Biocollage Author(s): David Joselit, Carol Becker, Critical Art ...

BiocollageAuthor(s): David Joselit, Carol Becker, Critical Art Ensemble, N. Katherine Hayles, ErnestLarsen, Sherry Millner, Marek WieczorekSource: Art Journal, Vol. 59, No. 3 (Autumn, 2000), pp. 44-63Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778027Accessed: 20/08/2008 22:15Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=caa.Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with thescholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform thatpromotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.http://www.jstor.org

BiocollFrom the mid-twentieth century onward, our bodies have undergone twoostensibly paradoxical changes: they have expanded outward through theprostheses of electronic communication, and they have contracted to themicroscopic dimension of DNA codes. The most visible, though not the exclusive,avatars of this dual movement are the Internet and the Human GenomeProject. If the Internet may stand for all of the technical apparatuses thatextend and expand human perception, folding themselves into the body ascyborg limbs, the Human Genome Project, whose ambition is to understandthe body as a code, reinvents the organic self as a malleable machine that maybe engineered and re-engineered. In new scholarship in the history of scienceand literary studies, these developments have been intensively analyzed interms of the cyborg (Donna Haraway) and the posthuman (N. KatherineHayles), but little work has been done to understand how they generate newforms of visuality. This forum is intended to explore such a question.If the i98os were characterized by an emphasis on identity politics, andthe representation of stereotypical subjectivities in order to dissect and underminethem, it is my belief that much of the most provocative art of the I99osemerged indirectly from the simultaneous expansion and contractionDavid J oselit of the body I have cited. Bodies have been remapped and disseminated."Identity" can be counterfeited on the Internet, or situatedon the level of sequences of proteins which are too infinitesimal,?6 and too abstract, to correlate comfortably with a coherent bodywarranted to a coherent self. I believe that this condition has hauntedart practices in which bodies manifest indeterminate and hybrid mixtures ofgenders, species, and machines. How do we evaluate this work in light of thequestions of authorship, appropriation, and identity which have motivatedmuch of the most progressive art of the last twenty-five years. Is there a politicsof the posthuman, and if so, what is it?We would like to thank Robin Held, Assistant Curator, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington,Seattle, and Karen Sinsheimer, Curator of Photography, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, for their assistance.David Joselit is Associate Professor in theDepartment of Art History and the Ph.D.Program in Visual Studies at the University ofCalifornia, Irvine. He is author of Infinite Regress:Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941.Ifligo Manglano-Ovalle. Garden of Delight:Lu, Kack, and Carrie, 2000. Courtesy theartist and Max Protetch Gallery, NewYork.This work combines aesthetics and geneticsin a new form of a genre with a valued positionin the history of art: portraiture.Theseare life-size DNA portraits for which thesubject and "sitter" has chosen the colors.Portraits of individuals are then groupedaccording to family, which includes, in addi-; ?a:B811 e _?i- BB tion to traditional biological families, familiesconsisting of gay partners and adoptedchildren, friends, and so on.44 FALL 2000

When it was first proven that Dolly, the cloned sheep, had a genetic makeupthe age of her host, it threatened to end the fascination with cloning as aviable method of reproduction. (Why would a member of any species wantto start out old?) But in April 2000, when scientists at Advanced Cell Technol-ogies in Worcester, Massachusetts, announced that their cloned cows "possessedcells with clocks that are set like newborns," this was a revelation.' Itwould seem that finally humans had found the fountain of youth. Now ableto replicate other species (and someday ourselves) ad infinitum, they (we)could always remain young.At the core of the Human Genome Project, cloning, and biotechnology,there appears to be a desperate desire to find "the secret of life," a searchintended to foil the most fearsome elements of our genetic pro-Carol Becker gramming-the inevitability of imperfection, deterioration, disease,and death. Perhaps the conversation about the "posthuman" is funrGFPBunny damentally about our desire to flee from human vulnerability, mor-tality, and our subjective awareness of these conditions. And if suchexperimentation and theorizing is a personal, ontogenetic attempt to defydeath, it is also a phylogenetic effort to continue to evolve as a species whenit would appear that all dramatic "natural" evolutions of the physical bodyhave come to completion. Simultaneous with this interest in immortalizingthe physical body is an attempt to create a new, virtual body, unencumberedby gravity. One day we might decant our old "self" or core into a cyberneticshell stored on some version of a floppy disk from which our singular andcollective identities could be eternally retrieved (but hopefully not erased).These complex motivations are often couched in the discourses of transcendenceand liberation.If, in the art world, the theorizing of the I98os and I99os were aboutissues of identity-the mining of the nuance of one's historical self, conceptualizedin society, or what one is, then perhaps this new era will be characterizedby what one is not, and focus on the incorporation of otherness: the recombinationof the natural and the fabricated; the physical and the virtual; thebreakdown of distinctions between art and science; the site of visual experimentationnow become the actual, material body, no longer merely its representation;the interrogation of the permeable parameters of species differentiation-newhybridities-as well as the cyborgization and robotization ofthe human body, and the humanization of the machine. Perhaps we are nowenamored with the notion of the posthuman precisely because we perceivehumanity as an outdated Enlightenment construct impossible to obtain.Dystopian-unable to imagine the transformation of society and social structures,we have become fascinated with something pre-social: the source oflife and all its differentiations as manifested in the Human Genome Project. Isour focus now shifted to the origins of being to deflect us from the questionof being in society? Or is this actually the issue of identity taken to an evenmore basic level: What is human? What is animal? Where do the two cometogether? How can we truly gain mastery of the code that makes us humanand differentiates us from the 98 percent of our makeup that is geneticallyI.Taken from a report in USAsimilar to that ofToday, April 28-30,apes? Are we nostalgic for our placement in the world of2000. animals (the 98 percent) or committed to leaving such categorizations behind45 art journal

