Kimo Reder

A p.s. to Genesis: notes on transgenic/bio-poetic art

Roy Ascott's moistmedia and the second big BANG (bits atoms neurons genes)

Bio-artist, cybernetician, and assembleur Roy Ascott refers to “a moistmedia substrate where digital systems, telematics, and genetic engineering” all meet. This fertile matrix, in his imagining, is a haven for “cultural traditions previously banished from materialist discourse as esoteric and shamanic.” This esoteric tendency poetically and noetically questions the very bases of uppercase Form and Objecthood.

Re-verb/re-noun: Verse in vivo and the living word

Many scriptural traditions promise a “living word” or some variation on a “word made flesh,” and new developments in genetic art also engage in an organismic language. DNA’s four-letter alphabet of ATCG is a tetragram like the names of gods ranging from Zeus to Jove to Deus to Gott to Odin to Lord, but one that rearranges at will like a protein’s palimpsest, forever half-erasing and rewriting itself. Bio-poetics can now forge new DNA molecules able to pass a cell’s reading test, in acts of virtuosic 5,000-bit spelling, placing codes inside of codes and (in the case of the very first synthetic organism) scratching Richard Feynman’s “What I cannot create, I do not understand” as a piece of defiant graffiti inside of a cell.

Boland and Cinti's flask menagerie: Hair-growing cacti, Martian roses, and living mirrors

A succulent growing human hair in Howard Boland and Laura Cinti’s Cactus Project is an inquiry into primate/plant interrelations, indirectly following up on (by inverting) Whitman’s vision of a poet’s body as an overgrown swamp or canebrake. Bio-art can now perform horizontal gene transfers across species lines, and so Thoreau’s desire to be “the corn and the grass and the atmosphere writing” can also be partially realized in experiments that test the boundaries between humans and their often unruly crops.

'A cubicle diced irony ox': Genetics and poetics in the letter-blender

Feeding “deoxyribonucleic acid” into an anagram generator, one receives results like “a crucible decoy dioxin” and “a cubicle diced irony ox” and “a cubic code dioxin lyre” and “a bouncily dicier codex.” These lettristic recombinations fittingly suggest animals turned into conundrums on laboratory workbenches and harps made from humanly concocted chemicals playing geometric melodies and books sliced up into elusive components.

Feeding “deoxyribonucleic acid” into an anagram generator, one receives results like “a crucible decoy dioxin” and “a cubicle diced irony ox” and “a cubic code dioxin lyre” and “a bouncily dicier codex.” These lettristic recombinations fittingly suggest animals turned into conundrums on laboratory workbenches and harps made from humanly concocted chemicals playing geometric melodies and books sliced up into elusive components. This is tellingly ironic, as the science of genetics and the genre of bio-poetic art intersect most productively at the level of the malleable, protean letter.

Joe Davis' 'Microvenus' as molecular muse

Joe Davis’ Microvenus “infogene” encodes and inserts the superimposed letters “Y” and “I” (a primeval Germanic rune for both “female” and “life” itself) into a bacterium, converting a graphic emblem into phase values and then into a nucleotide sequence. The muse-worship that Robert Graves once located at the origins of Western verse tradition in The White Goddess can now be clinically literalized.