Multimedia Investigations
Research Projects
Design Projects
Related Projects*
Materiality is a research and design collective organised by Peter Brooks and based in Bristol.
* Related projects are by Peter Brooks before forming Materiality.
Research Projects
Design Projects
Related Projects*
Materiality is a research and design collective organised by Peter Brooks and based in Bristol.
* Related projects are by Peter Brooks before forming Materiality.
Chicken Shit/Cachu Iar
Highlight: Exhibited and presented at Hay Literature Festival with Friends of the River Wye.
MA research at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths.
Presented at Hay Literature Festival, Oxford Real Farming Conference and the European Permaculture Community Forum.
Exhibited at Hay Literature Festival, St Anne’s House Bristol, Goldsmiths University of London.
Published as a chapter the Dark Mountain Journal.
Adapted to audio for Farmerama Radio Podcast’s award-winning Less and Better series.
The River Wye is on the verge of ecological collapse, and turns green with algae blooms each summer as a consequence of nutrient pollution. The Wye flows through the area with the most poultry factory farms in the UK.
White stripes can be found on chicken breasts sourced from the Wye catchment. These are lines of fat that have replaced failed muscle fibres, causing chronic pain for the chicken. This is likely an autoimmune reaction triggered by an overload of nutrient-rich feed in the factory farm.
Factory Farm 3D reconstruction:
- Images of algae blooms were sourced from social media and mapped by location and date to reveal an increase in blooms each summer, occurring earlier and further upstream each year.
- A photograph of a farm in the supply chain was used to build an accurate 3D model of factory farming conditions. Architectural drawings were created to visualise the scale and density of chickens more accurately and effectively than photography.
- Farm location data sourced from CPRE and Friends of the River Wye was used to create a map of the areas at risk of nutrient pollution, by indicating the fields most likely to be spread with manure from factory farms.
The research has been published as a chapter in the Dark Mountain Journal. A draft map using this methdology at a national scale was published in Nick Newman’s ‘Protest Architecture’ from RIBA.
Chicken Shit/Cachu Iar was adapted to audio for Farmerama Radio Podcast’s ‘Less and Better’ series, which won the 2024 Independent Podcast Awards Environment & Natural World category.