Critical Art Ensemble.Society for ReproductiveAnachronisms, 1998-99.Graphic from website.Courtesy of the artists.Critical Art EnsembleBody Invasion an d ResistantCultur al Practice11?3I1)Whenever new vision technologies make a cultural appearance, and access tothem begins to trickle down to less endowed areas of specialization (like artproduction), there are those who will immediately seize the opportunity toget in on the ground floor of new aesthetic possibilities. It seems reasonableto assume that at this very moment, some artists are trying to negotiate turningin their Web cams for electron microscopes. And already, the "art world"has begun to see representations derived from molecular biology drifting outof the laboratories and into a variety of cultural spaces. With two decades ofthe vision-tech explosion behind us, what is ahead is relatively predictable:heroic molecular landscapes emphasizing the paradox ofscale and the colorful beauty of the micro-world, andexpressions of frankensteinian desire in the form of manufacturedor intentionalized life-forms (glow-in-the-darkrats and proteins performing textual patterns), and othersuch fare. This time around, projects of technologicaland/or formal novelty will be all the more depressing. Inthe past, vision technology (such as video, for example) was generally limitedto contributing to a further refinement of capital's vision apparatus of panopticcontrol. While this technology was quite effective in producing informa-tion, better controlling information flows (speed and volume), and superiorvision capability, we could all rest assured that although the social environmentwas manufactured to effectivelyexpress the colonial texts of the reigningpower regimes, the body still hadsome autonomy -there were stillsome organic processes out of theinscriptive reach of capital; there wasa stopping point somewhere in whatdegree the body would have to bearthe signs and burdens of capital. Notanymore. The greatest colonial initiative,perhaps ever, is underway-fullscalebody invasion at the molecularlevel, making both immediate andcross-generational control possible.Unlike the first time capital attemptedthis initiative with the eugenics move-ment, this time it is ideologically,financially, and technically feasible.For this reason, CAE has found itimpossible to treat this new technologyas just another tool, nor to think that bio-art does not contribute to this secondwave of body invasion if it does not foster resistant components.To complicate matters further, the biotech revolution is a secret revolution,slowly infiltrating and subverting the structure of everyday life. Biotech'sinterventions into ordinary life occur stealthily with as little representation aspossible. For example, new initiatives in pharmacology are kept secret-supposedlyto protect corporate security-and the genetic engineering of organic48 FALL 2000

Critical Art Ensemble. Cultof the New Eve, 1999-2000.Performance. First manifestationat St. ClaraHospital, Rotterdam.Thisproject represents acollaboration betweenCritical Art Ensemble,Faith Wilding, and PaulVanouse. Courtesy of theartists.I. CAE is not necessarily against organic commodityengineering in general. Such considerationsmust be made on a case-by-case basis withthe analysis skewed far more toward ecologicalissues than toward health issues. The problemhere is that the intentional withholding of accessiblesignage in everyday life situations by relevantindustries suggests an attempt to eliminate publicdiscussion and debate on the issues of biotech.For a more complete explanation of CAE's argumentssee Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies,and New Eugenic Consciousness (New York:Autonomedia/Semiotext(e), 1998) and DigitalResistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (NewYork: Autonomedia/Semiotext(e), 2000).commodities remains intentionally unlabeled in the United States.' Underthese conditions, the production of images and performative structures dramaticallychanges. Resistant image makers have to begin at the fundamentallevel in order to represent the unseen elements of biotechnical developmentsin ways that are accessible and meaningful to nonspecialists. CAE believes thatthe best way to do this is through participatory projects in which informationand actual scientific projects are brought to nonspecialists outside a contextoverwhelmed by the signs of scientific authority. For example, one only needsto skim over a sperm or egg donor screening test to see that something otherthan health issues is at stake. However, for this counter-perception to shinethrough, the review of this test must be done in a situation in which an authority(a doctor, for example) is not reassuring the reader that everything is okay.In addition to designing and doing participatory performances that shedlight on current political developments and the construction of representationassociated with biotechnological expansion, CAE has attempted to underminescientific authority for the purpose of creating room for diverse amateur discourse.The utopian rhetoric of the creators, manufacturers, and promoters ofscientific invention is relatively hard to argue with, because of a popular perceptionthat the public (nonspecialists in biology) cannot comprehend scien-tific knowledge at an advanced enough level to be able to validly comment onscientific claims and initiatives. The expertise needed to understand science to49 art journal

allow a person to make an informed decision about courses of biotechnologicaldeployment is modest! Amateurs should be a key part in this discussion (asin any with revolutionary social potential). Artists, activists, and students workingin biotech are model amateurs who are making significant contributionsto constructing a foundation for public discourse in the field of biotech, andshould do what is necessary to replicate this discourse position and its alternativeforms of perception and investigation among as many people as possible.Finally, intervention in the utopian spectacle of biotech-what little thereis-should begin as soon as possible. Here cultural producers are the experts.The current conditions that this group must engage seem to be as follows:specialists within the various areas that constitute the field of biotechnologytend to explain their discipline using the language of cybernetics. Unfortu-nately, this language is largely inscrutable to nonspecialists. To complicatethe matter further, the standard utopian promises derived from the Enlightenmentrhetoric of progress that are used to adjust perception of or sell technologyto popular culture do not generate sympathy or excitement. Biotech'spromises of a new body, convenience, democracy, and community (all thesame promises used very effectively by information and communicationstechnology) are tainted by trace cultural anxieties left behind by the prewareugenics movement, and other, vaguer, big brother suspicions. The only otherfunctional, broad-based popular utopian rhetoric that remains is Christian.Consequently, when biotech makes one of its few media appearances in orderto sell itself as a stock option or raise research money, it offers the promisesof immortality, miracle cures, edenesque abundance, and new universalism(i.e., DNA as a replacement for the soul). In contrast, CAE attempts to providesigns that contribute to the development of a critical (as opposed to utopian)public discourse on this subject matter and to disrupt or subvert the falsespectacular distraction of progress and profit for all.Critical Art Ensemble is a collective of five artists dedicated to the exploration of the intersectionsbetween art, technology, critical theory, and political activism.Visualizing the PosthumanNo longer a cloud on the distant horizon, the posthuman is rapidly becomingan everyday reality. Kevin Warwick communicates in binary code with computerdevices in the environment via an implant in his arm; portions of a lampreyeel brain, transplanted into a mobile robot, direct the robot's motion;Cog, Rodney Brooks's humanoid robot, surveys theenvironment and plays catch with a human interlocutor.N. Katherine Hayles It is not a question of whether the posthuman willarrive but what forms it will take when it does. In thisdizzying cascade of posthuman visitations, an area ofcontestation that remains vitally under-determined isembodiment. Should the body be seen as evolutionary baggage that we areabout to toss out as we vault into the brave new world of the posthuman?Or does embodiment continue to be essential to human thought and being?Complexly related to this issue is the role of the visual in posthuman cul-tural production, for vision both constructs an embodied world for us and50 FALL 2000

