Artist Statement

We inhabit the microbial world. Microbes live on us, inside us, and around us. Every single orifice of our own bodies is populated by millions of different microbial species. We breathe microbes, swallow microbes, digest microbes, and defecate microbes. For the longest time, it has been believed that the key to understanding the human condition lies in understanding the human genome; but given our intimate relationship with microbes, researching only the human genome is now understood to be an insufficient condition: sequencing the metagenomes of our microbial communities would be necessary too. The disruption caused by the identification of this so-called human microbiome has been a real game-changer for several reasons. For one, Homo sapiens as we know it is now best described as a superorganism, that is, an organism in which a large number of different species coexist. It implies that the human genome is only one of the many genomes that affect us. More importantly, human biology can no longer deal only with human genes and human cells. Whereas the human genome used to define us as a species, the corresponding metagenome redefines what it means to be an embodied human. What if we were just a walking bag of microbes?

Artist’s shit 2.0 – ‘Your work is shit’ – the Italian artist Piero Manzoni was allegedly told by his father. In response to this insult, he came up with the idea of canning his own excrement as a work of art. Artist’s Shit (in Italian Merda d’Artista) was produced in 1961 into an edition of 90 cans. More than 50 years later, Artist’s Shit 2.0 takes advantage of next generation sequencing technologies to produce yet another edition of Manzoni’s masterpiece. For this work, my stool sample has been sequenced to reveal the metagenome of my gut microbiome. Billions of bacterial DNA fragments generated by a MiSeq Illumina sequencer have been produced and assembled into corresponding genomes to characterize the collective metagenome of all species of bacteria living inside my gut. As more and more of these bacterial sequences will be collected, archiving and storing metagenomic data will raise an unprecedented challenge in the history of biology. My work proposes a re-enactment of Artist’s Shit to account for such progress in biotechnology and high-throughput sequencing. However, contrary to Manzoni’s shit, my own excrement has not been canned; it has been sequenced and saved on 90 8GB USB flash drive, signed, and numbered. For this artist’s talk, I will present one of those pieces (of shit).

• François-Joseph Lapointe is head of the Laboratory of Molecular Ecology and Evolution at the Université de Montréal, Canada, and full professor in the Department of Biological Sciences. As part of his scientific research, he is interested in systematics, metagenomics and population genetics. Author of more than 100 publications in evolutionary biology, he also has developed numerous algorithms in biostatistics and bioinformatics. François-Joseph Lapointe also completed in 2012 a PhD in the study and practice of arts at the Université du Québec à Montréal. As part of his thesis entitled “Choreogenetics, or the art of making DNA dance”, he produced a genetic algorithm for dance composition and created a performance generated from the genetic sequences of 30 dancers. His most recent bioart project is to sequence his microbiome (and that of his wife) to generate metagenomic self- ortraits (or microbiome selfies). His research-creation projects are presently funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and a prestigious DIVA Award from the Danish Arts Foundation.