ITA ENG

Screen shots of the web interface of "The Eighth Day" showing the overhead view

THE EIGHTH DAY, A TRANSGENIC NET INSTALLATION

"The Eighth Day" is a transgenic artwork that investigates the new ecology of fluorescent creatures that is evolving worldwide. It was shown from October 25 to November 2, 2001 at the Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University, Tempe [21]. While fluorescent creatures are being developed in isolation in laboratories, seen collectively in this work for the first time they form the nucleus of a new and emerging synthetic bioluminescent ecosystem. The piece brings together living transgenic life forms and a biological robot (biobot) in an environment enclosed under a clear Plexiglas dome, thus making visible what it would be like if these creatures would in fact coexist in the world at large.

As the viewer walks into the gallery, she first sees a blue-glowing semisphere against a dark background. This semisphere is the 4-foot dome, aglow with its internal blue light. She also hears the recurring sounds of water washing ashore. This evokes the image of the Earth as seen from space. The water sounds both function as a metaphor for life on Earth (reinforced by the spherical blue image) and resonate with the video of moving water projected on the floor. In order to see "The Eighth Day" the viewer is invited to "walk on water".

In the gallery, visitors are able to see the terrarium with transgenic creatures both from inside and outside the dome. As they stand outside the dome looking in, someone online sees the space from the perspective of the biobot looking out, perceiving the transgenic environment as well as faces or bodies of local viewers. An online computer in the gallery also gives local visitors an exact sense of what the experience is like remotely on the Internet.

Local viewers may temporarily believe that their gaze is the only human gaze contemplating the organisms in the dome. However, once they navigate the Web interface they realize that remote viewers can also experience the environment from a bird's eye point of view, looking down through a camera mounted above the dome. They can pan, tilt, and zoom, seeing humans, mice, plants, fish and the biobot up close. Thus, from the point of view of the online participant, local viewers become part of the ecology of living creatures featured in the work, as if enclosed in a websphere.

"The Eighth Day" presents an expansion of biodiversity beyond wildtype life forms. As a self-contained artificial ecology it resonates with the words in the title, which add one day to the period of creation of the world as narrated in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. All of the transgenic creatures in "The Eighth Day" are created with the same gene I used previously in "GFP Bunny" to create "Alba", a gene that allows all creatures to glow green under harmless blue light. The transgenic creatures in "The Eighth Day" are GFP plants, GFP amoeba, GFP fish, and GFP mice. Selective breeding and mutation are two key evolutionary forces. "The Eighth Day" literally raises the question of transgenic evolution, since all organisms in the piece are mutations of their respective wildtype species and all were selected and bred for their GFP mutations.

"The Eighth Day" also includes a biological robot. A biobot is a robot with an active biological element within its body which is responsible for aspects of its behavior. The biobot created for "The Eighth Day" has a colony of GFP amoeba called Dyctiostelium discoideum as its "brain cells". These "brain cells" form a network within a bioreactor that constitutes the "brain structure" of the biobot. When amoebas divide the biobot exhibits dynamic behavior inside the enclosed environment. Changes in the amoebal colony (the "brain cells") of the biobot are monitored by it, and cause it to move about, throughout the exhibition. The biobot also functions as the avatar of Web participants inside the environment. Independent of the ascent and descent of the biobot, Web participants are able to control its audiovisual system with a pan-tilt actuator. The autonomous motion, which often causes the biobot to lean forward in different directions, provide Web participants with new perspectives of the environment.

The biobot's "amoebal brain" is visible through the transparent bioreactor body. In the gallery, visitors are able to see the terrarium with transgenic creatures from outside and inside the dome, as a computer in the gallery gives local visitors an exact sense of what the experience is like on the Internet. By enabling participants to experience the environment inside the dome from the point of view of the biobot, "The Eighth Day" creates a context in which participants can reflect on the meaning of a transgenic ecology from a first-person perspective.

