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Bibliography
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SCI-ART:
Post-Photography, Documenting Our Genetic Possibilities
M-1000
When Roy Ascott wrote about our post-photographic age,
he suggested that nowadays nobody really cares about
the debate over what is real or how much truth is unveiled
in photography due to the explosive use and incorporation
of the digital medium. Meaning, the perspective of viewing
photography solely as a journalistic medium of documentation
seems almost banal and archaic due to the infinite creative
possibilities to re-frame pictorial content and re-contextualize
subject matter provided by the processes of digitization,
manipulation, and new output expressions. Today, all
photographic processes from analog and digital, to interactive
interface outputs are seemingly an integrated part of
photography art-making and the discussion of ‘analog
versus digital’ or ‘truth versus fictive’
doesn’t mean a whole lot in this intermixing. In
a sense, the field of photography today creates a new
understanding of the meaning and methods of documentation
that succinctly work with our age of transformation.
The term “New Media” has been broadly used
to describe electronic and digital work as well as new
ways and languages for understanding the world. With
this in mind, it only makes sense that artists use the
New Media of “post-photography” to document
the world (in the most post-photographic sense) through
the context of another conceptual innovation: that of
post-genomics and the media and language of bio-technology.
The last issue of SCI-ART briefly mentioned how, for
the past couple of months, New York has been hosting
the “DNAge Citywide Festival for the 50th Anniversary
of the Discovery of the Double-Helix.” The arts
exhibition mentioned in that issue, “How Human:
Life in the Post-Genome Era,” seems most appropriate
as a focus for this article because of it being held
at the International Center of Photography (ICP). Organized
and curated by Carol Squiers, the Curator of ICP, the
exhibition (which just recently ended), showed over
thirty artists from around the world who distinctively
used photography’s capabilities to explore the
issues raised by genetic research. (http://www.icp.org)
This article looks at five of these artists to explore
how they have used the photographic medium to present
not only another way of understanding our post-photographic
era but also the world of the post-genome era. Both
of these ‘posts’ inflect our understanding
of reproductive capabilities and both serve as expressions
of today’s New Media.
First, artist Larry Miller, who is known for his Genetic
Code Copyright certification project (see the November
issue of the SCI-ART article series (http://nyartsmagazine.com/70/sci.htm)),
exhibited another thought provoking piece at the ICP
called the Genomic License No. 8 (Arts Manifestus).
This piece shows eleven portraits of currently living
and active artists in a linear sequence, mounted on
the wall. Each picture has another frame right below
it that carries their individual DNA samples from blood
or cheek cells on micro-slides. By documenting the outer
features of these artists through photographic portraiture
and documenting each one’s inner micro-biology,
Miller questions whether “artistic traits”
are in the genes. Artists such as Lynn Cazabon, William
Pope L, as well as Miller himself have been selected
as having real “artistic talent” and are thus
grouped together in the framework Miller proposes. Next
to the series of pictures is the Genomic License, which
is the textual agreement for selling these genetic samples.
The future purchaser of this piece can use the combination
of these artists’ genetic information to create
a human montage of an ‘ultimate artist’ or
as Miller puts it, to create a “phenocollage –
resulting in some kind of ‘Uber-Artist’ or
human with artificially instilled talents.” Obviously,
this is a highly conceptual piece that highlights the
many different issues brought up by the thought of future
cloning possibilities. One that hits the heart of genetic
matters is the paradigm of seeing the world through
the eyes of genetic determinism. Miller humorously demystifies
the criteria for artistic excellence, criticizes the
coded reality of our time, and makes us appreciate the
beauty of being uniquely human, as he would say, “One
and Only.” (http://genesthetics.com)
Another artist, Justine Cooper, also worked by gathering
people’s genetic information, but this time she
presented them together in a video collage. At ICP,
she installed a video installation entitled Transformers
and projected her video animation onto a large screen.
Out of all the places in the world, this Australian
artist went to a largely homogenous city, Beijing, and
got biological samples, fingerprints, IDs, and photos
of eleven people who in some ways could be seen as “transformers”
of society due to their various identities as either
of mixed racial heritage, transgender, or multi-cultural.
