Kimo Reder

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

The arc of our ark

Bio-poetics over the DNA rainbow

This commentary series has traced out just a few implications of bio-poetic work, and speculated on some of its futures. For all of the potential recklessness of such tampering and tinkering with genes and molecules, Steve Tomasula also imagines a “Midrash” of bio-ethics being forged, or at least illuminated, by the collective endeavors of genetic artists. Such work does much more than merely illustrate bio-tech capabilities; it performs an embodied auto-critique in which genes and bodies are put at deliberate and provocative risk. Bio-art provides us with wittily hypocritical (as well as hypercritical) risk assessments and bioethical conundrums, using the materials and the sensibility of the studio to make the “labor” in laboratory more ludic.

This commentary series has traced out just a few implications of bio-poetic work, and speculated on some of its futures. For all of the potential recklessness of such tampering and tinkering with genes and molecules, Steve Tomasula also imagines a “Midrash” of bio-ethics being forged, or at least illuminated, by the collective endeavors of genetic artists. Such work does much more than merely illustrate bio-tech capabilities; it performs an embodied auto-critique in which genes and bodies are put at deliberate and provocative risk.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña: Poyesis genética and the Aztec ethno-cyborg

For decades, performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been curating an ongoing, serial “Ethno-Cyberpunk Trading Post,” a provocation with bio-poetic undercurrents. His phantasmagoric essays, poems, manifestoes, and theater pieces all offer up a mutant, cross-splicing take on race, just as his “genetically engineered Mexicans” and “ethno-cyborgs” use the language of bio-manipulation and robotics to undermine prefabricated notions of racial “belonging.” In such work, the human figure “enhanced with prosthetic implants” is a recurring trope for neocolonial incursions and resistance to such incursions at once. This is achieved by way of a Fourth-World “virtual barrio” of an ethnoscape trying to take back the rhetoric of “borderlessness” from the profiteering of the post-national, corporate world.

For decades, performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña has been curating an ongoing, serial “Ethno-Cyberpunk Trading Post,” a provocation with bio-poetic undercurrents.

The family circuits

Uninterrupted tissue and interspecies continuum

Bio-poetics is an art form not interested in some Modernist purification of the tribal dialect but instead in a creative mongrelization of the planetary genome. In Grammatical Man, Jeremy Campbell refers to “basic resemblances between genes and language that are beyond dispute” — also beyond dispute are the resemblances between living organisms at the level of their molecular components.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: An engineering Eve in the garden of ectopia

In her brief story “She Unnames Them,” Ursula K. Le Guin recasts Eve the primal mother as a primal liberator subverting the process of Adam’s animal-labeling. Bio-artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is pursuing a related task, engaging in acts of transgenesis, regenesis, and intergenesis via computer simulations and 3D models of newly proposed creatures. Ginsberg is a self-declared Artist of the Sixth Mass Extinction, a designer instead of a protector of biodiversity, a conservationist who works via novelty rather than nurturance.

Lives and semilives in the balance: A brief dossier on the brink of biohazard

Perhaps too much of bio-poetic work (and commentary) risks falling into a starry-eyed vision of a blissfully ever-expanding genetic future. As if in response, bio-artists Ionat Zurr and Oron Catts ask, “Are the semi-living semi-good or semi-evil?”, a parodic question hinting at the problems that ensue when humans intervene into the nonhuman dimensions of virus and bacteria.