signifies its meanings through representational practices. As text moves fromthe durable fixed inscriptions of print into the flickering signifiers of digitalmedia, visual forms, like the body, seem to lose their weighty materiality.Yet the digital realm also has its embodied particularity; electrons flashingacross a cathode ray tube are not less material than plant fibers impregnatedwith ink. On some deep level of correspondence, visual forms and ideas aboutembodiment evolve together. In my view, a crucial cultural project at thishistorical juncture is to find forms adequate to express and construct theposthuman without erasing embodiment as the essential enabling ground forhuman existence.In digital environments, the old print relation between letter andphoneme, mark and sound, is being reconfigured as text becomes dynamic,dancing on the screen in ways impossible with durable inscriptions. As a consequence,text is reasserting itself not only as something to be read but somethingto be seen. Word and image join in new collaborations, delighting intheir flickering mutability and instantaneous transformations into one another.In the light speed with which these transformations take place and the infinitepossibilities of mutation, text-as-image testifies to the posthuman body as asite of nonessentialist and culturally inflected production. But it is also possibleto create text-as-image that simultaneously insists on the continuing importanceof embodiment to human perception and being. The trick is to do both atonce, to work at the borderline between text and image, enduring materialform and mutable cultural production, without sacrificing either to the other.The Topographic Text: Reading as Gliding"What does it mean to move through a maze of language?" Diana Slatteryasks in her electronic hypertext "Glide: An Interactive Exploration with VisualLanguage" (academy.rpi.edu/glide/testbed). At the center of this question isGlide, imagined as a nonverbal language that can only be written, not spoken,although it can also be performed through gestures. The narrative at the site,"The Death Dancers," illustrates the different modes through which Glide canbe apprehended. The narrative takes place four thousand years in the future,when humanity has been infected with the I-virus, bestowing on selectedmembers the dubious privilege of immortality. The Lifers, as they are called,become so jaded that only one event can pique their interest-the Game, acontest based on negotiating a complex maze comprised of the glyphs of theGlide language. The twenty-seven glyphs making up Glide are all variations ofsemi-circles of a certain radius and its double. Their similar geometries makeit possible for them to fit together into larger patterns, creating mazes that arealso inscriptions conveying meaning.Semantically the glyphs function somewhat like ideograms, with eachmark conveying three root meanings along with successive layers of secondary,tertiary, and sometimes quaternary connotations. The Lexicon at thesite illustrates this process of signification by displaying a moving circle ofglyphs. When the user clicks on one of the marks, it breaks off from the circleand shoots out rays displaying the three root meanings. Additional clicksexpand these into second and tertiary meanings until all of the overlappingterms have been revealed, creating a semantic network that functions more as5I art journal

in the context of tfe Death Cancer culture, theprmary fom f ar tectu is the maze. the mae ismind moo the game boar, and mazes ar made of ng . of.? * * * 31idete gtyphs. hence, the s4emrap.fnisftftlt'rand/or with in the middlelrrrt* |^^| ^^^^Byunlnking the par of glyphs that "make w archltsctwjrevals an inner snuctawe, aroher layer of meatning. ther isa- warntrfuty as to whrch rglypth two owose thei pairm or mon, this ors becu t shr"stron Ilnk-an overap. a' vertical links create two ewglyphs i the certer such as that in architcture where tthtwo glyphs form root and unr*, alo with a stron" link.Diana Slattery, DanielO'Neil, and Bill Brubaker.Glide Visual LanguageProject (academy.rpi.edulglideltestbed), 1998.Electronic image.Courtesy of the artists.an extended metaphor or a haze of signification rather than a clearly defineddenotation.To run a maze of glyphs, then, is both to enact a physical performanceand apprehend the subtle metaphoric connections that comprise each glyph initself and the larger meanings that flow from several glyphs joined together."The Death Dancers" narrative describes the Millennium class of initiates, adolescentswho are being rigorously trained by Dancemaster Wallenda, a Liferwhose job it is to instill a Zen-like discipline in his students so they can runmazes of increasing complexity. The four students embody distinct typeswhich correspond to different approaches to solving the mazes. The Chrometype relies on rational calculation of angles, degrees, and radians; the Swashtype sparks on creative ingenuity; the Bod draws on the body's proprioceptiveand kinesthetic capabilities; and the Glide gains an intuitive understandingof the language so she can think in Glide, running the maze as if she werelearning a poem. Put into syncopation with these different types are differentmodes of cognition described as Island-Mind, the rational cogitation of theconscious mind; Sea-Mind, the cognition that emerges from dreams, omens,and metaphors; Gut-Mind, centered in bodily sensation and emotion; andLily-Mind, a transpersonal awareness that melds into what Emerson called theOversoul. To run a maze in a certain way amounts, then, to mobilizing a certainmode of cognition. Rational consciousness in this world is merely onemode of cognition among many, and not necessarily the most powerful. TheDancemaster, for example, can choose to make the maze mirrored, in whichcase the visual faculty becomes almost worthless and those relying on Island-Mind are easily outrun by Dancers calling instead on Gut-Mind. Reading practicesfor Glide thus involve whole-body processing and a variety of sensorymodalities.Enhancing the richness of interpretation (which is also always a performance)is the complexity of decoding. The compound glyphs that make upmazes can be taken apart not just in one way, as when one decodes an alphabeticword into letters, but in multiple ways, each of which is an appropriatereading of the maze. For example, the glyph for "architecture" can be decon-52 FALL 2000

