500 volts, 800 hertz,1.25 amperes
Now is an age of selective knowledge, where the emphasis is on understanding the events of each other’s lives, but not the events that life is founded on. Among the victims of shifting focus is food, so fundamental to life, but so largely ignored as a system. In this digital age, everyone knows what was for lunch, but not how it got there. This project attempts to integrate the primacy of meat production into the public ethos.
A foundational practice of global culture, animal processing has economic, historic, symbolic, and environmental meaning and influence. And yet the current vision of the slaughterhouse is fragmented and polarized, contrasting sterility and precision with carnage and inhumanity, forgotten and ignored out of horror or disconcern. What was once a pig is now bacon; what happens in-between is something people are largely unconcerned with. This is not meant as an exercise in ethics, but rather an opportunity for understanding and synchronicity with a fundamental reality of life… and death.
As a program the slaughterhouse is a paramount example of the factory predicament. Worker conditions, animal treatment, sanitation and corruption of power are all highly scrutinized. Through transparency this project seeks to reduce public stigma with a promotion of observational scrutiny rather than speculative criticism. Not only does this interaction work on the minds of the public, but also on the business of the slaughterhouse.
500 volts, 800 hertz, and 1.25 amperes is what it takes to effectively kill a pig. As a slaughterhouse capable of killing, butchering, processing, and packaging 200 pigs an hour, the project is both employment and home for 120 workers, and combines residential, industrial, and commercial programs. It invites the public to access the site though relationship to the context and public programs, including green space and market.
A foundational practice of global culture, animal processing has economic, historic, symbolic, and environmental meaning and influence. And yet the current vision of the slaughterhouse is fragmented and polarized, contrasting sterility and precision with carnage and inhumanity, forgotten and ignored out of horror or disconcern. What was once a pig is now bacon; what happens in-between is something people are largely unconcerned with. This is not meant as an exercise in ethics, but rather an opportunity for understanding and synchronicity with a fundamental reality of life… and death.
As a program the slaughterhouse is a paramount example of the factory predicament. Worker conditions, animal treatment, sanitation and corruption of power are all highly scrutinized. Through transparency this project seeks to reduce public stigma with a promotion of observational scrutiny rather than speculative criticism. Not only does this interaction work on the minds of the public, but also on the business of the slaughterhouse.
500 volts, 800 hertz, and 1.25 amperes is what it takes to effectively kill a pig. As a slaughterhouse capable of killing, butchering, processing, and packaging 200 pigs an hour, the project is both employment and home for 120 workers, and combines residential, industrial, and commercial programs. It invites the public to access the site though relationship to the context and public programs, including green space and market.
A manual with additional information on culture, equipment, and inspiration was also produced earlier in the semester and largely revised for the final as a documentation of research and logic. The following is a partial documentation.
