotechnology already sit at the foundation of dairy farming itself, in artificial insemination, health monitoring, and breed management. It is performed by and with farmers who may not call themselves scientists, but whose daily life already runs on ‘products of science’: the feed, the medicine, the milking technology. By working directly with Cow 148, real veterinary procedures, real DNA extraction, a real IVF process, Wuttin doesn’t stage science as spectacle; he makes legible scientific literacy (parts of) the village already practices, and on which its survival depends.
The bio-art-work is also possible within a specific ecosystem: access to labs, IVF technology, and scientific collaborators, built on Thailand’s growing biotechnological infrastructure and sometimes its regulatory grey zones. In this, Wuttin joins a small but internationally connected Thai bioart community, currently reinventing the field through local knowledge and practices.
Yet the work doesn’t shy from its own difficulty. There is a provocation the artist seems to invite rather than resolve. Producing an actual embryo, rather than simulating the process, is central to the piece as doing carries a different weight than merely representing. But this insistence on the real raises real questions. What responsibility follows, toward the cow and her frozen offspring, from this artistic rehearsal in surrogate life? Vanishing Breed • [๑๔๘] holds these questions open rather than answering them.
Project Description and Curatorial Response by Chiara Giardi
*** Full credits and a list of collaborators are coming soon. ***
