Al Grano: Crop-Cropping Sugar Daddy

Re-mixed video-loop - 2012

Screenings
VideoAkt 03 International Biennial, Barcelona, Spain (June 2013)
Video Guerrillah-Video in the Built Environment, Sao Paulo, Brazil (November 2012)

AL GRANO: Crop-Cropping Sugar Daddy, 2012. Still from video 3mins 08 secs duration, shown in continuous loop.
AL GRANO: Crop-Cropping Sugar Daddy, 2012. Still from video 3mins 08 secs duration, shown in continuous loop.
AL GRANO: Crop-Cropping Sugar Daddy, 2012. Still from video 3mins 08 secs duration, shown in continuous loop.
AL GRANO: Crop-Cropping Sugar Daddy, 2012. Still from video 3mins 08 secs duration, shown in continuous loop.
AL GRANO: Crop-Cropping Sugar Daddy, 2012. Still from video 3mins 08 secs duration, shown in continuous loop.

“Al Grano” (grain) is a multi-year and multi-sited project in which I use a small grain of corn to inspect monumental debates about genetically modified technology. Parallel projects nested in “Al Grano” address what’s involved in a disaster that creates unbalance, deconstruction and crisis in a myriad of interconnected registers. One of these nested projects is the video: “Al Grano: Crop-Cropping Sugar Daddy.” The title plays with the words –crop and cropping– used in agriculture as well as in digital art practices.

In agriculture, maize crop and cropping practices are engineered to supply Corn Fructose Syrup that sweetens an array of unhealthful packaged foodstuffs found in regular supermarkets - from Pop-Tarts to ham. Specific genes are introduced in laboratories into the maize genome resulting in crop modifications, and then, industrially driven monocropping is practiced over huge agricultural lands adversely impacting the environment. Further, these agricultural systems generate a pervasive money-spinning loop of government subsidies and corporate control, creating in farmers corrupt dependencies on these sugar daddies.

In digital practices crop and cropping are functions provided by most software programs allowing the user to take parts of an object and recombine them with other elements. In “Al Grano: Crop-Cropping Sugar Daddy” I incorporate these visual strategies to echo the conceptual issues discussed above. Still images of packaged foodstuffs containing Corn Fructose Syrup (Pop-Tarts, Quaker bars, Coffee-Mate, Beef-Polish-Sausage…) and images of transgenic yellow corn seeds were submitted to a digital crop-cropping system, and then were recombined with cornfields video footage in looped sequences that reminisce the cascading tempo of corn harvested via agricultural threshing machines.

Year of production: 2012

Duration: 3mins 08secs (shown in continuous loop)

CREDITS:
Pat Badani: Director - producer - camera operator - editor
Desiree Agngarayngay: Video Technical Assistant

Pat Badani