CONCLUSION

Quite clearly, genetic engineering will continue to have profound consequences in art as well as in the social, medical, political, and economic spheres of life. As an artist I am interested in reflecting on the multiple social implications of genetics, from unacceptable abuse to its hopeful promises, from the notion of "code" to the question of translation, from the synthesis of genes to the process of mutation, from the metaphors employed by biotechnology to the fetishization of genes and proteins, from simple reductive narratives to complex views that account for environmental influences. The urgent task is to unpack the implicit meanings of the biotechnology revolution and contribute to the creation of alternative views, thus changing genetics into a critically aware new art medium.

The tangible and symbolic coexistence of the human and the transgenic, which I have developed in several of my works discussed above, shows that humans and other species are evolving in new ways. It dramatizes the urgent need to develop new models with which to understand this change, and calls for the interrogation of difference taking into account clones, transgenics and chimeras.

The Human Genome Project (HGP) has made it clear that all humans have in their genome sequences that came from viruses [22], acquired through a long evolutionary history. This shows that we have in our bodies DNA from organisms other than human. Ultimately, this means that we too are transgenic. Before deciding that all transgenics are "monstrous", humans must look inside and come to terms with their own "monstrosity", i. e., with their own transgenic condition.

The common perception that transgenics are not "natural" is incorrect. It is important to understand that the process of moving genes from one species to another is part of wild life (without human participation). The most common example is the bacterium called "agrobacterium", which enters the root of plants and communicates its genes to it. Agrobacterium has the ability to transfer DNA into plant cells and integrate the DNA into the plant chromosome. [23]

Transgenic art suggests that romantic notions of what is "natural" have to be questioned and the human role in the evolutionary history of other species (and vice versa) has to be acknowledged, while at the same time respectfully and humbly marveling at this amazing phenomenon we call "life".

NOTES

1 - Peter Tomaz Dobrila and Aleksandra Kostic (eds.), Eduardo Kac : Telepresence, Biotelematics, Transgenic Art (Maribor, Slovenia : KIBLA, 2000). Texts by: Annick Bureaud, Edward A. Shanken, Christiane Paul, Aleksandra Kostic, Suzana Milevska, Machiko Kusahara, Gerfried Stocker, Steve Tomasula, Eduardo Kac. See also: <http://www.ekac.org>.

2 - Atkins, Robert . "State of the (On-Line) Art", Art in America, April 99, pp. 89-95; Carvalho, Mario Cesar. "Artista implanta hoje chip no corpo," Folha de São Paulo, Cotidiano, 11 November 1997, p. 3; Cohen, Michel. "The Artificial Horizon: Notes Towards a Digital Aesthetics", in: Wonil Rhee (editor). Luna's Flow . The Second International Media Art Biennale. media_city seoul 2002 (Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea, 2002), p. 20 and pp. 32-33; Decia, Patricia. "Bioarte: Eduardo Kac tem obra polêmica vetada no ICI", Folha de São Paulo, Ilustrada, 10 October 1997, p. 13.; Dietz, Steve. "Memory_Archive_Database", Switch, Vol. 5, N. 3, 2000. http://switch.sjsu.edu; Dietz, Steve. "Hotlist", Artforum, October 2000, p. 41.; Esnal, Luis. "Un hombre llamado 026109532", La Nacion, Section 5, Buenos Aires, 15 December 1997, p. 8. ; Kac, Eduardo. "Time Capsule", InterCommunication, N. 26, Autumn 1998, Tokyo, pp. 13-15. ; "Time Capsule", in Database Aesthetics, Victoria Vesna, Karamjit S. Gill and David Smith, eds., special issue of AI & Society, Vol. 14, N. 2, 2000, pp. 243-249.; "Art at the Biological Frontier", in Roy Ascott, ed., Reframing Consciousness: Art, Mind and Technology (Exeter: Intellect, 1999), pp. 90-94.; "Capsule Temporelle", in : O'Rourke, Karen (ed.). L'Archivage Comme Activité Artistique/Archiving as Art (Paris: University of Paris 1, 2000), n.p.n.; Machado, Arlindo. "A Microchip inside the Body," Performance Research, Vol. 4, N. 2, "On Line" special issue, London, 1999, pp. 8-12. ; Paul, Christiane. "Time Capsule", Intelligent Agent, Vol. 2, N. 2, (1998) pp. 4-13. ; Scheeres, Julia. "New Body Art: Chip Implants", Wired News, March 11, 2002.; Sherlock, Maureen P. "Either/Or/Neither/Nor", in Grzinic, Marina (ed.), Gallery (Dante) Marino Cettina - Future Perspectives (Umag, Croatia : Marino Cettina Gallery, 2001), pp. 130-135.; Stiles, Kristine. "Time Capsule", in Uncorrupted Joy: Art Actions, Art History, and Social Value (University of California Press, 2003); Strickland, Stephanie, "Dalí Clocks: Time Dimensions of Hypermedia", Electronic Book Review, N. 11, 2000.; Tomasula, Steve . "Time Capsule: Self-Capsule", CIRCA, N. 89, Autumn 1999. Ireland, pp. 23-25.

