NeMe: Mechanism Independent by Paul Vanouse

I. Start Here

In this essay, I would like to articulate a category of artistic practice called ‘Emerging Media’. Hardly an original term, it has typically been used as a catch-all category for artists working with new technologies. Many have resisted such a vague, unsexy categorization, preferring to self-describe as ‘digital media artist’, ‘computer artist’, ‘biotech artist’, ‘net artist’, ‘electronic media artist’, etc. I champion the term ‘Emerging Media’ because it resists defining a practice based on a medium in favor of a broader strategy of techno-cultural investigation that is continuously re-defining its object. My argument begins with a brief statement about my practice, followed by a clarification (quasi manifesto) of this field and two examples of how this plays out in my own work.

Since the early 1990s my artwork has addressed complex issues raised by varied new techno-sciences using these very techno-sciences as a medium. My artworks have included data collection devices that examine the ramifications of polling and categorization, genetic experiments that undermine scientific constructions of race and identity, and temporary organizations that playfully critique institutionalization and corporatization. These “Operational Fictions” are hybrid entities — simultaneously real things and fanciful representations — intended to resonate in the equally hyper-real context of the contemporary electronic landscape.

Over the past few years, I have been specifically concerned with forcing the arcane codes of scientific communication into a broader cultural language. In The Relative Velocity Inscription Device (2002), I literally race DNA from my Jamaican-American family members, in a DNA sequencing gel, in a installation/scientific experiment that explores the relationship between early 20th Century Eugenics and late 20th Century Human Genomics. Specifically, the double entendre of race is intended to highlight the similarities and obsession with ‘genetic fitness’ within these historical endeavors. Similarly my latest endeavor the Latent Figure Protocol (in-prog 2004), utilizes DNA sequencing technologies to create emergent representational images in which there is a tension between that which is portrayed and the DNA materials (from the specific individual or specific species) used to generate it. Not simply images of a sequence of DNA in a gel (like a standard DNA fingerprint), but rather a gel containing DNA sequences specifically chosen to create a recognizable, quasi-photographic representation. Both projects use DNA technologies in a very different manner than in typical lab work as I believe that artists working in emerging technologies should go beyond use of only pre-existing lab techniques and creatively ‘hack’ in this domain.

II. Emerging Media

Historically speaking, most recently solidified artistic media forms could once have been called ‘emerging media’ artforms. For instance video art emerged in the 1970s as artists sought to counter mainstream usage of video for broadcast spectacle in favor of resistant counter-spectacle. In this case, many artists sought to counter televisual compression of time (such as Dara Birnbaum), naturalization of the ‘point of view’ (such as Douglas Davis), and even to interrupt the formation of the mediated image (such as Nam June Paik). While video art continued to evolve and become recognized as an artform, many of the tropes of mainstream, televisual narrative became naturalized. Indeed, the video medium eventually became a fairly ‘transparent’ medium of representation. By transparent, I mean that artists no longer felt compelled to reflexively address ideas like ‘hey, the television screen isn’t a window because I’m not literally inside your TV’, or ‘wait a minute, this isn’t actually happening now ‘it was pre-recorded’, or ‘hey, that cut just changed our vantage point and compressed televisual time’. The moment of a medium’s emergence as an artform involves intense scrutiny of its typical usage prior to artistic intervention, at least in postmodern times.

Many contemporary emerging media fields have followed a similar trajectory. For instance, in the late 1990s, much net.art explored fundamental issues of online culture: the possibilities of new non-geographically based communities; the difficulties in verifying identity and authenticity; the implications of a work being interacted with in many places simultaneously. My fundamental interest however is an even more radical understanding of emerging media. Not only artistically contemplating the relationship of a techno-cultural medium (like the net) to the arts, but rather contemplating the relationship of techno-scientific medium to the broader culture including the arts. This endeavor is especially important to me as it underlines techno-scientific practice as being part of culture. Furthermore, it places the artist as the conduit for this translation/reentry process.

Emerging media practitioners of this latter definition have been fundamentally interested in exploring the relationship of the arcane codes of scientific communication to a broader cultural language. The language of science is of course one of many culturally created discourses. For example, biological terminology is not nature’s discourse, but rather a cultural discourse attempting to map onto an interpretation of nature. (This definition is not to belittle the process of interpretations of nature, nor to imply that these interpretations cannot be proven in the laboratory or operationalized into useful inventions.) A fundamental issue that emerging media practitioners have taken on is the slippage of analogic codes between discourses, generally seen as evidence of too culturally biased a scientific theory. There have also been cases where artists have wanted to open up the meanings of a techno-science or even influence the mapping process by allowing these analogies to proliferate. The former strategy comes out of a postmodern critique or anthropology of the belief system of modern science and the latter as a catalyst for new methodological exploration or even scientific revolution.

