The Cosmopolitan Chicken Project is included in this wonderful, somewhat unusual book about machines and inventions by Gottfried Hattinger. An incidental collection of hybrid world concepts, fantasies and obsessions.
A book about geniuses, artists, inventors and mechanics whose common aspiration is the construction of apparatus and machines. Instead of tracing down the history of technology, the focus is not predominantly on “useful” inventions, but rather on artistic ones, sometimes also on absurdities and follies of the genre.
Highly entertaining and illustrated with more than 800 pictures, the book offers a geographically and temporally comprehensive overview of fantastic and realized machines and apparatuses. At the same time, Gottfried Hattinger guides us through an astonishing collection of hybrid world designs, fantasies, and obsessions that have been spawned by human imagination over millennia.
Hattinger included the Cosmopolitan Chicken Project after his encounter with the project at the Globale exhibition at ZKM, Karlsruhe (DE) in 2015
“With his long-term Cosmopolitan Chicken Project, Koen Vanmechelen acts as a demiurge who has nothing less in mind than the creation of the "world chicken“ – a cosmopolitan chicken, so to speak – from the most diverse breeds of chickens around the globe. (…) His studio, LABIOMISTA is both a laboratory and library of biocultural diversity. (…) The artist is convinced that scientific facts and the creativity of art can together reveal the mutability of nature and human life.”
More information: Scheidegger & Spiess