Published this month under the American scientific journal Nature. The artists talking about their fictional multi-installation Dead Meat ii.. An interactive space where the public wear plastic coats and boots to avoid getting their hands and clothes bloody. The meat covers the walls and there are computerised like systems to control the doors opening and closes.

“Blood oozed from the ceiling more freely in the next room. A few splashes landed on the hood of one patron. After a whispered conversation with his partner, they headed back towards the entrance. I pitied them for their squeamishness. I’d refused the plastic coverings, preferring to wander the halls in a mini skirt and tank top. I wanted to feel the blood on my skin.”
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v488/n7409/full/488124a.html

Reading the story I can smell the blood and relived the touch of the meat on my hands. The meat i imagine is beef, a meat I don’t eat. I find it too tuff, not liking the feel of it on my teeth and it upsets my stomach. But this is cooked meet, not the raw meat the article talks about. I can clearly imagine the horror or seeing a room of meet and blood dripping from the ceiling.

It reminds me of the great Fredrick Pohl story The Space Merchants, about the workers in the future who harvest the meat from a giant chicken. The walk around the inside and look after the different parts of it, cutting off parts of it before they went off.

“It was a great concrete dome, concrete-floored. Chicken Little Filled most of it. She was a gray-brown, rubbery hemisphere some fifteen yards in diameter. Dozens of pipes ran into her pulsating flesh. You could see that she was alive.