Human Molecular Colonisation Capacity

Maja Smrekar / Hu.M.C.C. 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. Hu.M.C.C.- Human Molecular Colonization Capacity project dwells on the food industry biotechnological production that is in its final form represented as a highly designed yogurt package, containing the product of an artist´s enzyme, which is offered to the public to consume 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 set paraphrased within the realm of industrial food chain process. The Hu.M.C.C. project paraphrases a concept for the waste of productive forces explored by Marx, who established a connection between rising levels of accumulation of the capital and the fall of tendential rate of profit, related to the exploitation of time spent at labor – by new waves of technological inovation - which is shown in the project by 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. Therefore the Hu.M.C.C. dwells in the so called "Soylent 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 this same people at the same time yearn for those same products! Hence Maya Yoghurt product stands as an overidentification tactical media, paraphrased as means of producing pressure on the population - this infinite desire of capital to continue to develop, no matter if that would include even (sublime) levels of cannibalism.