A new performance lecture by artist Melanie Jackson and Dr. Esther Leslie exploring our relationship to milk, through looking at its aesthetics, technologies and cultural meanings.

Milk is an ur-substance, a primary medium. It is the first substance to enter the mouth, to touch the tongue, to fill the belly. Milk is also promiscuous collaborator and one of the most technologised liquids on the planet. It is at once a cipher of standardisation and modernity, and endless innovation. It teams up commercially with a bestiary of cartoon avatars, and a dazzling spectrum of synthetic colour. It is an industry that has pioneered the application of big data, assisting milk’s accelerated abstractions into chemical components, economic actions, bodily manipulations and it has provided the model for other industries to generate their algorithmic futures. They explore Milk's ability to act as a spectrometer – an apparatus that can reveal to us the defining characteristics of an epoch.