Egstrogen Farms
producer and animator, 2015
A television commercial for a fictional company advertising transgenic chicken eggs that allow women to ovulate daily like hens, under the slogan 'One egg a day is the fertility way.'
Mary Maggic created the piece at the MIT Media Lab. Formatted as a standard commercial, the video depicts a biotechnology company selling Egstro Eggs, chicken eggs engineered to carry gonadotropins so that a woman who eats them ovulates on a hen’s schedule rather than her own.
The work incorporates avian transgenic research and an argument drawn from subRosa’s Cultures of Eugenics: that women and chickens occupy the same position in relation to fertility and biotechnology industries, as producers of eggs on demand.
The piece includes animations of chicken DNA, reproductive anatomy, and the transgenic sequence. Christian von Stackelberg shot drone footage, Melinda Green acted and edited the script, David Nicholson acted, and a chicken rental company supplied the chickens.