• Course overview
• Genomic Art - overview
• Interactive arts: Media Arts Video segment, Design|Media Arts, http://rhizome.org/fresh/
• The Gene Hunters: Video: http://www.pbs.org/saf/1202/video/watchonline.htm
• Genetics: The basics about DNA and the genetic code.
  • HGP Info Center: http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/project/info.html
  • Genetics Science Learning Center: http://gslc.genetics.utah.edu/basic/,
  • Dolan DNA Learning Center,CSH: http://vector.cshl.org/dnaftb/
• Sampling of online resources for artists and genetics. (Resources)
• What?
• Geneome Education: http://www.nhgri.nih.gov/educationkit/

"All artists are trying to literally create life." William Burroughs [4]

Artists' contribution to the dialog run a wide gamut, and while addressing events in the sphere of biotechnology, they create novel approaches to art making. Here are some examples of genomic art works that span the gamut we will be encountering. Genomic artworks extend from 2D images to living organisms that you interact with through mediating systems, to virtual environments and organisms created by the techniques of artificial life.

In this work Alexis Rockman juxtaposes images of domestic animals, cows, chickens, mice, pigs and vegetables, and their genetically modified counterparts. The team that gave us Dolly, recently gave us the five cloned piglets genetically modified so that there is less likelihood that their organs would be rejected by human bodies upon transplantation. Alexis Rockman has imagined one step further: genetically modified pigs that are the "medium" used to clone and culture human organs for transplantation.

We may look at this and think/feel any number of things ranging from fascination to fear. We may even feel that reality has far outstripped the ability of any kind of art to "shock" us in to deeper understandings. Yet the painting serves to remind us that our relationship to nature has never been neutral. There are crops and domesticated animals in the image. We may feel more at ease with their images out of familiarity, yet we must not forget that they too are the product of our long standing practices of genetic modification by selective breeding.

The Eighth Day is a transgenic artwork developed collaboratively by Eduardo Kac and a team of biologists. It consists of a self-contained ecology of GFP organisms. A terrarium representing our newly enhanced ability to manipulate nature through molecular genetics. This work is an example of many different aspects of Genomic and Media Arts. As a media art work it uses technology to allow web participants to affect the system and again to mediate the experience for onsite (gallery) viewers, and utilizes genetics/living organisms as a medium to communicate it's message.

By enabling local and online 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.[16]

"We feel that artistic endeavors such as The Eighth Day project have the potential to reach a far broader audience than the scientific press. By communicating with a wider audience than those who already vocally support or oppose the development of transgenic animals, we hope to positively advance the debate on the use of transgenic technology in our society."

Alan Rawls and Jeanne Wilson-Rawls
Biologists

"The Eighth Day is a transgenic artwork that investigates the new ecology of fluorescent creatures that is evolving worldwide."

Eduardo Kac
Artist

Tierra uses evolution by natural selection in the medium of the digital computer to generate complex and intelligent software.[19]

Evolutionary race between hosts and parasites in a soup of the Tierra Synthetic Life program.

• Evolution by natural selection has generated complex and intelligent life forms in the medium of carbon chemistry.
• Evolution is the only process with a proven ability to produce intelligence.
• The DNA of living organisms is a genetic ``program''. This is a parallel software of a complexity much greater than any that could be written by humans.
• Experiments illustrated here show that evolution by natural selection works very effectively in the medium of computer machine code.
• Evolution will find forms and processes that exploit the possibilities inherent in the computational medium.

• Self-replicating machine code programs are introduced to the RAM memory of the computer.
• Genetic variation occurs due to ``mutations'' resulting from random flips (between 0 and 1) of bits in the memory.
• A ``reaper'' function of the operating system kills old or defective processes in order to make way for newborn programs, once the memory is full.

http://www.v2.nl/DEAF/web/web.html

"TechnoSphere (UK) is a virtual 3D world which is accesible through the Internet. It offers the possibility of creating a artificial lifeforms by freely combining a number 'body parts' that are offered on the site. This beastie is then placed in a virtual landscape environment. The artificial lifeforms grow and develop in a short time and send messages and animations to their creators via e-mail. TechnoSphere is an arena where digital lifeforms try to find a future. Artificial lifeforms vie for food and develop their own genetic code to survive. The evolutionary development of this 3D world is dependent on the participation of an on-line audience.
http://www.lond-inst.ac.uk/TechnoSphere/index.html "

"A page showing the creatures I've created in the Technosphere biosphere simulation, with links to the information about them, and links to other people's webpages about their creatures."

http://www.table76.demon.co.uk/Technosphere/technosphere.html

Art

Definition: Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Some questions:

• Is this science or is this art?
• What contribution to science, or our knowledge about life is this work making?
• How is this art different from "traditional" definitions of art you have encountered before?
• How is genetic alteration of living organisms the same or different form art?
• More questions...

As we explore Genomic Art, we will be creating our own questions and seeking to refine our understanding of art, science, culture, memes and their interrelations.

Excerpts from the review by Marc Lafia http://rhizome.org/object.rhiz?3127

In his book published by Leonardo and MIT Press, Mr. Wilson argues that there is an enormous value for artists to work on the frontiers of emerging technologies, not only to produce new works and advance new discourses, but equally to have artists probe these fields and reclaim them from the university and corporate research departments. and through art and cultural criticism, bring their findings into the larger cultural realm. After all, if art is to tell us something of our culture, and our culture is daily being impacted by advances in physics, genetics, biology, robotics, astrophysics, artificial life, telecommunications, digital information systems, then shouldn't such things be forefront on the minds of artists and of the keenest interest to the public.

Stephen Wilson who has worked as an artist and researcher for the past twenty years presents his book as a resource in the reexamination of the relationship between research and art, between science and art. It is his claim that it is in the crucible, in the percept of art, that science and technology will yield different answers, approached with different methods as to the systems of meaning and significance that constitute their fields proper. Under each others purview, each other's temperament, science and art come into relief and are seen anew in a manner most pressingly needed for our culture.

Is it the artist, or the scientist, or both, that make visible and give shape and form to what is often not seen, mapping a space of knowledge visually, sensually, of something there, but not quite there before? Is each a varied vantage point on a similar set of data? Each an exercise in modeling? In our living, are we not always concerned with questions of nature, life, pleasure, the individual, the social body and our conjugation to emerging technologies which forge the trajectories and folds of our varied and interwoven cultural meshworks? Can one be a producer of cultural materials without encountering these issues? How might this information enter into the conceptualization and practice of art? It is these questions that Wilson addresses in his over 900-page exemplarily researched tome. ...

Artists working in emerging research, as well as artists as students of the sciences, have opportunity to become knowledgeable about an area of technology or science and then engage in much needed cultural critique. Such critique can reveal narratives and concepts that might be invisible to not only regular practitioners of the field but cultural critics and the public as well. Undoubtedly, research agendas in all of these fields raise a series of complex and disturbing questions. For example, cultural narratives produce our experience of our bodies. Medicine and experience of the body is not just an objective corpus of scientific knowledge external to culture but rather a product of media and language. This research and the sciences then is most fitting terrain for artists to get involved with, both to comment on, and to independently shape possible future research directions. It is this conversation that the arts can foster and that Wilson invites us to participate and encourage.

[note: emphasis added.]