With the collaborative efforts of Dr. Jim Bonacum, an
evolutionary biologist at the Museum of Natural History
in New York, Cooper was able to use these people’s
actual DNA codes in her piece. She had two gene sequences
decoded for each candidate, one that showed little difference
and the other that showed a great amount of genetic
variation amongst people. The genetic information was
layered with other scientific diagrams produced by such
tools as scanned electron microscopy. Furthermore, these
representations were then re-collaged with each person’s
photo IDs, different forms of medical records, and juxtaposed
with flying texts about their personal history that
was collected from an interview by the artist. The power
of this piece is in its interweaving of different modes
of visuality that bluntly “document” these
people’s existence. In turn, the documentation
of physical to micro-biological identity becomes larger
than life and overwhelming – a true portrait of
our time. (http://justinecooper.com)
Third, speaking of micro-biological identity, the medical
and scientific world has made it possible to literally
take the face out of the body. In other words, personal
identity is erased in the world of scientific data and
in sense, a new molecular face emerges. Ellen Sandor
and her collaborators of “(art)n” (including
Keith Miller, Jack Ludden, Fernando Orellana, and Janine
Fron) showed Cryptobiology: Reconstructing Identity,
which they call a “portrait” of an enzyme
called lysozyme. Here, the peculiar irony is that (art)n
ascribes a human face to microscopic biology. The collective
group of artists is well known to work in collaboration
with scientists and other professionals from other fields,
including members of the Scripps Research Institute,
Nasa, the U.S. Army, and others. For this project, they
worked with Kathleen Helm-Bychoski from the Department
of Chemistry of DePaul University to create a photographic
image that works in two new ways as portrait photography:
as an artistic documentation of DNA database and as
the face that is brought back into the body picture.
(www.artn.com)
Next, Catherine Wagner is an artist who photographs
cultural archetypes of built environments and has documented
a series of images entitled -86 Degree Freezers (12
areas of concern and crisis) (1995). Another way of
understanding today’s climate of scientific research
is to look at the world of archived artifacts, records,
and research specimens. In her work, Wagner exposes
the gritty world of frozen objects, the things in storage
waiting to be researched, that portrays something other
than the media’s image of science’s fancy
graphics and sterile labs. In other words, with choreographed
lighting, text and large-scale imagery, Wagner recreates
the aesthetic of research environments, including the
documentation of ‘still-lifes’ used for the
Human Genome Project. (http://www.ekcsm.org/bios_wagner.html)
Last of all, Brandon Ballengée creates artwork
with information generated from ecological field-trips
and research labs. His work displayed at the ICP, Living
Gems: The Evolution of Aesthetic Design and Genetic
Engineering in Fish, was done in collaboration with
scientists Hong Suk Michael Oh and Peter Warny. This
body of work photographically documents transgenic fish
(genetically engineered or modified fish) and is presented
to mimic the ordering and labeling of scientific taxonomizing.
These fish exemplify the history of hybridization for
artificial farming and pet collection purposes. Moreover,
the artificiality in color and the exaggeration of their
shape amplifies the danger that engineered organisms
have unknown environmental consequences if released
into the wild. (http://greenmuseum.org/content/artist_index/artist_id-19.html)
Two references to scientific articles that deals with
this month’s SCI-ART article are: first, Science
News: The Weekly Newsmagazine of Science : “2003
Moving On: Now the human genome is really done,”
where an international consortium of scientists announced
that the deciphering of the human genetic code is now
truly complete
(http://www.sciencenews.org/20030419/fob6.asp); and
second, “Happy Anniversary”. Fifty years after
Watson and Crick’s insight, scientists continue
to take a close look at DNA’s double helix. (http://www.sciencenews.org/20030419/bob9.asp)
M-1000 is the pen name of artist MINALIZA1000 (minaliza1000@aol.com).
The SCI-ART article series is made possible with assistance
from Art & Science Collaborations, Inc (ASCI). (www.asci.org)
Since April 2003, a secondary publication of the SCI-ART
article series has been translated into Korean and published
in the Art Magazine Wolgan Misool, a monthly arts magazine
of Seoul, Korea. (www.wolganmisool.com)
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