cocoa — a blurry metamorphosis

Cocoa is an interdisciplinary design project that conducts visual research on the production, supply chain and marketing of cocoa between the Netherlands and Ivory Coast, with an interest in the body within global food systems, the construction of value, the transformation and extraction of landscapes and the global dependencies between producing and consuming countries. As the visual material is especially dense around the production of cocoa in the Ivory Coast and around the marketing of chocolate in the Netherlands, a very present absence of images stays in-between and leaves a blurriness to the transformative processes within the supply chain.

By feeding an AI (machine learning) with our visual research collected through image searches on the internet, we visualised the blur of transformation processes within the supply chain in a physical, circular installation with multiple screens. The video generated by the AI was projected onto the floor in the middle of the installation. Later we transferred the spatiality of the physical installation into the virtual one as you can see in the video.