structed into the glyphs for "matter" and "mind"; alternatively, it can also beread as glyphs for "fire" and "moon," with "root" and "unity" in the middle.The multiple ways in which glyph mazes can be decoded suggest an entirelynew interpretation for the hypertext link. Instead of the "go to" computercommand, Slattery conceptualizes the link as the matching of similar geometrieswithin glyphs to form more complex topographical surfaces. It is not aquestion, then, of creating a pointer from one address in the computer memoryto another but of finding spatial forms that fit fluidly together and that,once joined, can be decoded into different components than were used toassemble them. "Text expands and contracts," Slattery writes, "moves alongthe axis, breaks out of lines, offers alternative pathways, explodes in your face.Text is definitely getting out of line."It is not merely a metaphor to say that Glide is metaphoric. Metaphor,which joins two disparate things together by asserting an identity betweenthem, is here enacted physically by joining one glyph to another to form alarger topographic shape. Just as metaphor creates an emergent meaning thatis more than the sum of the parts, blossoming forth as a realization inheringin neither component individually but rather growing out of their interac-tions, so the meanings that emerge from the glyphs and the larger mazes theyform come from complex interplays between root, secondary, and tertiarymeaning of components that themselves can transform into other shapes as thereader plays with deconstructing the maze into different glyphs. The highlyinteractive and emergent nature of this kind of reading is visually reinforced atthe site by animation that shows one glyph morphing into another, an actionthat both demonstrates and enacts the reading practices Glide requires.Slattery combines this unique interpretation of hypertext with an understandingof metaphor as a performance whose most important purpose is toincrease connectivity. For the individual subject, writing/reading/performingGlide increases awareness of multiple cognitive capabilities located throughoutthe body; Glide also increases connectivity between the individual and theLily-mind and thereby with other subjectivities as well. "The cognitive functionof metaphor increases the connectivity between minds, internally andsocially," Slattery writes. Although the mazes remain stationary during a givenrun/reading, the technology underlying them allows them to be instantlyrearranged into different shapes, much as the letters on a computer screen areperceived as stationary but can be transformed by a keystroke into differentfonts, etc. Such transformations are possible because computer script, unlikeprint, is not durably inscribed; the apparent fixity of screenic text is producedby a constantly sweeping electron beam that refreshes the screen many timeseach minute. The mazes are like computer writing in that they embody aprocess of becoming, functioning as mutable signifiers always available fortransformation and re-writing.In a larger sense, the entire Glide site is a metaphor for the reading andwriting practices hypertext initiates. By imagining a mode of reading that isalso a performance, Slattery intimates, the hypertext reader draws on a fullrange of sensory modalities that includes rational analysis but also proprioception,kinesthesia, emotions, tactility, and intuition. Visualizing the site mapas a maze written in Glide, she constructs the site as a topographic space the53 art journal

eader can explore through her embodied actions of moving the cursor andclicking, much as the Dancer explores the Glide maze through a physical journeythat is also reading. Slattery includes morphing programs showing oneglyph transforming into another, thus suggesting that the language is not astatic inscription but itself a performance always in the process of becoming.What is the upshot of these complex metaphoric interplays? Slattery linksthem with the medium when she writes, "The computer is a technology asprotean in its applications as fire or electricity. Is it possible that the impact isbeing felt ... in the ways we construe, form, and use language itself?" Hereher project is revealed not only as an attempt to imagine a visual language,but moreover to imagine it within a medium capable of transforming oursense of how language functions. For her, hypertext instantiates and demandscyborg reading practices that transform human subjectivity even as they aretransformed by it. At the Glide site, reading is performed as more than a cognitiveactivity-or rather, it is an activity that takes place in the embodiedcognitions of a posthuman subject who is made to realize anew the inextricableentwining of body with mind, image with text. We are the medium,and the medium is us.N. Katherine Hayles is Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the authorof Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,1990) and How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1999).Having the human genome is like having a Landsat map of the earth, compared to a world wherethe map tapers off into the unknown.... It's as different a view of human biology as a map ofthe earth in the fourteen-hundreds was compared to a view from space today.-Eric Lander, molecular biologistThis is like Vesalius .... Before Vesalius, people didn't even know they had hearts and lungs.-Norton Zinder, molecular biologistMaps are models of worlds crafted through and for specific practices of intervening and ways of life.-Donna HarawayThe Human Genome Project turns out to be a ferocious magnet for a host ofsynoptic metaphors, very few of which actually evoke the human body. Suchterms as Holy Grail, code of codes, map of the earth, book, set of instruc-tions, mosaic, jigsaw puzzle, recipe, scripture, blueprint,Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner Talmud, software, the key to human nature, master medicalmodel, summit of human knowledge all crop up regularlyboth in scholarly and popular discourse. These proliferatingmetaphors register as totalizing attempts to graspthe sense of the immense project all at once; and, in fact, the HGP is professedlya totalizing project, with the molecular biologist playing the role of theGreat Totalizer of Biotech Oz. Critical theory's noble renunciation of grandnarratives, its reluctant long goodbye to the project of totalization, has beenanswered by molecular biology's compensatory inauguration of the unravelingMapping the New New W orld54 FALL 2000

of a code three billion letters long. This gigantic enterprise of genetic totalizationhas been made feasible, technically and economically, by two otherclosely related forces endowed with the myth of virtually unlimited (i.e., everincreasing)power and speed: the computer and globalization. Together theseepochal forces now promise at a minimum to free the body from disease-toliberate us from the suffering imposed by nature's mistakes.The overarching metaphors listed above emerge from science itself andthus also represent the excessive desire or ambition of science not only toknow everything but to own what it knows. Note the list's shuttle betweenthe mundane (book, map, recipe) and the sublime (holy grail, etc.). Thisdynamic appears to reflect science's oscillation between conflicting paradigms:on the one hand, the still widely accepted, if anachronistic, notion of scienceas pure research, which deploys its tools to arrive at objective experimentalresults with no necessary practical implications; on the other, science asknowledge/power, a mage-like avatar given to perorations of perfectibility.Both of these metaphorical conceptions of the leading edge of contemporaryscience miss the rhetorical mark hit week after week in the full-page biotechads found in the pages of Science magazine, one of which recently placed theproject's results within a figurative space left out of the list above: a goldmine. All the major molecular biologists are said to hold economic investmentsin the HGP's success and/or its expected medical applications. The mostpublicized such scientist, Craig Venter, pulled out of the publicly funded HGP,and now heads a private competing venture, Celera, funded to the tune of$5oo million. Tied to corporate interests in exploiting value from the HGP,these scientists are keen to line the pockets of their lab coats with gold. Everyindication is that their primary object of study is their market share.Such a rapid and still growing accumulation of competing metaphorsaccompanied, as spectacularly as it is, by intensive capital accumulation andrecombination indicates that much more than a rhetorical contest is at stakein establishing how genetic research is set upon reshaping the human body.Suppose the self-confessed metaphor of the gold mine to be accurate, forinstance. History would then oblige us to expect the human body to be ruthlesslyexploited for everything it was worth just as a gold mine, counting fornothing except the value that can be extracted from it, becomes only a slagheap once its value is totally exploited. The difference is that the valuableresources of the human body can, in principle, never be exhausted.What remains slippery here is that the human body only exists in and forrepresentation-it amounts to a figure itself-quite obviously there is no suchthing as the human body, there are only individual human bodies, all of whichdiffer from each other, all of which have different genetic codes. The HGP isbased upon the negotiable socially and scientifically agreed-upon fiction of thehuman body, based in other words, on forgetting the everyday delirium ofdifference. The scientific assertion of the embodiment of totalization (the bodyas totality) is itself the best of weapons, since it virtually ensures the awedbewilderment of a carefully under-educated public, eagerly but passivelyawaiting the medical miracles seemingly imminent as the magical effect ofunlocking the great code. The psychology of such mastery is a very old storyin the midst of being recoded for popular consumption.55 art journal

