Food prices are going to rise in the future due to lack of production capacity, which decreases inversely with the global population growth. The food industry is exploring new possibilities and alternative capacities for future food production within the fields of synthetic biology and biotechnology. The HuMCC—Human Molecular Colonization Capacity project focuses on the food industry’s biotechnology production, and in its final form is represented as a highly designed yoghurt package, containing the product of an artist’s enzyme, which is offered for public consumption while at the same time the package is represented as a hybrid-art readymade object exhibited in a gallery. The project stands as a social darwinism experience paraphrased within the realm of the industrial food-chain process.
The HuMCC project paraphrases a concept for the waste of productive forces explored by Marx, who established a connection between rising levels of accumulation of capital and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, related to the exploitation of labor time—by new waves of technological innovation. This is shown by the genetically transformed microorganism producing lactic acid (as one of the most-used additives in the contemporary food industry) after being synthetically designed by the code of the artist’s gene composed with the code of a yeast gene and transformed back into the same microorganism. The project is therefore located in theSoylent Green paradigm where the fear of ecological cataclysm turns into a subtle critique of corporate cannibalism: not only are corporations actually using people to continue to maintain themselves in their own lives but these same people are simultaneously yearning for those products! "Maya Yoghurt" is an overidentification tactical media product as means of producing pressure on the population—this infinite desire of capital to continue developing regardless of whether that would include even (sublime) levels of cannibalism.
Biography
Intermedia artist Maja Smrekar was born in Slovenia. Her main interests are based at the phenomenology of perception and the concept of life. She has been awarded at the Cynetart festival 2012 by the European Centre for Arts Hellerau (Dresden/Germany) with the 1st prize, Honorary mention at the Ars Electronica festival 2013 (Linz/Austria), as well as the Golden Bird Award 2013 - the national award for special achivements at the field of visual art by the Liberal Academy, Association for Political Democracy and Liberalism Research (Ljubljana/Slovenia) for the project Hu.M.C.C. MajaSmrekar lives and works in Ljubljana, Slovenia.