School of Cow Comfort is an artistic research project that examines how machine learning and data-driven technologies operate within the agricultural sector, a field so central to our lives, where food production and distribution, allocation of land and resources, climate, labor, livestock management, animal welfare and political power relations intersect.
From March 2026 onwards, five artists
🕳️ Dasha Ilina
🕳️ Simon Weckert
🕳️ Joana Moll
🕳️ Gordan Savičić & Selena Savić
and !Mediengruppe Bitnik, will carry out eighteen months of artistic field research in collaboration with farmers, research institutions and a network of local practitioners in the region of Lower Saxony, one of Germany’s centres for agricultural production.
The project’s title refers to the Cow Comfort Index (CCI), a benchmark used in AI-supported dairy farming systems. The CCI measures factors such as how long cows lie down, based on the assumption that increased resting time correlates with higher milk production and lower costs. While framed as an indicator of animal well-being, the CCI primarily optimizes for productivity. Using the CCI as a critical case study, the project asks how ambiguous or non-measurable aspects of well-being are handled within such systems and which values are encoded in seemingly neutral benchmarks. This critique is extended by asking what a “Farmer Comfort Index” might look like, and which parameters, such as economic security, autonomy, physical strain, or mental health, would need to be included and weighted.
Over a two-year period, the School of Cow Comfort investigates how these data driven technological transformations affect farmers, animals, landscapes, and society at large. Agriculture is understood as a political and social infrastructure historically grounded in cooperation, generational knowledge and shared responsibility. By observing how structures are changing in this specific field, the project aims to shed light on broader questions about the social, ethical and political implications of these data-driven technologies.
The project will be activated with public events throughout both years. The artistic field research will be presented at a three-day learn-and-teach camp at a collaborating farm in September 2027. All dates will be published here: https://kunsthalle.osnabrueck.de