[COMMENTARY]
got milk?
What Milk Tells Us About our Digital Future
by STEPHANIE CRISTELLO
This text by Stephanie Cristello accompanies the work of Danish artist Jens Settergren featured in this issue. Reflecting on Milk Plus, Settergren’s recent installation at Viborg Kunsthal, Cristello explores how the symbolism of milk has evolved—from a primordial substance of care to a digitized, gender-fluid emblem of optimization and control. Through a rich analysis of Settergren’s visual language and cultural references, the essay examines how technology reshapes not only materials, but also meaning itself.
See the documentation of the exhibit here.
What makes us rethink the symbols that surround us? That transforms elements of nature whose cultural purpose went largely unchanged for centuries before their representation, and how we interact with them, was irreversibly altered by technology? In our increasingly digital world, substances like milk—once a maternal, protective, and nurturing life source—provide us with an example of how. Following concerted global marketing strategies in the years leading up to the twenty-first century, the revolution of milk invites us to consider how mediation converts meaning.
A recent largescale film installation by the Danish artist Jens Settergren (b. 1989) presents a framework through which the effects of globalization, capital, and technological advances associated with such shifts, come into focus. Through a series of sleek, minimalist, and refined simulations, the exhibition Milk Plus, which opened at the Viborg Kunsthal in fall 2024, indulges in the many guises of milk and its current role in visual culture. The aesthetics of Settergren’s films adopt animation styles developed around y2k, an important historical turning point for milk in Western culture.
Launched in 1993 by MilkPEP (the Milk Processor Education Program), the got milk? slogan is widely recognized across the United States as one of the most successful campaigns of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined, unmatched in numbers by any other ad in the industry to date. Countless iterations of the simple two-word idiom ushered a strategy within contemporary culture that went viral before the technological platforms we know now even existed. TV commercials, billboards, t-shirts, bus stops—in retail shop windows, in magazine ads, on bumper stickers, the list goes on. Analog as the campaign was, it was networked. The technology it used was the image.
“In realizing the installation, Settergren simultaneously relies upon and critiques our dependence on technology.”
— Stephanie Cristello
By the early 2000s, milk was suddenly the leading influential symbol reflecting contemporary ideals for productivity and perpetual optimization. This was not always the case. The foundations of milk in collective human imagination of course has roots in perceptions of care—in creation myths, the milk of other creatures nourished the first human beings, such as the Norse mythology of Ymir and the cow Audhumla, or otherwise created the world itself, as with Hera’s breastmilk (γαλα, gala) that spilled to build the Milky Way (γαλαξία, galaxy). The got milk? campaign changed things by targeting the consumer through a deprivation strategy: rather than generating new customers, its sales were encouraged by instilling an anxiety and fear among existing drinkers. The message of Big Milk was simple: bodies lacking in milk were less efficient, and therefore, inferior.
For those of us raised in the 1990s, coming of age in the last generation to have memories of a pre-internet existence, the promotional strategies and corporatization of the dairy industry mirrored all others. Commercials featuring milk poured against a single-colored backdrop that flowed into the shape of a person. Milk no longer fed the body, it was the body. Over time, the style of movement pictured in its broadcast animations developed from the maternal into something else—cascades of white translucent liquid adopting the behavior of its male counterpart. It was precisely through the novel non-binary gender associations of milk in the latter years of the got milk? campaign that its dissemination within global economic trade spread so rapidly.
What started as mother, turned into man, and ultimately machine. No longer a merely human product, its symbolic associations no longer needed to adhere to the limitations of humanity. As developments in the field of medicine unfold alongside advancements in artificial intelligence, each toward trans or posthuman ambitions of untethering the body-brain from the constraints of mortality, the implications of health and consciousness are inextricably linked. Settergren’s Milk Plus project similarly explores the brain as a cultural object—one that is informed by a ‘cognitive capitalism’ that considers the affective capacity of consciousness akin to assets, goods, and services whose use is rendered by the market.[1]
At Viborg Kunsthal, Settergren presents a freestanding LED screen that dissects the space of the lower gallery surrounded by four cross-shaped pharmacy signs. Graphic animations in the characteristic bright green hue either pulse like a heartbeat or emit Doppler-like waves that emanate from the center. Against these rhythmic repetitions, the film takes us through the tube-shaped chamber of a vessel as it passes through a stream of cartoon-like blood cells, reminiscent of biomedical demonstrations enacting the efficacy of a new drug. Across the synchronized projections, we follow the abstracted narrative of a sentient baby—its heavily processed voice scoring the plot of Settergren’s quasi-science fictional realm. Unnatural flows of simulated milk rush across the screen, colliding into one another in slow motion. The smooth and synthetic edges of the baby’s eyelids open and close, before it addresses us directly—a way of coming into being in utero that evokes a futuristic world in which birth is no longer tied to the female womb.
In realizing the installation, Settergren simultaneously relies upon and critiques our dependence on technology. Across biotech and pharmaceutical spheres, the race to discover self-healing cells and “the imaginary of a brain that can hack itself”[2] threatens the extinction of subjective consciousness. From primordial substance to hyper-commercialized entity, the future of milk has become a symbol of the potentials and dangers technological progress itself.
[1] Tony David Sampson, An Activist Neuroaesthetics Reader (Berlin: Archive Books), 2022. 33.
[2] Dimitris Papadoupolos, “Plastic Brain,” An Activist Neuroaesthetics Reader, 209-10.
Stephanie Cristello is a contemporary art critic, curator, and author based in Chicago. She is the Director and Curator of Chicago Manual Style, a non-profit space for exhibitions and publishing, and Editor-at-Large at Portable Gray. Cristello was previously Artistic Director of EXPO CHICAGO and founding Editor-in-Chief of THE SEEN. Her writing has appeared in Frieze, ArtReview, BOMB, and Mousse, among others. She has curated exhibitions internationally, including at the Malmö Art Museum, Kunsthal Aarhus, and the Driehaus Museum. She is the author of several books and the recipient of a Graham Foundation publication grant in 2020.