From an aesthetic point of view, there seems little reason to sacrifice anyof these accumulating metaphors and the historical and ideological weightthey carry when the ever-sharpening internecine combat over patents andprospecting claims is already drawing blood in the imperial realm comprisedof biotechnology, the giant pharmaceuticals, the government, and the univer-sity system. Since, at the very least, these metaphors indicate the tendencies,the specific directions of vision of the interested parties, we might be betteroff strategically claiming all of them. The human body as constituted by threebillion bits of coded information will, it is promised, become available toeveryone on the HGP's and Celera's websites-information as metaphor for thefreedom of information. Implicit in such a promise is the seldom enunciated,stickier question of ownership of the human body once every gene is patented,every application trademarked-information as publicity, cover story, or alibi.When seen as overlapping or clashing vectors of desire, ambition, andvalue, these metaphors become richly suggestive angles of approach that marklevels of discourse, indicating modes of vision. Let's take one example we arein the midst of exploring: the notion of mapping. The HGP is structured tomap the location of every gene in the human body. This cartographic effortis making visible for the first time what has always been invisible. Artmakingmight be said at its best to do the same thing: making visible what wouldotherwise remain invisible. If, as it seems, the body is in the midst of beingradically reconfigured by science, then the social, political, and emotionalimplications of these advances need to be mapped, made visible, by parallelartistic research-since art itself is in the far from innocent business of makingmeaning visible and palpable and even valuable.With molecular biology mapping the unknown micro-world, historicallyspeaking such relentless aggression parallels the colonialist activities of theruthless adventurers we got to know as great explorers in our grade-schooltextbooks, the men who mapped the unknown New World. The titanicstruggles for control of the New World turned out to be extremely profitable-withsome unfortunate side effects like slavery and genocide. Wenow see molecular scientists presently invading the submicroscopic turf ofthe new New World, also ripe for exploration/exploitation. Maybe it wouldbe a good idea to map the forms and the routes that these invasions take toshow how dangerous or costly this beautiful new landscape of the futurecould be. Science becomes visible to nonscientists through the power ofmetaphor. Technically, the meanings of the layering of information as mappingcould become visible through two- and three-dimensional collageand montage, seeing through the overlapped layers of the aesthetic, social,scientific, and corporate. Science and art as analogous projects of map-makingthus show us what has been hidden from our sight.We are developing "maps" that situate the viewer simultaneously withinthe visible and invisible territories of the differing yet analogous worlds ofhistory, the human body, the human genome, and the various bodies of socialand corporate institutions. The graphic language of scientific visual representation(charts, drawings, x-rays, photographs, diagrams, anatomical details,models, etc.) can be appropriated as artistic representation, partly by hear-kening to the history that such scientific visual representations (mapping) of56 FALL 2000

Sherry Millner. Scratcheson the Key, 2000. Collagewith drawing and pastel.Study for Mapping theNew New World, mixedmediainstallation.Courtesy of the artist.the body once shared with art dating back to Andreas Vesalius (the sixteenthcenturyanatomist who wrote and illustrated De Humani Corporis Fabrica, agroundbreaking treatise on anatomy), on to the present-day strategies ofgenetic micro-mapping, sequencing, and diagramming. With genetic mappingspecifiically intended to enable a medical invasion of the body, at all levelsand scales, merged scientific/corporate institutions are poised to gain advan-tage, knowledge, and profit from these researches.In fact, rather than settling on a unitary aesthetic mode of representationof the incipient metamorphosis of the body promised by the HGP, rather thanfocusing in on a preferred rapid delivery meaning system, in the hopes that itwould give us top value for our investments as artists, it might be much moreinteresting to deploy all of them. Not orgiastically, though that is not to besneered at either, but in a manner that places the energies of each metaphor,each level of discourse, each plane of representation, or angle of approach, ormode of seeing in relation to the myth of totalization. A critical art practice57 art journal