3 - Beiguelman, Gisele. "Artista discute o pós-humano", Folha de São Paulo, October 10, 1997; Decia, Patricia. "Artista põe a vida em risco" e "Bioarte", Folha de São Paulo, October 10, 1997; Geary, James. The Body Electric An Anatomy Of The New Bionic Senses (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2002), pp. 181-185; Kac, Eduardo. "A-positive". In : ISEA '97 -- The Eighth International Symposium on Electronic Art, September 22 -27, 1997 (Chicago: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1997), p. 62; Kac, Eduardo. "A-positive: Art at the Biobotic Frontier". Flyer distributed on the occasion of ISEA '97 -- The Eighth International Symposium on Electronic Art, September 22 -27, 1997 (Chicago: The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1997); Kac, Eduardo. "Art at the Biologic Frontier," in: Roy Ascott, ed., Reframing Consciousness (Exeter: Intellect, 1999), pp. 90-94; Machado, Arlindo. "Expanded Bodies and Minds", in: Dobrila, Peter Tomaz and Kostic, Aleksandra (eds.). Eduardo Kac: Teleporting An Unkown State (Maribor, Slovenia: KIBLA, 1998), pp. 39-63; Mirapaul, Matthew. "An Electronic Artist and His Body of Work", The New York Times, October 02, 1997; Osthoff, Simome."From Stable Object to Participating Subject: content, meaning, and social context at ISEA97," New Art Examiner, February 1998, pp. 18-23.

4 - Kac, E. "Transgenic Art", Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 6, Number 11, 1998. Also: <http://www.ekac.org/transgenic.html>. Republished in Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schopf (eds.), Ars Electronica '99 - Life Science (Vienna, New York: Springer, 1999), pp. 289- 296.

5 - At the time of writing, February 2003, canine reproductive technology is still not developed enough to enable the creation of a transgenic or cloned dog. However, research is underway to both map the dog genome and to developed canine IVF. Clearly, "GFP K-9" will be possible in the near future.

6 - Kac, E. "Genesis", Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schopf (eds.), Ars Electronica '99 - Life Science (Vienna, New York: Springer, 1999), pp. 310-313. Also: <http://www.ekac.org/geninfo.html>. "Genesis" was carried out with the assistance of Dr. Charles Strom, formerly Director of Medical Genetics, Illinois Masonic Medical Center, Chicago. Dr. Strom is now Medical Director, Biochemical and Molecular Genetics Laboratories Nichols Institute / Quest Diagnostics, San Juan Capistrano, CA. Original DNA music for Genesis was composed by Peter Gena.

7 - Mudede, Charles. "The End of Art", The Stranger, Volume 9, Number 15, Dec. 30, 1999 - Jan. 05, 2000, Seattle.

