In Viborg Kunsthal, Denmark, Jens Settergren’s “Milk Plus” unveils the cultural and posthuman implications of milk, redefining its aesthetic and symbolic essence in a techno-capitalist world.
The Danish artist has created a multilayered film installation that interrogates the transformation of milk from a primordial substance rooted in care and creation myths to a hyper-commercialized entity deeply entwined with posthuman ideologies and cognitive capitalism. Settergren dissects milk’s evolution through the lens of corporate branding, mythology, and technology, unveiling a narrative that is at once historical, speculative, and unsettlingly familiar.
The work begins by drawing a line from the maternal origins of milk to its appropriation by the iconic got milk? campaign, a cultural artifact that recast milk as a symbol of productivity and optimization. Settergren scrutinizes how this marketing juggernaut imbued milk with an eroticized and mechanized identity, replacing its ancient associations with nourishment and care. On Settergren’s freestanding LED screen, pulsating pharmacy-green visuals and quasi-science fiction imagery unfold, presenting milk as both sustainer and progenitor of a synthetic future. A surreal, digitally-rendered baby narrates its own gestation within this fluid-driven universe, echoing visions of a world where birth and consciousness are untethered from the biological human body.
Settergren’s work invites viewers to consider milk’s contemporary role as a cultural proxy for posthuman aspirations. As simulated milk cascades across the screen, its visual fluidity suggests an aesthetic that mirrors the techno-capitalist desire for seamlessness and efficiency. The installation’s interplay of sound and imagery channels the aesthetic rhetoric of biotech and pharmaceutical advertisements, implicating milk as an emblem of cognitive capitalism—a system where the mind itself becomes commodified, a site of production and optimization. Settergren posits that this trajectory might extinguish the very subjective consciousness that makes art, and life, distinctly human.
Yet, Milk Plus resists despair. It encourages us to see potential in the imperfections of human perception—the subjective misinterpretations that resist mechanization and reductive commodification. Settergren gestures toward a reclamation of milk’s metaphorical "milkiness," a concept that embraces fluid, non-binary, and personal associations rather than fixed industrial definitions. Whether evoking the shimmering opacity of sake or the cloudy latex of an opium poppy, these images suggest a path forward that prioritizes poetic misprision over the rigid clarity demanded by AI and market logic.
Through its elegant confrontation with the synthetic and symbolic, Milk Plus challenges us to reimagine the narratives that dominate our understanding of the human condition. It asks us to dream beyond mechanized optimization, to revel in the milkiness of life itself, and to defend the errant beauty of flawed, subjective consciousness.
