Playing with Life: Art and Human Genomics

The budding age of biotechnology represents a major turning point in human culture. How do we visualize this naming point? How do we picture a new age of genetic manipulation, of cloning, of cybernetics, a literal synergy between computing and biology, [1] particularly when these are still in their infancy? This may not simply be a matter of new forms of visuality, as in the specter of hybrid life forms, organ mining, genetic engineering, or a commercially driven eugenics civilization producing designer babies for a global Baywatch. [2] Form easily obscures the principles underlying potential new life, the question of what governs its creation. The organizing principle of heredity is concrete and digital. It is based on information that unravels in a temporal process that may well be impervious to (spatial) visualization. Digitally encoded information has no intrinsic relationship to the form into which it is decoded. It is not tied to a singular, inherently meaningful form. A double helix or a "DNA fingerpri nt" may provide for a pleasing picture, but the spatial structure of the molecule should not be conflated with its signifying principle, the way the encoded "information" is read. The challenge for artists may be reconciling form with principle.

This is not to say that art necessarily lags behind science. In a sense, a crucial epistemological shift in consciousness already took place in the postwar era in the way artists related art and life. Many prewar avant-garde artists had sought to connect art and life by attempting to put an entire worldview in a single work of art, to make the composition "resound" the cosmos or the dialectical principles underlying it. Space reflected the master plan of Creation, bringing the artist (and viewer) who understood and surveyed this in closer proximity to a mythical Originator (God or Spirit). In our postwar era of increasing skepticism and postmodern irony, such myths have been deconstructed and replaced by the notion of temporality and the contingency of cosmological events. In this regard, the visual arts since the 1960s show various striking parallels with contemporary scientific paradigms, whereby minimalism in particular marks a crucial naming point.

With minimalism, the modem myth of an origin and telos was replaced by a potentially endless sequence of repeated shapes. The spatial relationships that were once seen as inherently meaningful (because based on nature) and internal (because contained within the frame), subsequently derive their significance from site-specific, external relationships without intrinsic meaning. [3] Repetition replaces singularity. The digital code of the genome, emblematic of a new mode of consciousness, is likewise structurally without center, final cause, or inherent meaning. Genes are not a spatial blueprint of life, not a two-dimensional plan of what a heart or liver looks like, but a long string of nucleotides written in endless permutations that resemble, in principle, a world of replication not unlike that of minimalism. There is no aim in the actual replication of the particular sequences of nucleotides, with the possible exception of replication itself, that is, of life, The aim or goal of life is that of continuing i tself. [4]

A further point of comparison is that minimalist art acknowledges the viewer, whose physical interaction with the work produces ever-shifting viewpoints over time, through a kind of feedback loop. This phenomenon bears striking similarities with developments in cybernetics at the time, particularly the notion of reflexivity. Here the observer, in a kind of synthesis between the organic and the mechanical, becomes part of the system observed, without an outside from which to survey the whole. [5] Reflexivity is regressive, as are the obsessively pointless variations of LeWitt's incomplete open cubes or Judd's boxes. [6] Likewise, in evolution there is no progress. According to Stephen Jay Gould, there is only a decrease in morphological complexity, accompanied by an increase in complication of external factors. [7]

Ironically, then, minimalism's apparent rejection of a whole worldview in a single work, of a correspondence between artwork and nature, did not bring about the loss of art's connection with life. To the contrary--it simply replaced one worldview with another. After minimalism, art became increasingly concerned with time and process, as well as with emergent behavior and identity resulting from a continual "reframing" and reevaluating of the art world's own reflexive structures. According to N. Katherine Hayles, the latest phase of cybernetics, in order to break out of the reflexivity of perception, focuses on transformation through emergent behavior; not as an absolute break, but as a shift in emphasis, a seriation or overlapping pattern of replication and innovation. [8] The parallels with contemporary art are obvious. This new phase of cybernetics promotes an increasingly contextualized, embodied view of information, but with the observer retreating from the center to the periphery as narrator and narrate e of stories of what is possible. [9] Yet, in contemporary art dealing with genomics it is not enough simply to narrate or picture what is possible. Witness Thomas Grunfeld's "Misfit" creatures (e.g., a dog with sheep's head), or John Isaac's Say It Isn't So (1994), a mad scientist's experiment gone awry, his head turned into the body of a real plucked chicken. If anything, such work misconceives hybridity literally along the lines of a Cartesian split between mind and body.