Tracking
Chimeras: The Eighth Day of
Eduardo Kac
By Dan Collins
This essay appears in the anthology, The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac (June 2003), co-edited by Dan Collins and Sheilah Britton. Published by the Institute for Studies in the Arts and distributed by D.A.P., the book can be ordered through the following website: http://store.yahoo.com/artbook/0972429107.html
…animals are always the observed. The fact that they can observe us has lost
all significance. They are the objects
of our ever-extending knowledge. What
we know about them is an index of our power, and thus an index of what separates
us from them. The more we know, the
further away they are.
—John
Berger
While
in ordinary discourse the word "chimera" refers to any imaginary
life form made of disparate parts, in biology "chimera" is a technical
term that means actual organisms with cells from two or more distinct genomes.
A profound cultural transformation takes place when chimeras leap from
legend to life, from representation to reality.
—Eduardo Kac[2]
Illuminating the center of a darkened room is a dome, a four-foot acrylic hemisphere mounted on a wooden cylinder. The quality of light is hardly of this world. “Exciter beams” of a particular nanofrequency bathe the room in Giotto blue. Yellow filters secured to the side of the dome reveal a startling scene:a living collection of fluorescent green plants and animals. Glowing tobacco leaves pierce the surface of an undulating, sand covered landscape; iridescent zebra fish dart amidst a miniature pond; a petri dish filled with slime mold emits an eerie verdant light; and bright green mice forage among the plants and feed at stainless steel troughs.
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images clockwise from
top left: GFP mice "pups," GFP fish, GFP Dictyostelium
discoideum (slime
mold), GFP tobacco plant.
But The Eighth Day is not a scientific experiment. It is meant to be understood as a work of art. Kac has, in essence, cloned the transgenic process itself and inserted it into an art context. But even while the artist seeks to distance the work from the laboratory, the look and feel of The Eighth Day is perilously close to other structures in the neighborhood of science. Recalling that other most Arizona of domes, Biosphere 2 (a structure whose failure as a scientific experiment is its most salient feature), it hardly matters that it only mimes scientific rigor. Not hermetically sealed, Kac’s dome contains the same atmosphere we all share. It is a vitrine, pure and simple.
To be sure, this is not a simple garden under glass. Dominating the center of this completely self-contained environment is an unexpected interloper—a robotic device with a glowing, biological core called a “biobot.” This bot, perched on six articulated robotic legs, is a wavy, hand blown glass vessel about a foot high housing an array of electronic components. Among its many features are two miniature video cameras and a “brain” comprised of an illuminated petri dish filled with a population of slime mold. One tiny video camera is mounted directly above the amoebae where it can be focused by a finely threaded mechanism; the other is on a pivoting arm affixed to the top of the biobot.
The initial idea for animating the biobot was to harness the movements of the slime mold. As the slime mold (Dictyostelium discoideum) migrated across the surface of the backlit petri dish to feeding points, its position would be observed by a video camera. Changes in light and dark patterns, tracked by a motion-sensing program, would cause the biobot to contract or relax combinations of its six legs. This movement in turn would ensure that the viewpoint delivered via the web was ever shifting—a “dislocation” worthy of Deleuze.[6]. In fact, the movement of the mold proved to be too slow to be perceived by the typical viewer. Instead of driving the biobot’s movements in real-time, prerecorded movements of the slime mold were used to trigger the robotic legs. The behavior of the Dictyostelium discoideum was recorded over a 24-hour period; its nearly imperceptible movements sped up and played back through an endless tape loop.
Unlike the sense of empathy one feels for caged animals in Rara Avis, the alternative viewpoints provided by The Eighth Day seem more clinical. The mediated view via the web is, in effect, a video panopticon that both echoes and amplifies the sense of containment and display provided by the dome. There is indeed a desire on the part of the artist to allow for a more empathetic relationship to the organisms contained in the dome. According to Kac, The Eighth Day “recognizes the mutuality of the symbiotic relationship between beings that are so different, such as humans and amoebae.”[7] But this poses something of a dilemma for the viewer. If I don’t feel a kinship with the amoebae driving the biobot, is this born of my failure to empathize with the working conditions of slime mold? Or is there something about how the work is structured that prevents this sense of connection? If the work were designed more like Rara Avis—with viewpoints from various organisms precisely mirrored by observers—would there be more of a sense of the “symbiotic relationship” so important to the artist?