Sherry Millner. VagueShape, 2000. Collagestudy for Mapping theNew New World, mixedmediainstallation.Courtesy of the artist.is uniquely equipped to produce visual accounts of the relations of power/knowledge that correlate the dynamics of the macro-political to the dynamicsof the micro-world. Like kinky sex, the strangeness and remoteness of molecularrepresentation reproduce the body as Other. This activity effects a radicalscalar rupture not so much between interior and exterior but between theapparent totality of the singular different body and its submolecular metaphorsknown as genes.We could use maps that connect the extreme micro-level of scientificintervention into the body with the huge but not really totalizing social "bodies"(law, health, media, etc.) thatoldt Wr and; New0 makinin r this? en~teev a _y w a d H oiinstitution in---are in the midst of re-creatinghow the human body will beconstituted and perceived in thenext millennium. Radical shiftsscale and orientation with theinvolved spectator will fundamen-tally re-orient the experience ofthe human body, while makingits invisible interior spaces visiblefor the first time as social facts.We are in the midst of developinga project of transcription, usingof col-persp1~ ecprimary artistic processestion purpo tolage, drawing, photography,printing, appropriation, and videos a o : f Vage hma Appedyare,d, f .rom s to show how this potentiallyintimidating variety and intensityof mapmaking, rooted in theold New World and making visible the new New World is altering our owneveryday world. Historically, at least since World War II, science and technol-ogy have offered us roles as guinea pigs or as consumers. We have not beeninvited to shape the relations between science and other social institutions.Historically, science itself has largely disdained the notion that it is a socialinstitution, in favor of the proposition that it is involved in pure research.This proposition, which was always dubious, is now laughable.The question is what roles we can take as citizens/artists in participatingin this enterprise of re-mapping perception. Maps express a point of view, aperspective, as much as a painting does. Maps, as artistic forms of representation,purport to tell us where we are, where we stand, how to find what weneed to find. Such triply interrogating maps will connect the invisible, interiorspaces of the human body, from the submolecular level of genetic information,to the institutional "bodies" that immediately make specific knowledgecreatingand profit-making uses of that information.Ernest Larsen and Sherry Millner, artists who live in New York, are in the midst of developing Mappingthe New New World as a modular installation project. Their video essay, 41 Shots (2000), examines policeviolence in New York City.58 FALL 2000

The budding age of biotechnology represents a major turning point in humanculture. How do we visualize this turning point? How do we picture a newage of genetic manipulation, of cloning, of cybernetics, a literal synergybetween computing and biology,' particularly when these are still in theirinfancy? This may not simply be a matter of new forms of visuality, as in thespecter of hybrid life forms, organ mining, genetic engineering, or a commerciallydriven eugenics civilization producing designer babies for a globalBaywatch.2 Form easily obscures the principles underlying potential new life, thequestion of what governs its creation. The organizing principle of heredity isconcrete and digital. It is based on information that unravels in aMarekWieczorektemporal process that may well be impervious to (spatial) visual-ization..Playing w LiDigitally encoded information has no intrinsic relationshipith Life:to the form into which it is decoded. It is not tied to a singular,Art and Human Genomics inherently meaningful form. A double helix or a "DNA fingerprint"may provide for a pleasing picture, but the spatial structure of themolecule should not be conflated with its signifying principle, the way theencoded "information" is read. The challenge for artists may be reconcilingform with principle.This is not to say that art necessarily lags behind science. In a sense, aI.This synergy is made possible by an increasinglymechanistic view of crucialbiology. In our "informationepistemological shift in consciousness already took place in the postwarage," the Human Genome, and even life in general, era in the way artists related art and life. Many prewar avant-garde artists hadis seen increasinglyterms of data and computasoughtto connect art and life by attempting to put an entire worldview inbility, in terms of digitally encoded information.Cybernetics is not simply robotics, nor requires a single work of art, to make the composition "resound" the cosmos or thesubjects to be cyborgs, but rather posits new dialectical principles underlying it. Space reflected the master plan of Creation,forms of subjectivity predicated on the progressiveassimilation of computer and organism. Cf. bringing the artist (and viewer) who understood and surveyed this in closerKatherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman:proximity to a mythical Originator (God or Spirit). In our postwar era ofVirtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, increasing skepticism and postmodern irony, such myths have been decon-1999). I have benefited greatly from conversa- structed and replaced by the notion of temporality and the contingency oftions with PhillipThurtle.I wanto thankhim alsocosmological events. In this regard, the visual arts since the I96os show variforhis insightful reading of the present text.2. For an overview of some of the social and ethi- ous striking parallels with contemporary scientific paradigms, whereby minicalquestions in the current debate on the futuremalism in particular marks a crucial turing point.of genetics, cf. The Genetic Revolution and HumanRights, ed. J. Burley (Oxford: Oxford University With minimalism, the modern myth of an origin and telos was replacedPress, 1999), and The Code of Codes: Scientific and by a potentially endless sequence of repeated shapes. The spatial relationshipsSocial Issues in the Human Genome Project, eds.Daniel J. Kevles and Leroy Hood (Cambridge, that were once seen as inherently meaningful (because based on nature) andMass.: Harvard University Press, 1992). internal (because contained within the frame), subsequently derive their signi-3. Cf. Hal Foster's "The Crux of Minimalism,"reprintedThe Return of the Real (Cambridge, ficance from site-specific, external relationships without intrinsic meaning.3Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). Arguably, the shift could Repetition replaces singularity. The digital code of the genome, emblematicalready be located with Happenings or artof a new mode of consciousness, is likewise structurally without center, finalinspired by John Cage.4. Elsewhere I will address this idea in relation to cause, or inherent meaning. Genes are not a spatial blueprint of life, not aRichard Dawkins's notion of the "selfish gene," two-dimensional plan of what a heart or liver looks like, but awhich posits that we as organisms are only thelong string"vehicles" or "survival machines" for genes. Aside of nucleotides written in endless permutations that resemble, in principle, afrom being a popularization of ideas first put forth world of replication not unlike that of minimalism. There is no aim in theby George Williams in his 1966 Adaptation andNatural Selection, Dawkins's notion could be actual replication of the particular sequences of nucleotides, with the possibletraced back even further, to G.W.F. Hegel's exception of replication itself, that is, of life. The aim or goal of life is thatreflections on life in his Phenomenology of Spirit(1807). Here Hegel argues that the goal of Life is of continuig itself.4nothing but the reproduction of itself, its ownA further point of comparison is that minimalist art acknowledges thecontinuation, which he in turn links to consciousnessand neands(lifs ft o t viewer, whose physical interactionself-consciousness (life as the fwith the work produces ever-shifting viewofconsciousness, etc.).eedback t points over time, through a kind of feedback loop. This phenomenon bears59 art journal

