In today's screen saturated culture, perceptions of food are overwhelmingly formed by images circulated via the internet and mobile. The Facebook game FarmVille is the subject of Kheti Badi (Shah, 2015), a photographic artwork reflexively engaging with the contemporary scenario of ‘post-photography'. The work comprises not of photographs taken with a traditional camera but of screenshots of a farm and its holdings as displayed in Farmville; the highly compressed jpegs cropped and resized to the point of destabilizing visual coherence are depictions not of pastoral landscapes but of computer vision and the programmable character of photography. While photography remains an instrument for recording material realities, its power extends toward feeding back into the very processes through which science and technology modify food production. This chapter explores how Kheti Badi, through a series of hyper artificial and un-photographic images, shows the constructed nature of both what we put our hands on in the supermarket and see in advertising's dreamscapes.
Conference on human vision, visual processing, and digital display part of SPIE/SPSE symposium on electronic imaging science and technology san jose convention center, san jose, california february 24-March 1, 1991