Antonelli talks about her upcoming show, “Design and the Elastic Mind.”

Question: What are your favorite designs?

Antonelli: Well you know I’m gonna be a little self-serving.  There are many objects that I find exciting, and I’m putting them all in my show in February.  So it’s kind of interesting.  It’s the show called Design and the Elastic Mind.  But just to give you an example, there is a former student, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, that’s taking a new technology, a new scientific discovery from Australia, which is the fact that you can actually grow meat in vitro without killing any cows.  And he’s been working on what shape should that steak have in the future.  You know when you can grow it in vitro, should it still look like a steak?  Should it look like something else?  And so this idea of how to keep references to our past when we will not have anymore the need to stay anchored to the ground.  So what he did is he went around the English countryside and he looked for the best cow that he could find.  And then he stuck the cow in a _________ machine and took the best MRI scan of the organs – you know the most beautiful piece of the cow – and made the steak in that shape.  So it still is a memory of the cow.  It’s an ode to the cow, but the cow is alive and kicking.