SOW and augmented reality artivism

As part of geography’s creative (re)turn, art interventions can serve as a powerful force for transforming individuals and their imaginaries, particularly at the age of the anthropocene. This paper develops a critical account of SOW – an augmented reality (AR) public art intervention taking form of a giant female pig appearing in six sites linked to industrial pork production across England. It explores the conceptual work AR does at the intersection of art and activism – artivism – through analysing SOW as a spatial and political agent in performance of witnessing the industrial meat complex but also prefiguring alternative food production futures. SOW as an AR intervention reconfigures how activism is enacted in public space: she serves as a nonhuman witness while also enabling affective attunement between humans and nonhumans at the industrial pork production sites. The paper discusses how SOW’s witnessing aims to ‘bring to the fore the overlooked and to challenge the settled’ by making the invisible spaces of industrial pork production visible and challenging power regimes within them. It also considers SOW’s potential for creating moments of nonhuman encounter that generates affective responses, activating different ways of knowing through a co-creative, embodied experience.