8 - Kac, E. "GFP Bunny", in Dobrila, Peter T. and Kostic, Aleksandra (eds.), Eduardo Kac: Telepresence, Biotelematics, and Transgenic Art (Maribor, Slovenia: Kibla, 2000), pp. 101-131. Also: <http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html>.

9 - I had proposed to live for one week with Alba in the Grenier à Sel, in Avignon, where Louis Bec directed the art festival "Avignon Numérique". In an email broadcast in Europe on June 16, 2000, Bec wrote: "Contre notre volonté, le programme concernant «Artransgénique», qui devait se dérouler du 19 au 25 juin, se trouve modifié. Une décision injustifiable nous prive de la présence de Bunny GFP, le lapin transgénique fluorescent que nous comptions présenter aux Avignonnais et à l'ensemble des personnes intéressées par les évolutions actuelles des pratiques artistiques. Malgré cette censure déguisée, l'artiste Brésilien Eduardo Kac, auteur de ce projet, sera parmi nous et présentera sa démarche ainsi que l'ensemble de ses travaux. Un débat public permettra d'ouvrir une large réflexion sur les transformations du vivant opérées par les biotechnologies, tant dans les domaines artistiques et juridiques, qu'éthiques et économiques. Nous nous élevons de toute évidence contre le fait qu'il soit interdit aux citoyens d avoir accès aux développements scientifiques et culturels qui les concernent si directement."

10 - Cook, Gareth. "Cross hare: hop and glow", Boston Globe, 9/17/2000, p. A01.

11 - For a bibliography on transgenic art, see: <http://www.ekac.org/transartbiblio.html>.

12 - <http://sprocket.telab.artic.edu/ekac/bunnybook.html>

13 -These posters have also been shown in gallery exhibitions: Dystopia + Identity in the Age of Global Communications, curated by Cristine Wang, Tribes Gallery, New York, 2000; Under the Skin, curated by Söke Dinkla, Renate Heidt Heller and Cornelia Brueninghaus-Knubel, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, 2001; "International Container Art Festival", Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan (from Dec. 8, 2001 to January 6, 2002); "Portão 2", Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo, Brazil (from March 21 to April 27, 2002); "Free Alba!", Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago (from May 3 to June 15, 2002); "Eurovision - I Biennale d'Arte : DNArt; Transiti: Metamorfosi: Permanenze", Kunsthaus Merano Arte, Merano, Italy (from June 15 to August 15, 2002); "Gene(sis): Contemporary Art Explores Human Genomics", Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, from April 6 to August 25, 2002. See also the following catalogues: Under the Skin (Ostfilden-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), pp. 60-63; Eurovision - I Biennale d'Arte : DNArt; Transiti: Metamorfosi: Permanenze (Milano: Rizzoli, 2002), pp. 104-105; International Container Art Festival (Kaohsiung: Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, 2002), pp. 86-87.

14 - Stein, Lisa. "New Kac Show Takes a Look at Ethics, Rabbit", Chicago Tribune, May 10, 2002, p. 21.

15 - In actuality, genes do not "produce" proteins. As Richard Lewontin clearly explains: "DNA sequence does not specify protein, but only the amino acid sequence. The protein is one of a number of minimum free-energy foldings of the same amino acid chain, and the cellular milieu together with the translation process influences which of these foldings occurs." See: R. C. Lewontin, "In the Beginning Was the Word", Science, Vol. 291, 16 February 2001, p. 1264.

16 - In 1985 I purchased an issue of a magazine entitled High Technology whose cover headline read "Protein Engineering : Molecular Creations for Industry and Medicine". Clearly, the desire to "design" new molecular forms has been evolving for approximately two decades. See: Tucker, Jonathan B. "Proteins to Order. Computer graphics and gene splicing are helping researchers create new molecules for industry and medicine", High Technology, Vol. 5, N.12, December 1985, pp. 26-34.

17 - Special thanks to Dr. Murray Robinson, Head of Cancer Program, Amgen, Thousand Oaks, CA.

