“It is a new era and we need a new kind of art.” Eduardo Kac
Sandra Seekins writes in her essay, Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art, The language of DNA, the metaphors used to describe it, and how this information is “translated” is also a concern for biotech artists. Brazilian-born Eduardo Kac (pronounced “Katz”), an artist and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, is a pioneer in biotech art. At the festival Ars Electronica 99, Kac presented his controversial and ongoing work Genesis (first exhibited in 1999 and on display at the festival). Central to this work are notions of translation, coding, and decoding.
The artwork begins with the imperialist and authoritarian statement about human supremacy over nature taken from the Old Testament book of Genesis: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” Perhaps it was the inflexible ideology of the statement that spurred Kac to convert it into Morse code (dots, dashes, word spaces, and letter spaces). Morse code was invented by a painter, Samuel F.B. Morse. In 1836 he also created the first working telegraph set. Morse code is significant, both because it has a similar binary logic to digital 1s and 0s, and because it was the technology that arguably ushered in the global information age.
Kac then converted the Morse code into genetic code – Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine and Thymine, abbreviated as A, G, C, T (the chemical base pairs that make up the rungs of the DNA molecule, the famous double helix). DNA is used by Kac on numerous levels, as material, as process, as life form, and as metaphor. Kac is well aware of the way DNA is spoken of as a map, blueprint, or recipe for life, as the “code of codes,” or as David Hunt writes in “Eduardo Kac: Metaphor into Motif,” a “souped up photocopy machine.” Kac plays with this notion of coded information.
With the assistance of a biotech company and Charles Strom, a Chicago geneticist and director of the Department of Medical Genetics of the Illinois Masonic Medical Center, a gene “written” by the code was synthesized. [See See Lisa Lynch, “Trans-Genesis: An Interview with Eduardo Kac“] Biblical passages are no strangers to translation, having been translated from Hebrew, into Greek, into other languages, and now into Morse code and the “language” of DNA.
The “artist’s gene” carrying the coded biblical passage was combined with a protein that glows cyan when illuminated by ultraviolet light. The gene and the protein were inserted into a species of E. coli (commonly found in the human gut), which could reproduce the gene. The genetically engineered bacteria was then put in a petri dish along with another strain of E. coli that glows yellow under ultraviolet light, but does not carry the Genesis gene.
How does all this appear as an installation piece? Entering the dark exhibition space, the viewer is confronted with the petri dish illuminated by lights on a pulpit-like platform. On one wall is a large projected image – the bacteria in the petri dish blown up in scale. Due to its increased size and its focal colour within the darkened room, this large circle of blue with greenish-yellow areas almost resembles a planet in space, mysterious and compelling. On the wall next to it is projected the genetic alphabet: CTCCGCGTATT and so on. On another wall is the biblical passage itself. A computer screen also shows the bacteria in the petri dish.
Multiple languages coexist, like esoteric messages with hyberbolic significance: the Book of God, the Book of Life or Nature, Information. Biology, language, and technology are contingent in this seductive piece. Biological “life” – bacteria – is in the petri dish for us to examine. Translation from one “language” to another is what allows us to “read” the genetic alphabet of biology. Technology is what facilitates humans to manipulate, transfer, and splice genes.
The piece is interactive. By using the internet or by visiting the gallery, the viewer can hit a switch that illuminates the bacteria with either white or ultraviolet light. The flick of a switch or the click of a mouse accelerates the mutation rate of the bacteria when it is exposed to ultraviolet light. The result of this mutation is not only the creation of a new strain of bacteria, it is a new translation of the biblical verse. The easy public access to manipulating the building blocks of life raises questions about the power to change, and makes one wonder about biotech regulations or lack thereof. By giving an old myth – the biblical passage – a contemporary twist, Kac has made every spectator a co-author of the Book of Life. The language of genetics becomes a communal process.
But does this rewriting undermine the dogmatic assertion of the original passage, which grants “man” absolute authority over the earth, while unnerving those already afraid of human tinkering with the genome as an act of defiance against “nature” or God? Or does it reinscribe DNA as the master code and humanity as the master species? The resultant ambiguity is unsettling.
At the end of the exhibit the translation occurs again in reverse: from the now mutated DNA back into Morse code, then back into English. In one version it reads: “Let aan have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that ioves ua eon the earth.” Slight changes, perhaps, but in animal and human populations, small corruptions in DNA can, of course, have devastating consequences in terms of disease, disability, and even survival.
