Panel Statement
Panel: VIDA: New Discourses, Tropes and Modes in Art and Artificial Life Research
This talk will address a few thorny issues key to VIDA’s mission and my own work in emerging technologies of art: the tensions between complexity and reductionism, emergence and determinism, and living and non-living via another dualism, Biology and Post-biology. Central to this discussion are two projects Relative Velocity Inscription Device (a VIDA prize winning project, 2002) and Ocular Revision (2010). The former project is a live scientific experiment in which DNA from my own family’s skin color genes are literally raced against one another in a DNA fingerprinting gel, implying a valuation of their speed such as genetic fitness. In the latter project, the notion of Genetic Mapping is turned upside-down, as I create satellite-like images of the Earth’s hemispheres by inserting uniquely processed E. coli DNA into a custom, circular electrophoresis apparatus. These projects reflect upon epistemic differences in the life sciences between the Biological and the Post-biological periods. Whereas Biology defined the cell as the basic unit of life and thus took upon itself a new object, life itself, Post-biology shifts the focus of the life-sciences to non-living matter, DNA. Furthermore, this Post-biological turn takes a further cybernetic twist as the non-living matter of DNA is increasingly treated as a pure code, rather than a material substance. The differences are not simply a matter of scale in which more powerful tools allow us to look deeper, but rather a shift from the primacy of vision altogether toward a hyper-rationalized, statistical observation. I believe that these issues reflect a changing vision of organic life, a topic fundamental to emerging artistic practices and the VIDA mission.
- Prof. Paul Vanouse was awarded the second prize of VIDA 5.0: Art & Artificial Life International Competition (2002) for his project Relative Velocity Inscription Device. He is an artist who works in Emerging Media forms. Radical inter-disciplinarity and impassioned amateurism guide his practice. Since the early 1990s his artwork has addressed complex issues raised by varied new techno-sciences using these very techno-sciences as his media. His 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.