Hidden Incidents of Pet Food: Taurine Deficiency by Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

“Hidden Incidents of Pet Food: Taurine Deficiency” is a digital artwork that combines contemporary art, machine learning, and data visualization to shed light on a relatively unknown yet significant social issue, specifically the deficiency of taurine in cat food.

Taurine, an animal protein, is one of the most essential and indispensable elements for cats that can only be obtained from their diet. Despite this, the significance of taurine was not widely recognized by the public until the 1970s, as an increasing number of pets started to suffer from heart disease and blindness after consuming pet food. After systematic clinical studies, they finally found a direct link between Taurine deficiency and cat diseases in 1976. It was, however, not until 1981, that Taurine was first introduced as a standard in pet food quality control, which reflects a huge delay between scientific findings and policy-making.

The artists create the portraits of 6,000 cats who died from taurine deficiency in pet food by training an AI model. They further visualized these 6,000 cats with real data to reveal the trending relationship between the boom of pet capital markets and the deaths of cats due to pet food problems. This means not a simple digital portrait or bar graph, this is a historical memorial for blind cats.