As a promotion for Kobayashi City’s beef of Japanese Black, on November 29, 2020—otherwise known as “Good Meat Day”—we held an “only looking” online grilled meat festival called UMMER ONIC 2020, a play on the Japanese words for “delicious meat” and the Summer Sonic music festival.
Instead of performing artists, we had 29 cuts of “meatists” (meat artists), and for 10 hours their grillings were livestreamed as they gave “live performances” on three stages.
Everything from meatist introductions to timetables and stage changes was performed in the atmosphere of a music festival. Unique official festival goods were also sold, including original t-shirts and a Sizzle Record that used real, binaural recordings of the sizzles of grilling meat for each meatist. Though people couldn’t actually gather in person due to the coronavirus pandemic, we created a place online where they could surround themselves with meat and have a good time.