5. Cf. Hayles, 7-1 1. Reflexivity led in cyberneticsto Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela'sconcept of autopoiesis, which claims that organismsrespond to their environment in ways determinedby their internal self-organization.6. Rosalind Krauss has argued against those whosee LeWitt's work as emblems of Reason, ofmathematical prowess and the powers of thehuman mind, as though his work were dedicatedto the Cartesian transcendental subject, longobsolete. Instead, she argues, LeWitt's cubes areat most a demonstration of a kind of mad obsti-nacy. Their organizing principle is like "the loquaciousnessof the speech of children and the veryold, is like those feverish accounts of events composedof a string of almost identical details, connectedby the word 'and."' With LeWitt's work,Krauss writes, we "enter a world without a center,a world of substitutions and transpositionsnowhere legitimated by the revelations of a transcendentalsubject"; see Rosalind Krauss, "LeWittin Progress," in The Originality of the Avant-Gardeand Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press, 1985), 245-58.7. Cf. Stephen Jay Gould, "The Pattern of Life'sHistory," in The Third Culture: Beyond the ScientificRevolution, (New York: Simon and Schuster,1995), 51-73; cf. also Phillip Thurtle, "'The GFiles': Linking the 'Selfish Gene' and the 'ThinkingReed'," prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/gould/commentary/thurtle.html.8. Hayles, 223.9. Ibid.10. The shifting meanings of the chemical signalsembryonic cells exchange as they travel downdevelopmental paths to their destined cell typeare almost completely unknown, as is the significanceof over 95 percent of the Human Genome,which is often characterized in terms of "filler" oras the "useless baggage" of genetic parasites.I . Jeremy Rifkin, "The Biotech Century: HumanLife as Intellectual Property," The Nation, April 13,1998, 12. Any work or discourse on the HumanGenome, whether scientific or artistic, is embeddedin sociopolitical contexts that apparently transcendin complexity and particularity the code ofDNA. Yet conversely, these contexts are also inturn influenced by larger epistemes of knowledge,by powerful biotechnologies that are themselvesinformed by the genome, and which are alreadydetermining the fate of millions.striking similarities with developments in cybernetics at the time, particularlythe notion of reflexivity. Here the observer, in a kind of synthesis between theorganic and the mechanical, becomes part of the system observed, without anoutside from which to survey the whole.s Reflexivity is regressive, as are theobsessively pointless variations of LeWitt's incomplete open cubes or Judd'sboxes.6 Likewise, in evolution there is no progress. According to Stephen JayGould, there is only a decrease in morphological complexity, accompanied byan increase in complication of external factors.7Ironically, then, minimalism's apparent rejection of a whole worldview ina single work, of a correspondence between artwork and nature, did not bringabout the loss of art's connection with life. To the contrary-it simply replacedone worldview with another. After minimalism, art became increasingly concernedwith time and process, as well as with emergent behavior and identityresulting from a continual "reframing" and reevaluating of the art world's ownreflexive structures. According to N. Katherine Hayles, the latest phase of cybernetics,in order to break out of the reflexivity of perception, focuses on transformationthrough emergent behavior; not as an absolute break, but as a shiftin emphasis, a seriation or overlapping pattern of replication and innovation.8 Theparallels with contemporary art are obvious. This new phase of cybernetics promotesan increasingly contextualized, embodied view of information, but withthe observer retreating from the center to the periphery as narrator and narrateeof stories of what is possible.9 Yet, in contemporary art dealing with genomicsit is not enough simply to narrate or picture what is possible. Witness ThomasGrtinfeld's "Misfit" creatures (e.g., a dog with sheep's head), or John Isaac'sSay It Isn't So (1994), a mad scientist's experiment gone awry, his head turnedinto the body of a real plucked chicken. If anything, such work misconceiveshybridity literally along the lines of a Cartesian split between mind and body.Seriation, as multilayered patterns of replication and innovation, involveshistory as well as the future, the process of replication of the genome itself pointingto the spatiotemporal complexity of coded information and its potentialuses. Essentially, we still don't understand the multiple dimensions of biologicallyencoded time, the complex program of a series of steps that directs ahandful of embryonic cells through progressive bursts of chemical signals intogradually more specialized tissues. Reading the code of life cannot be doneby speeding up the slow process, as we do with a slow computer, but, rather,requires understanding complex shifts in meaning and patterns as time progressesand identity changes.'? Beyond a mechanistic view of biology, thegenome can thus become a powerful model for historical complexity. However,as with all such models, danger lurks in vitalist assumptions that lead in turn totechnological and social determinism. "The new ideas of nature," warns JeremyRifkin, "provide the legitimizing framework for the Biotech Century by suggestingthat the way we are reorganizing our economy and society are amplificationsof nature's own principles and, therefore, justifiable."" How can artistsresist such an instrumentalist view of nature? Is it enough to create art as amultilayered process "mimicking" the aimless, free play of life? Are we back atthe origin? Perhaps we can say again: as is life, so art ...Marek Wieczorek is Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Washington, Seattle.60 FALL 2000

Recent and Upcoming ExhibitionsSanta Barbara Museum of ArtThe Santa Barbara Museum of Art has organized a series of recent exhibitionsengaging with the subject of biotechnology, visuality, and art. Out of Sight:Imaging and Imagining Science, on view at the museum from April 7 to June ii,I998, focused on the ramifications of DNA research. The works in the exhibition,which included photographs, video, and photo-based installations,investigated the artistic implications of advancements in geneticresearch and new imaging technologies. Artists included (Art)n,Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, Christopher Bucklow, FeliceFrankel, Nancy Keder, Pamela Davis Kivelson, Oliver Meckes,Pietro Motta, K.R. Porter, David Scharf, Gary Schneider, Du Seid, MichaelSpano, and Arthur Tress.The second exhibition in the series was The Jefferson Suites: An Audio-VisualInstallation by Carrie Mae Weems, on view at the museum from November 27,I999, to February 6, 2000. The installation consisted of a series of thirteeninterlocking and interrelated narratives, thirteen photographs, and a thirteenminuteoriginal musical score. With this work, Weems investigated the moral,social, and political implications of genetic research and its relationship to art.Karen Sinsheimer, Curator of Photography at the museum, is presentlyorganizing a major exhibition for 2002-2003 that will commemorate thefiftieth year since the production of the seminal x-ray diffraction patternby Rosalind Franklin that led to the Watson-Crick description in 1953 ofthe double-helical structure of DNA. It will feature photographically basedwork by artists seeking to explore this inner universe to interpret the geneticrevolution.Swiss InstituteThe exhibition Tenacity: Cultural Practices in the Age of Information and Biotechnology, onview at the Swiss Institute in New York from March 24 to May 13, 2000, wasorganized by the curator, Yvonne Volkart. As Volkart has written, "Information,communication, and biotechnology play an increasingly important rolein the globalizing society of the changing century. Beyond simplistic techn-odeterminism, there are good reasons to recognize that these technologiesinfluence our ideas of subjectivity, agency and politics. This process is linkedto the culturalization of economic interests-among other things. In this con-text, the arts, as a field of the visual, hold an important and active place inour increasingly visualized society, be it in an affirmative or a critical sense.Tenacity examines how art strategies and aesthetics interfere in the universalismof technologies, asking how artists can be users while at the same time opposingthe ideologies provided by these technologies. Beyond a simple criticismof hegemonic ideas of art and technologies, the Tenacity participants engage inproducing alternative esthetics and omitted subject matters. They assert thatdigital media, new technologies and virtual realities don't abolish the embodimentof knowledge, criticism, and resistance. In so far as art is always anembodiment of ideas and a realization of imaginative and utopian moments,it has a crucial function in tenaciously insisting on the materiality of actualbodies and their contexts. Reflecting the importance of identity and agencyin a networked context, many artists focus on the figuration of net personae61 art journal

