Genesis — Eduardo Kac's transgenic art

1999

Artists: Eduardo Kac · Year: 1999 · Medium: Transgenic bio-art — bacteria genetically modified to contain a DNA translation of a biblical text, viewable via real-time networked camera · Substrate: Genetically-modified E. coli bacteria containing a gene encoded from Genesis 1:28 biblical text (converted to DNA via Morse-code translation); real-time UV light and camera; networked viewing by internet audience · Place: Linz, Austria (first installation) · Institution: Ars Electronica Center Eduardo Kac's Genesis (1999) was a live bioart work in which Kac created an "artist's gene" by translating a biblical verse — Genesis 1:28, the dominion clause — first from English into Morse code, then from Morse code into DNA base-pair codons (A, C, G, T), and then had the sequence synthesized into real DNA and inserted into a living bacterial culture. The cultures were maintained in a petri dish visible to the gallery audience in an ultraviolet-lit display case. A live webcam fed the image to the web; online viewers could click a button that triggered a mutation-inducing UV flash in the culture, causing real genetic mutations in Kac's artist-gene. By the end of the exhibition period, the installed bacteria carried a deliberately mutated version of Kac's translated verse. What Kac was arguing, operationally, is that the boundary between the symbolic (a biblical text) and the material (a genome) had collapsed once biotechnology became accessible enough that an artist could transliterate one into the other. The gallery visitor and the remote web visitor were both participating in genuine genetic mutation of real living material. The translation was not metaphorical; the base-pair sequence in the bacteria was readable back as the original English verse if one ran the mapping in reverse. Genesis is the bioart piece in this archive that most directly names the medium's specific argument. Kac's subsequent works — GFP Bunny (2000, the fluorescent rabbit Alba), Time Capsule (1997, the implanted microchip), Natural History of the Enigma (2003–08, the "plantimal" Edunia that combined his own DNA with a petunia's) — developed the premise further, but Genesis is the cleanest case where the work is both a participatory network-art piece and a real genetic intervention. The piece appeared first at Ars Electronica in 1999, was subsequently shown at the OK Centrum in Linz, then toured through Paris, Berlin, and São Paulo. Kac, now at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, remains one of the most unusual artists in this archive: his medium is simultaneously the web, the gallery, biotechnology, and the mammalian body. Lore Kac developed the Genesis DNA translation with the help of biologists at the University of Chicago's microbiology department; the synthesis of the DNA sequence cost roughly $2,500 in 1999 dollars and was ordered from a commercial gene-synthesis service. The bacterial culture was a harmless strain of E. coli standard for laboratory research. The UV-flash mutation mechanism was a commercially-available biological tool (a UV transilluminator) that the gallery installation housed in a custom exhibition case. Kac has said in several interviews that the ethical-review protocols at the University of Chicago — where the work was initially prepared — required several months of consultation before approval, and that the gallery variants at subsequent venues had to pass similar biosafety reviews. The work's second bacterial-culture incarnation at the OK Centrum reportedly got stuck in customs for several days before entering Austria. Sources • Kac, Eduardo — Telepresence & Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, & Robots (University of Michigan Press, 2005). • Kac, Eduardo (ed.) — Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond (MIT, 2007). • Ars Electronica Archive — Genesis 1999 citation.