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Recombining Art Practices of the New Millennium
I will speak of experience.
A fairly interesting art form that has appeared in the laboratory of the SEAFair workshop and already successfully applied in Skopje in 2001, is that a group of international bio-tec and genomic artists led by Melentie Pandilovski and Adam Zaretsky (under the scientific eye of Dr. Liljana Simjanovska from the Genetic Laboratory of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts) have created a system consisted of using a textbook from the past, e.g. the encoding hexagrams from the I Ging, into DNA. The involvement of a group of artists in the creation of a sequence to be inserted into an organism is a rather penetrating way to breach the gap between wet lab work and popular conceptions about gene splicing. Not only has the group created a system, but also each of us took turns consulting the Oracle of the Book of Changes to form a group sequence of uncertain fortune, which may be considered as radical text poetry and a way to meditate on the role of the arbitrary, in semiotics, in evolution and in human behaviour.
The artists threw coins which were then translated into both divination text and sequentially recorded chemical amino acids. The sequence, derived from the universal random luck access point, is now a stable and inheritable sequence in a MC-12 (Macedonian Chi 12 artists) strain of K-12 E. Coli.
The successful experiment has led us to use new books from the past and it culminates in the construction of a random and collaborative sequence of DNA. Soon it will be continued with the Nagoya Orai book, which would be then inserted into the K-12 E. Coli genome.
What is characteristic for this work?
1. The work, although utilizing a text, cannot be considered as text-based, similar to the fact that the web itself is not text-based although textually over-loaded.
2. The work is not image-based. As far as artists were engaged in the process of which artworks outgrow the concept of images and where artists immerse in wetwork or biotechnology, the phenomenological experience of the space increases.
How then do we describe the work of these artists?
We may technically say that the appearing work represents a vibrant collection of moist interaction between bio-data stacks moving from abstraction to representation.
Technically, the next step will be the utilization of integrated media communications: The space is to be augmented, accented through interaction of the viewer/participant, a process in which wide-ranging "moist visualization" replaces bio-imagery and bio-textuality.
Melentie Pandilovski
Skopje
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