In later exhibited versions of Genesis, Kac included two laser-etched granite Encryption Stones. Kac has adapted the idea of the Rosetta Stone discovered by Napoleon’s troops in 1799, by using a triple language system. While the Rosetta Stone, which proved so evocative to antiquarians and linguists, contains three languages – Greek, demotic script, and hieroglyphs, each stone in Kac’s diptych includes three different “languages” – the biblical passage, Morse code, and the DNA alphabet. On one slab the order is from the biblical passage to Morse code to DNA, and on the other, the order is reversed with the now mutated biblical passage listed last. Because there are two stone slabs, they also recall the tablets Moses brought down from the mountain, inscribed with the Ten Commandments. These references call up the age-old interest in how life (as well as power and authority) is defined through text. [For more on this see Sheilah Britton, and Dan Collins, ed., The Eighth Day. The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac (Arizona: Arizona State U, 2003)]
Yet Genesis also includes living organisms. Flesh and logos must coexist. Information cannot be disembodied. There is interplay between durability and permanence (the stone slabs) and the fluidity and unpredictability of life processes (the bacteria itself). N. Katherine Hayles’ astute account of Genesis in “Who is in Control Here? Meditating on Eduardo Kac’s Transgenic Art,” [The Eighth Day, 85-86] also notes that the “sentence that emerges from the bacteria’s mutations speaks not only of dominion but also of rich interconnections in which causation is multiple and massively parallel, thus giving the lie to human agency as the uniquely important element in the rich stew of recursive feedback loops we call life.”
Does Kac “relocate humanity within the complex ecological systems of life rather than above or below it”? [Any M. Youngs, “The Fine Art of Creating Life,” Leonardo 33, no. 5 (2000): 377-80] Is the artist less involved than the biblical text in placing humanity at the apex of creation? Are we authors, are we observers, or are we equal participants in Genesis? Viewers are implicated in the act of translation, interpretation, and mutation. This is not merely about what humans are capable of. Why do we want to do certain things? How do we demonstrate responsibility and complicity in relation to biotechnologies? It is unnerving when artist George Gessert reminds us that Genesis was first displayed in Linz, Austria, a favorite city of Hitler’s, close to where Hitler himself was born, thus making a link between Nazi eugenics, genetic engineering, and megalomania. [See George Gessert, “Art is Nature: An Artist’s Perspective on a New Paradigm,” Art Papers (March/April 2001): 16-19] Kac, a Brazilian, is also of Jewish origin. Genesis brings issues and questions about genetic research – from the past and present – to a viewing public, opens up a dialogue, and leads us to ponder its charged implications.
Christine Davis’ ACGT I and II of 1998–1999 provides a different take on the genetic code. Combining tiny squares of steel, each etched with a letter of the genetic alphabet, with thread, she turns the genetic code into two hanging panels that resemble flat pieces of fabric. Under a microscope the code is indeed tangled and stringy in appearance. Only via its abstraction and interpretation does it become the clear string of information, a series of letters in particular combinations. Life is much messier than this, and perhaps this is alluded to by the tangled string ends. According to Davis, “The genetic code seemed to be a radical shift from mechanics to communication, from how the body “works” (blood and guts) to how it “means” (blocks of letters). The idea of genetics as a universal language of life was something I found quite menacing.” [Quoted in Paradise Now, 56] Why does she find it menacing? A universal language of genetics is one that can easily become conflated with new standards of normativity (insertion of “desirable” or “healthy” genes) and deviance (removal of “undesirable” or “unhealthy” genes).
ACGT I and II also calls up a gendered approach, given the association of needlework and sewing with the labour and sociability of women. The so-called code of life is here stitched together from various components (and disciplines): steel and thread represent technology and life, the biological code supposedly “programs” our fragile flesh. Life literally hangs in the balance. Davis seems to suggest that products of art and products of life are both routinely manufactured and commodified, albeit in dissimilar ways.
Both Kac’s Genesis and Davis’ ACGT I and II were presented at “Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution,” a major show of genetic art that opened at Manhattan’s Exit Art Gallery in September 1999. According to the catalogue introduction,
Most of the work in the exhibition has been made outside of the sanctioned interests of the mainstream art world, and as a result has been marginalized as much by its seriousness and specificity as by its subject matter. But the issues about which these artists make art are now central to the world at large. [Paradise Now, 10]
The media spotlight on new developments in genetics facilitates an increased public awareness, and, given the central focus on technological developments in the work of many contemporary artists, genetic art will indeed be extremely important to biotech debates. Whether or not it will ever move into the “mainstream” of art production depends on how one defines that term. Politically effective art often only becomes mainstream in retrospect, once some distance and time has passed, and it depends on the theoretical lens applied or the interpretative tools utilized to assess it.
Some critics are skeptical of biotech art’s longevity, assuming it to be a novelty or trend; Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker gives it “the shelf life of milk.” [Mentioned in John Travis, “Genes on Display – Art Movement has Grown Out of Genes” (review of the exhibition “Paradise Now: Picturing the Genetic Revolution”), Science News (December 16, 2000)]
Compare this to Carole Kismaric, a co-curator of the exhibition Paradise Now, who calls biotech art the “imagery of our times.” [Travis] I caution against embracing either account. The Human Genome Project will continue to galvanize public attention longer than it takes milk to sour, and the gene is not the only visual catalyst of the twenty-first century. [One could add the microchip, the refugee camp, the sweatshop, large-scale weather disasters exacerbated by global warming, the terrorist suicide bomber – all recurring images symptomatic of our times.]
Sandra Seekins / Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art
other islands in this text-fed stream
