Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams

This portion of Sandra Seekins’s essay on the The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art also bring us many promises and perils of translation, a thorny topic that recurs again and again in this issue of The Capilano Review. As Seekins tells us, Eduardo Kac’s controversial and ongoing work Genesis 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.”

First Kac converted the passage into Morse code (dots, dashes, word spaces, and letter spaces), and 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). 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. As Sandra Seekins“>Sandra Seekins points out, 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.

Multiple languages coexist, like esoteric messages with hyperbolic 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. [Sandra Seekins / Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art]

Of course the idea of “reading” the “language” of nature is not a new one, nor the conflation of the Book of God and the Book of Life mere hyperbole. Since the Early Modern era authors have struggled to reconcile the authorship of God with the study of science. In his Novum Organum (1620) Francis Bacon grumbles: “in every age Natural Philosophy has had a troublesome adversary and hard to deal with; namely, superstition, and the blind and immoderate zeal of religion. […] But if the matter be truly considered, natural philosophy is after the word of God at once the surest medicine against superstition, and the most approved nourishment for faith.” Bacon enjoyed drawing overt comparisons between himself and Christ and called the work of the new scientist a “second scripture.” Somewhat more modestly, or perhaps just more cautiously, author and practicing physician Sir Thomas Browne wrote:

There are two books from whence I collect my divinity; besides that written one of God, another of his servant nature, that universal and public manuscript, that lies expansed unto the yes of all; those that never saw [God] in the one, have discovered him in the other: This was the scripture and theology of the heathens; the natural motion of the sun made them more admire him, […] the ordinary effect of nature wrought more admiration in them, then in the other all his miracles; surely the heathens knew better how to join and read these mystical letters, than we Christians, who cast a more careless eye on these common hieroglyphics, and disdain to suck divinity from the flowers of nature. [Religio Medici (1635)]

The reading and translating process in Eduardo Kac’s Genesis is interactive. As Sandra Seekins explains: 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.

As N. Katherine Hayles, observes in her 2005 book My Mother Was A Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts, in a chapter called “Making: Language and Code: The Dream of Information”:

Viewing language as a code rather than as a loose network of floating signifiers entails different reading techniques. At issue is the difference between a language that cannot unambiguously say what it means, and a message that cannot be encoded and decoded without undergoing transformations as interventions distort the codes and thereby produce noise in the system. This in code what is available for readerly inspection is not so much the ambiguity of meaning […] but places in the text where interventions in the coding chain occur. […] A characteristic of code, as distinct from natural language, is the leverage that comes about through the multiple coding correlations, as when a single keystroke changes the entire appearance of a text on screen, or when a single mistake in transcribing DNA code leads to drastic physical changes when that gene is expressed in an organism.

At the end of Kac’s Genesis 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.

Just for fun, let’s put the Old Testament passage through the Altavista search engine’s translation tool, Babble Fish: http://babelfish.altavista.com/

Kac is Brazilian, so let’s translate the text into Portuguese: Deixe o homem ter o dominion sobre os peixes do mar, e o fowl do ar, e do excesso cada coisa viva que se move em cima da terra.

Kac’s Genesis was first displayed at the festival Ars Electronica 99 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. Here is the passage in German: Lassen Sie Mann Herrschaft über den Fischen des Meeres haben und das Geflügel der Luft und des Ãœberschusses jede lebende Sache, die nach der Masse bewegt.

• other islands in this text-fed stream

  • The Language of DNA (or “The Code of Codes”)
  • The Monstrous Future
  • Collapsing Boundaries (Hybrids)
  • Genetic Portraits
  • Co-opting the Lab
  • Metaphors of Biotechnology
  • Brief Encounters with Biotech Art
  • Of Molecules and Matter
  • Sandra Seekins