THE VEGETABLE VENDETTA
In the Vegetable Vendetta AI empowers vegetables with the marketing skills of the biggest fast food and luxury brands to promote potatoes and broccoli.
The installation asks visitors to scan potatoes or broccoli using a camera. The scan is used to create an AI-generated movie starring the vegetable and using the persuasive marketing strategies of brands like McDonald’s and Prada. The prototype was made public after nearly a year of development within the Hungry EcoCities program.
The food system
Artist Jeroen van der Most: “Our food system is broken. We eat overly processed foods, there’s an obesity epidemic, and food supply chains are unsustainable. A system kept in place by an imbalance of power. Major brands promote their products with big budgets and skills that small local producers of healthy vegetables don’t have. AI enables small players to make great content without the budgets of their big competitors.”
An exhibit of the project at PoCo Museum, Tallinn, Estonia.
Power
The Vegetable Vendetta is an experiment with AI to fight the power of large food enterprises. The prototype implements persuasive strategies on the spot that portray the vegetable in happy social moments or in luxurious other-worldly environments with handsome looking people. By moving a real vegetable in front of the camera, participants can change the content and adjust strategies in the movies.
The content of the installation is created with a range of the latest video and image generation AI. It’s combined with AI that’s capable of recognizing and extracting vegetables from camera footage. The generated AI content forms the movie scenes and foregrounds and backgrounds around the scanned vegetables. Algorithms blend the different parts into a fluid moving image in realtime.
The future
The project offers a peek into a future where generative AI will be omnipresent and will shake up the balance of power in industries and marketing, blending the digital and physical. Could AI be a Robin Hood of food that empowers the smallest players in the food system? Overall, the project is an experiment that aims to disrupt the marketing of our food, but most of all hopes to persuade viewers to fall for the charm of the humble vegetables in their AI-fueled vendetta…
The Vegetable Vendetta was developed in cooperation with:
As part of the European funded project Hungry EcoCities. The project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement 101069990 and is part of the S+T+ARTS program on promoting art-driven innovation through Science+Technology+Arts.
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The Vegetable Vendetta at PoCo Museum, Tallinn. Picture by Triin Mangusson.