Its multiple points of access and its shifting allusions
to both the realm of art and the vocabulary of science ask us to multi-task:
we are positioned by the artist between two poles—between allegory and perception…between
acts of interpretation and pure sensory experience. To the extent that the
work can be understood as a sophisticated metaphor or allegory—as an idea
about communication and interaction—the work implies a deeper level
of connection between living beings, be they plant or animal.[8] But the direct experience of the work
seems more conflicted that this. It
points to our continued use of surveillance and techniques of control to establish
privileged positions vis à vis the natural world. Undeniably, the flora and fauna of The
Eighth Day are objectified, just as surely as in any zoo, lab experiment,
or feedlot. Their “invisible nature”—invisible
in their everydayness—is here altered through a controversial breeding process
that animates their otherwise unremarkable features.
At the same time, the dome, with its glowing inhabitants, affords us
the luxury of seeing relationships that are all but invisible in nature.
While the genes of a jellyfish may not count for much on the evolutionary
scale, the simple fact that they provide a means to display—at the level of
DNA—the commonality of very different organisms may be partial proof that
we are all, finally, connected. In
point of fact, these various organisms could not “accept” the jellyfish gene
unless they were fundamentally produced out of the same chemical building
blocks.This is not fiction; this is concrete fact.
Herein lies one of the paradoxes of the piece. The very feature that demonstrates the commonality between vastly different entities is also the feature that casts them inexorably into the role of “other.” Most people would agree: to glow green is to be marked as different. To the extent that something living—particularly a mammal—glows green, we have an index of alterity. The degree to which they glow marks their distance from us. To paraphrase Berger, “the more we know about animals, the further away they are.” Familiar genetic features go unremarked. Until we situate ourselves in an uncompromising position—scanning for the unfamiliar, the taboo, the bizarre—it is impossible to bridge the gap between ourselves and the too familiar life forms that surround us. Do we require this kind of dramatic difference to stimulate our sense of empathy and concern?
How can we foster a different mode of interaction with the plant and animal kingdom? The concept of “dominion,” inherited from no less authoritative source than the Bible[9], promises stewardship for the human race, but not rights for animals in any contemporary sense.One wants to believe that the artist has found a path out of this cultural dilemma. It is certainly true that the installation provides us with a trace—it makes visible the invisible. And the artist gives us a living world…not a dead collection of specimens pinned under glass. The sculpture invites us to come in proximity to its magic. A kind of “video moat” rings the dome requiring viewers to “walk on water” to observe the contents of the terrarium. The theatricality of the image notwithstanding, how can one resist this opportunity to be implicitly identified with one of God’s miracles? Still, more of a spectacle than a demonstration, the work is more successful exploring metaphors for “interconnectedness” than providing evidence of our ability to commune with nature.
A sympathetic reading of The Eighth Day would suggest that the more we are able to project ourselves imaginatively into the condition of the “other,” however constituted, the more chance there is for understanding and connecting with that which threatens our own “sense of the world.” This interpretation, while complicated by the inevitable associations lent by science, seems to be at the heart of the artist’s intention. Kac writes in his essay “Transgenic Art:” “The use of genetics in art offers a reflection … from a social and ethical point of view. It foregrounds related relevant issues such as the domestic and social integration of transgenic animals, arbitrary delineation of the concept of "normalcy" through genetic testing, enhancement and therapy, health insurance discrimination based on results of genetic testing, and the serious dangers of eugenics.”[10] As a transgenic artist, Kac is not interested in the creation of genetic objects per se, but in the invention of transgenic social subjects. In other words, he sees his project as one of a completely integrated process involving the creation of living organisms and their relationship to society at large. Crucial to this process for Kac is the provision of a loving, caring, and nurturing environment in which the animals can grow safely and in good health.The Eighth Day implies that we need to be open to not only the “exotic” range of flora and fauna “native” to the planet, but also to that infinite variety of “alien” images and life forms—the fears, dreams, and inventions— that haunt our collective imagination. Once chimeras “leap from legend to life,” are we prepared to open our doors to the unfamiliar—and by extension to the “cultural transformation” alluded to by the artist? Further, as humans and the human genome become increasingly “transgenic,” will we be prepared to accept a fluid definition of what constitutes “humanness?” The Eighth Day and Kac’s ongoing work with transgenics is a call for an ethical dialogue that seeks to mitigate how humans, plants, and animals cohabit the planet.