In this article, at this techno – scientific moment, I am focused on the realms of biotechnology and genomics as currently emerging media forms, though perhaps nearing the end of this definition. The most interesting work in this period is manifested in the work of dozens of artists and collectives working in the very forms of this current science, including live biological experiments, novel tissue forms, transgenic organisms and other live cell cultures, genome database analysis programs, etc. A multitude of other artists are important to the discussion of biotechnology, but work primarily with representations of it in more familiar media forms, especially photography and digital media, so are less implicated under the terms of emerging media practice.

Emerging Media artistic practice requires a commitment to radical interdisciplinarity and impassioned amateurism. Specialization is an outgrowth of the rationalization and instrumentalization of labor and resists outside influence. Highly – motivated amateurism and “true” interdisciplinarity, on the other hand, are strategies by which domain – specific knowledge and authority can be productively discussed, challenged and intelligently incorporated into other cultural fields. Most often, this interdisciplinary venture is facilitated by scientists who are interested in collaborating with artists and/or who are broadly – based scholars committed to the collegial exchange of information and consultation. Less frequently, artists enter these domains as motivated amateurs, hacking their way through biology textbooks and laboratory procedures necessary to produce their work.

Emerging Media practices do not by definition require cutting edge technologies. An emerging media is simply that which utilizes a given technology that has been isolated in its communicative potential and through creative re-use, mis-use and/or even ab-use turned into a highly communicative cultural form. While this clarification might complicate easy categorization of what is or isn’t considered an emerging media project, it may emancipate artists from market-driven techno-fetishism and desperate new-gizmo-lust.

Emerging Media forms are by definition in flux. Several things connote a medium that no longer is really definable an emerging media form. As previously mentioned, when artworks begin to treat the form as a transparent medium of expression we can safely say that the medium has become an official medium of communication and is no longer emerging. Secondly, when the medium becomes marketed and mainstreamed by consumer technologies its form is often closed, oversimplified and formalized. Lastly, and perhaps most ironically, when the medium becomes too professionalized — thoroughly integrated into the pedagogy of universities and given official categorical status by museums, festivals and institutions — it likewise becomes complacent and its highly-charged, quivering ambivalences are sedate.

The categorization of emerging media is not meant to be value laden. Just because one is working in emerging media, doesn’t mean that the work is good, nor even that it is contemporary. Work in this medium can still be stuck in a very traditional aestheticism, it can be filled with cliché, it can still be socially irresponsible, and it can still be a venture completely interpolated in a capitalist framework. Emerging media can also suffer from sheer avant gardism. It is not uncommon to hear artists described as ‘the first blankety-blank artist’ or ‘the pioneer of ‘blankety artform’. The importance of individual research in this field should not be evaluated under such a neo-colonial, territorial framework that invalidates further exploration. Rather, the best work in this field creatively renegotiates the boundaries of disciplines, forges new interdisciplinary thought vectors, and encourages broadly based education and public participation in culturally defining debates.

III. Relative Velocity Inscription Device

Relative Velocity Inscription Device is a live scientific experiment using the DNA of my own multi-racial family of Jamaican descent that explores the relationship between early 20th Century Eugenics and late 20th Century Human Genomics. The experiment takes the form of an interactive, multi – media installation, containing a computer-regulated, biological separation gel through which four family members’ DNA samples slowly travel. Each DNA sample contains one of the six genes generally accepted as influencing skin color. The family members’ skin color genes are literally raced against one other in a sequence of experiments (one for each of the six genes). An early eugenic publication within the installation called Race Crossing In Jamaica, allows access to historical precursors of this “race’. The double entendre of race is intended to highlight the similarities and obsession with ‘genetic fitness’ throughout the history of human genetics.

Racial categories were constructed based on external characteristics of groups (typically natives in imperial colonies). Skin color — is the most frequent delimiter. As human genetics moves from the study of the skin/body to the study of micro-bodies; from forms to underlying codes; despite the proclamation by genome scientists in 2000 that there is ‘no scientific basis for race,’ critics have warned of subtler forms of scientific racism such as genetic or molecular racism. Perhaps the ultimate molecularization of racial stereotyping was voiced by James Watson, discoverer of the DNA double helix. In a lecture at UC Berkeley in 2000 Watson discussed an experiment in which a group of male students were injected with melanin, the substance produced by genes that makes our skin dark. Watson claimed that the students quickly became sexually aroused — developing erections. We are left to assume that even as the scientifically unpopular concept of race has been removed from skin color, a stigmatization of individual black-identified traits may follow. Perhaps it is not the black body that is deemed prone to promiscuity, but blackness itself. The very signifiers of race, rhetorically dislodged from their referents but still encoded within every cell in our bodies, could be personified as sexual deviants awaiting the opportunity to express themselves against our will and irrespective of environment.