18 - Protein visualization was carried out with the assistance of Charles Kazilek and Laura Eggink, BioImaging Laboratory, Arizona State University, Tempe.

19 - Rapid prototyping was developed with the assistance of Dan Collins and James Stewart, Prism Lab, Arizona State University, Tempe.

20 - Terms like "transcription", as well as "code", "translation", and many others commonly employed in molecular biology, betray an ideological stance, a conflation of linguistic metaphors and biological entities, whose rhetorical goal is to instrumentalize processes of life. In the words of Lily E. Kay, this merger integrates "the notion of the genetic code as relation with that of a DNA code as thing". See: Kay, Lily E., Who Wrote the Book of Life: A History of the Genetic Code (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 309. For a thorough critique of the rhetorical strategies of molecular biology, see: Doyle, Richard, On Beyond Living : Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1997).

21 - The "Eigth Day" team: Richard Loveless, Dan Collins, Sheilah Britton, Jeffery (Alan) Rawls, Jean Wilson-Rawls, Barbara Eschbach, Julia Friedman, Isa Gordon, Charles Kazilek, Ozzie Kidane, George Pawl, Kelly Phillips, David Lorig, Frances Salas, and James Stewart. Additional thanks to Andras Nagy, Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute, Toronto; Richard Firtel, University of California, San Diego; Chi-Bin Chien, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, and Neal Stewart, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I developed "The Eighth Day" through a two-year residency at the Institute of Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University, Tempe. The exhibition dates: October 25 to November 2, 2001. Exhibition location: Computer Commons Gallery, Arizona State University, Tempe (with the support of the Institute of Studies in the Arts). Documentation can be found at: <http://www.ekac.org/8thday.html>.

22 - See Brown T. A.. Genomes (Oxford, UK : Bios scientific publishers, 1999), p.138; and Baltimore, David. "Our genome unveiled", Nature 409, 15 February 2001, pp. 814-816. In private email correspondence (28 January 2002), and as a follow up to our previous conversation on the topic, Dr. Jens Reich, Division of Genomic Informatics of the Max Delbruck Center in Berlin-Buch, stated: "The explanation for these massive [viral] inserts into our genome (which, incidentally, looks like a garbage bin anyway) is usually that these elements were acquired into germ cells by retrovirus infection and subsequent dispersion over the genome some 10 to 40 millions ago (as we still were early apes)." The HGP also suggests that humans have hundreds of bacterial genes in the genome. See: International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium. "Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome", 15 February 2001 Volume 409, No. 6822, p. 860. Of the 223 genes coding for proteins that are also present in bacteria and in vertebrates, 113 cases are believed to be confirmed. See p. 903 of the same issue. In the same correspondence mentioned above, Dr. Reich concluded: "It appears that it is not man, but all vertebrates who are transgenic in the sense that they acquired a gene from a microorganism."

23 - This natural ability has made a genetically engineered version of the agrobacterium a favorite tool of molecular biology. See: Herrera-Estrella L. (1983). Transfer and expression of foreign genes in plants. PhD thesis. Laboratory of Genetics, Gent University, Belgium; Hooykaas P.J.J. and Shilperoort R.A. (1992). Agrobacterium and plant genetic engineering. Plant Molecular Biology 19:15-38; Zupan J.R. and Zambryski P.C. (1995). Transfer of T-DNA from Agrobacterium to the plant cell. Plant Physiology 107 : 1041-1047.

Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his interactive net installations and his bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web '80s, Eduardo Kac (pronounced "Katz") emerged in the early '90s with his radical telepresence and biotelematic works. His visionary combination of robotics and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. Kac’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such as Exit Art and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; InterCommunication Center (ICC), Tokyo; Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago; Seoul Museum of Art, Korea; and Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro. Kac's work has been showcased in biennials such as Yokohama Triennial, Japan, Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil, and Gwangju Biennale, Korea. His work is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, among others. He's a member of the editorial board of the journal Leonardo, published by MIT Press.

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