Cow photo finish

Cow Photo Finish. Text by James Duncan Clarke

The history of human competition is inherently linked to technology. Since the days when better rocks meant sharper spears and bigger fires meant warmer caves, the advantage provided by one’s tools could mean the difference between life and death.

Today, away from the conventional arenas of modern warfare and elite sport, society’s quest for absolutes – definitive winners, losers, and zero-sum games – has become increasingly acute. Beyond the individual, we see this competition manifest itself within almost all of our man-made systems, from our political institutions through to our attention-hungry devices. Competitive human nature has now been co-opted and leveraged by the tax-averse barons of Silicon Valley, who operate a profit model largely built upon exacerbating differences and ruthlessly exploiting psychological weaknesses. Big Tech’s own relentless quest for marginal gains now plays out 24/7 across the terrain of twitching retinas and swiping thumbs. More likes, more shares, more follows, more friends, more content, more clicks, more data.

A backdrop of commerce and corruption was also instrumental in the technological developments which led to the introduction of the photo finish within sport. Despite being used in the Olympics as far back as 1912, the real innovations within photo finish technology emerged from the United States in the 1940s in order to increase trust within the gambling worlds of horse and dog racing. Its subsequent refinement and transfer to the world of human endeavours was inevitable.

Julian Benjamin’s work, Cow Photo Finish, is a deliberately absurd appropriation of sprint finish tech, redeploying it within the setting of the English rural-industrial landscape.

Having located a dairy producer in the Hampshire countryside, Benjamin painted his own white line across a dirt track and proceeded to capture, pixel by pixel, the absolute mundanity of a herd of cows en route to the milking shed.

When approaching a modern sprint finish photograph, the viewer needs to do so with a suspension of photography’s norms. The surrealness – all warped limbs and sterile background – results from its inverting of the traditional photographic axes. Whereas a standard photograph shows spatial locations at a single point in time, a photo finish confounds us, at least initially, by showing the same location at various points in time.

Benjamin has long been obsessed with exploring the limits of photography as a scientific tool, often extracting precise data and then flipping the evidence on its head. Embedded within this particular act of appropriation is a desire to a prod and push at the edges of the camera’s capabilities. As well as the occasional Dali-esque disruption caused by a pausing cow, scattered within the tapestry-like panorama are sporadic cuts, exposing the camera’s fallibility when pushed beyond its limits by a 20-minute data-capture session.

The work lends an additional voice to the conversation between Clare Strand’s Cyclegraphs Camera Work and the Gilbreths’ early twentieth-century studies of time and motion. We can see the influence of technical pioneers such as Eadweard Muybridge, alongside conceptual artists such as Ed Ruscha, whose own panorama, Every Building On The Sunset Strip, is a clear reference point in both form and deadpan approach.

Thematically, a line can also be drawn from works such as Mishka Henner’s satellite images of vast US cattle feedlots, which capture the apocalyptic end game of the industrial farming complex.

The act of traversing Benjamin’s 15-metre long work brings with it a significant amount of dwell time. Throughout the journey, one has time to flip between viewing the scene as a whole, or interrogating each cow individually. Naturally, we anthropomorphise the participants – the speed demon up front, the wildly long-necked inquisitor, and the inevitable straggler bringing up the rear. Some may ponder upon the vast state subsidies, hyper-competition and fractional profit margins coded deep within this landscape, and how it is only by way of an exceptional genetic mutation that this conspicuously Western system can even exist at all.

At a time when our relationships with data, experts and knowledge have become increasingly fractured, Benjamin’s work poses important questions around who and what we choose to believe. After initially luring us in with its lurid greens and cartoon-esque cows, it is a work which continues to grow in gravity the longer you spend with it. It is difficult to leave having not paused – even for one-thousandth of a second – to consider our own respective races: where we are, who is watching us, and how far we have left to run.

Cow Production

In what is becoming something of a theme, this work looks to the animal kingdom for its central protagonist. In this case, the domesticated ungulate, Bos taurus. I came to these ruminant mammals with the aim of simulating the conditions of a competitive sports arena. Specifically, the finish line and photo finish tech that records what passes across it.

Photo finish takes its place in the glut of technology that mediates our worldly experience. A method of extracting accurate data from human exertion and a rare example of a photograph delivering a genuinely decisive moment. Deployment and effective use of photo finish apparatus is contingent on certain factors: namely a subject moving at constant speed, in one direction, in a prescribed space, across a fixed line. Criteria common to the athletics track, racecourse and coincidentally, dairy herd on their way to be milked.

Having established a conceptual link between elite human athlete and lactating bovid, the latter were duly located and coopted for active service. Thus it was that Don (veteran photo finish technician) and I found ourselves in the Hampshire countryside, at Peak House Farm.

Peak House is a dairy farm with a herd of about one hundred cows. Breeds include Holstein, Norwegian Red, Montebeliarde and British Friesian crossed with Brown Swiss. The cows graze in a field a few hundred metres from the main farm buildings. Twice a day, the gate is opened, leaving the cows to make their own way down a track to the milking facility. It’s a well rehearsed routine and the cows go willingly. They’re not coerced or goaded in any way, but move in their own time and at their own pace.

With knowledge of the milking schedule, and mindful of the technical requirements of the apparatus, we set up the photo-finish camera, painted a line in the dirt (principally to give a whiter background), and decamped to a discreet distance. The camera ran uninterrupted for the time it took the cows to pass in front of it. 

As absurd as this operation may seem, it nonetheless yields data: the position of the cows and intervals between them, accurate to one thousandth of a second. In deference to scientific methodology, the cows were recorded with the same technical rigour as world class athletes.

The data gathered has no practical application, nor can it be monetised. But it exists in context and stands in contrast to a reductive worldview in which the value of things is defined solely by their profitability. The harvesting of useless data from unwitting tetrapods is thus offered as a contribution to a wider discourse around human-data relations. Herded and corralled in the same digitised economic landscape, our own data as much a commodity as the milk our subjects are on their way to deliver.

So what of the image itself? Perhaps more data visualisation than photograph, the image is a technical one, restricted to two dimensions. The vertical axis is spatial, the horizontal axis, temporal. The image is without depth or emotional content. Nothing here of the collective joy of winning or the solitary anguish of losing. The camera scans the world as dispassionately as a checkout scans the barcode on a cabbage.

Once data has been extracted, the photo finish image is more or less redundant. Those seeking a more meaningful relationship with the image must make do with what’s on offer: a heavily compressed lo res jpeg file. A poor image from the outset. Regardless of any shortcomings, the conventional superiority of data over image is reversed. The data might tell us who was first to the milking shed but beyond the mundane bovine narrative is a more compelling technological one. 

Visible are the aberrations and artefacts of a technology wilfully pushed beyond its comfort zone. Anticipating a subject travelling at constant speed, synchronicity between capture rate and subject movement is easily disrupted. Precision in one area leaves a deficit in another. The cows’ erratic behaviour reveals not only the technology’s limitations, but something of our own increasingly contentious relationship with data, and the mechanisms that harvest it. 

Looking to the animal world to make sense of our own, we are acting on the same impulse that guided the creative output of early sapiens. Drawing on available technology and animal symbolism, this work is really just a version of parietal art, updated for the post digital époque. The tools may have changed but the ideas haven’t. Occupying the same timeline of artistic expression, the unlikely pairing of photo finish tech with lumbering quadruped speaks of a wider tension between culture and nature. The imposition of the former on the latter. A convergence of the two played out in a granular and glitched tragicomedy.