In order to address this tense space of contemporary genomics, I utilized an early publication by biologist Charles B. Davenport called Race Crossing in Jamaica. Davenport sought to disprove the theory of hybrid vigor by showing the ultimate inferiority of Black/White hybrids. The study used a detailed methodology, which tabulated over one hundred examinations upon hundreds of human subjects. One of the factors that particularly intrigued me was the subject of performance, i.e. tests of strength and motor control. It was clear that these tests were biased by external, non-genetic factors, such as mood and occupation. Conversely, contemporary genomic studies, insure a digital precision — a genetic trait is either present or absent with no ambiguities. All that would be necessary is to design the correct examination for the micro-body and its value could be determined unambiguously. As my own family contains black/white hybrids of Jamaican descent, the subjects were easily selected — mother, father, sister and brother (myself).

A few aspects of the work could not be performed live, including drawing blood, extracting DNA from the blood and amplifying DNA from selected regions of skin color genes. However, all other phases of the process take place live in the space of public display. Since Gel Electrophoresis uses DNA fragments that (when stained) are visible to the naked eye, this technology was perfect for public display in that it is performed at a scale at which viewers can actually see what is happening. It was essential that viewers witness:

1. The experimental process itself — the DNA slowly moving through the polarized gelatin.
2. Its abstraction into data — the camera periodically imaging the gel and computerized image-processing algorithms locating each sample and tracking which sample finishes first.
3. Records of previous races — the viewer can access, via touch-screen, the results of all previous races, which are updated automatically as the experiment runs.

Each of these processes occurs live. The gallery is not merely an incubation chamber in which a process is occurring, nor is it merely a display space to post the results of this experiment, but an fully automated laboratory where all phases can be viewed and evaluated.

IV. Latent Figure Protocol

My current project, Latent Figure Protocol utilizes DNA sequencing technologies to create emergent representational images in which there is a tension between that which is portrayed and the DNA materials (from the specific individual or specific species) used to generate it. Not simply images of a sequence of DNA in a gel (like a standard DNA fingerprint), but rather a gel containing DNA sequences specifically chosen to create a recognizable, quasi-photographic representation. For instance, using a 16-lane electrophoresis gel, it is possible to generate an iconic image by treating each lane as a row of pixels analogous to how early computer images were built using ascii characters. Inserting DNA of known sizes into the beginning slot of each lane allows for a sequence of DNA bands in each lane to migrate at different speeds when voltage is applied, thus creating a 2-dimensional grid of DNA bands resembling a low-resolution bitmap image.

The subjects of these images will be reflexive of the subject from which the DNA was obtained and/or referential of the concept and issues of recombinant DNA in general. A simple example would be to create an iconic image of the universal copyright symbol (©) using DNA from a transgenic crop such as Bt maize — such an image might connote the tensions surrounding not only private ownership of GMOs, but also the status of organic life in general. I am planning to create a series of projects using this protocol and varied methods of installation and live performance in which to show and demonstrate the work.
The imaging process will be performed live using a computer regulated electrophoresis rig. This distinction is important to me as it reiterates the usage of biological science as a medium of expression not merely the subject of representation.

In both works, I am interested in using DNA imaging materials that are intended to be read “scientifically” (i.e. to obtain the genetic sequence of an organism) and through rigorous rewriting/recombination to force them to be read “culturally” (i.e. as a qualitative indicator of fitness and as a representational image). I want to create highly-charged, ambivalent artifacts belonging to the realms of both culture and science. The short history of genomics already undermines this nineteenth century dualism (science/culture) as the process of “scientific” mapping is intimately related to the process of creating a “technological” innovation or a “creative” and patentable product or technique.

The projects destabilize the notion of objective truth/evidence as is implied by familiar DNA sequencing uses such as DNA fingerprinting playfully undermining both essentialist notions of identity and biologically-determinist senses of biological destiny.

V. Conclusion

What is at stake in this discussion of emerging media is a working definition for long-term artistic practices that might seem flighty at first glance. In a sense, defining an emerging media artist within a narrow single media definition is like defining a conceptual artist based on the materials of their last work. As conceptual art understands media as massively signifying elements in a work, no given medium is really sufficient for a sustained practice of nuanced communication in a constantly shifting cultural milieu. An ontological comparison might be how current philosophers prefer the concept of becoming to the concept of being. The primary goal of this discussion of emerging media is to likewise move beyond the static confines of ‘thingy’ based practice to the more open, mechanism-independent model of artistic practice.

Examples of the former strategy include:
Bruno Latour’s Science in Action, and We Have Never Been Modern. An example of the latter is Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method.
“Race, Inter-Race and Post-Race in the Study of Human Genetics”, Paul Vanouse, Afterimage, Sept./Oct. 2002.

Credits

• Originally published in: a minima: actual art publication, Spain, vol 10, 2005
• Paul Vanouse is an associate Professsor of Art at the University at Buffalo, a research Fellow at the Studio for Creative Inquiry, Carnegie Mellon University and a practising new media artist
• Also by Paul Vanouse…

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