with a wide range of psychic and political dimensions. Cyborgs, monsters,nomads, bots, lurkers and hackers cross the multi-layered space. The Tenacityparticipants have been involved in an engaged digital media discourse foryears and are among the best-regarded artists in the new media scene. Theexhibition establishes a display specific to their critical reflections on newmedia and new technologies focusing beyondthe visual into the acoustic. As an embodiedvirtual space, the gallery provides the temporaryand symbolic location, where tenaciousagents and images gather andmove in a kind of high-speed, virtualizedacoustic and visual space."The following artists participated inm, I;:;; Tenacity: Ursula Biemann; Bureau of InverseTechnology; Ricardo Dominguez; MarinaGrzinic and Aina Smid; Natalie Jeremijenko;Kristin Lucas; Diane Ludin; Jenny Marketou;Jennifer and Kevin McCoy; Francesca daRimini and Michael Grimm; ? Tark, USA;Cornelia Sollfrank.Faith Wilding. Embryoworld (detail), 1997.Mixed-media installation. Courtesy of theartist. Embryoworld is a three-part installationthat explores the representationallanguage of technologically assisted reproductionand the notion of the eugenicperfectibility of humans. It is comprisedof thirty-two watercolor drawings ofembryos that chart the changing medicalunderstanding of female reproduction;framed donor profiles obtained from afertility clinic; and a sculpture based ona common cemetery image that signifiesthe soul leaving the body. It is part ofthe artist's project, Sex and Gender in theBiotech Century, which focuses on genetics,medical imaging, and women's reproductivehealth in a global economy.:Henry Art Gallery, University ofWashingtonOrganized by Robin Held, Assistant Curator atthe Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, in collaborationwith an advisory committee, the exhibitionBetter Living Through Science: Contemporary Artand Human Genomics (working title)is scheduled to open in the fall of 200I.It explores the implications of the HumanGenome Project on our understanding ofhuman life and identity. It is a collaborative.---0--2iMy sand interdisciplinary endeavor that involves aworking group of artists, scientists, historians,and representatives of the biotechnologyindustry engaged in an eighteen-month-long dialogue about the meaning andimpact of current genetic research on our understanding of human life. Forthis project, the Henry Art Gallery has been able to draw upon the Universityof Washington's world-renowned biomedical, genetic, and health sciencesfaculty and researchers, as well as the diverse culture of biotech companiesthat has expanded in the Seattle region. The exhibition will feature five commissionednew works by artists working in collaboration with consultantsfrom the field of genomics, as well as approximately forty existing works bythese and other artists.Better Living Through Science loosely follows the laboratory model devised tofacilitate the international human genome sequencing effort itself. In pursuingthe general model of the laboratory, the museum first convened interestedparties at the Henry Art Gallery in January I999, with support from the62 FALL 2000

National Endowment for the Arts, in order to define the basic goals of thecollaboration. The first working group's informal daylong session was characterizedby a high level of discussion and a great deal of enthusiasm forthis project. Plans are now underway for a second meeting to be held onDecember 2-3, 2000. Key goals are to shape the artist projects to be includedin the exhibition through dialogue amongartists, essayists, and audience; and to generatethe list of topics and finalize partnerships forthe public programs that will take place inCatherine Wagner. The Morgue:Drosophilae with Human Chromosomes,1993. Photograph. Courtesy of the artist.In this photograph, human DNA is superimposedover a specimen of a fruit fly,pointing to the striking genetic similarityof these two species. It is part of theseries, Art and Science: Investigating Matter,which explores the historical relationshipbetween art and science, demystifies thetechnical language of genetics for nonpractitioners,and provides an opportunity toconsider our relationship to currentadvances in genetic research.presentation will also be part of the Decembersession.The following artists have agreed to submitproposals for five commissioned works:Shawn Brixey (Berkeley); Marta Lyall (Seattle);Lee Mingwei (Berkeley and New York), IfiigoManglano-Ovalle (Chicago); Jill Reynolds(Cambridge, Mass.); Matthew Ritchie (NewYork); Buster Simpson (Seattle); Paul Vanouse(Pittsburgh).The following advisors have agreed toconsult with artists during both the proposaland execution stages of their projects: LeahCeccarelli (Assistant Professor, Department ofSpeech Communication, University of Washington);Scott Edwards (Associate Professorof Zoology and Curator of Genetic Resources,The Burke Museum of Natural History andCulture); Richard Francois (Director ofDevelopment and Community Relations, SeattleBiomedical Research Institute, Seattle); LeroyHood (President and Director, Institute forSystems Biology, Seattle); Mary-Claire King(Professor, Medicine, Division of MedicalGenetics, University of Washington); EdwardLarson (Richard B. Russell Professor of History and Law, University ofGeorgia); Maynard Olson (Director, Human Genome Center, and Professor,Molecular Biotechnology and Medicine, University of Washington); PhillipThurtle (Lecturer, Communication/Comparative History of Ideas, University ofWashington); Lisa Vincler (Bioethicist, Assistant Attorney General, Universityof Washington); Marek Wieczorek (Assistant Professor, Department of ArtHistory, University of Washington).63 art journal