The Ethics and Anxiety of Being with Monsters and Machines: Thinking Throughthe Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac
School of Drama
Trinity College, Dublin
Ireland
Twice, especially since 1900, scientists and their ideas havegenerated a transformation so broad and deep that it touches everyone'smost intimate sense of the nature of things. The first of these transformationswas in physics, the second in biology.
Introduction
Eduardo Kac is an Associate Professor of Art and Technology at the Schoolof the Art Institute of Chicago and a Ph.D. research fellow at theCentre for Advanced Inquiry in InteractiveArts (CAiiA) at the University of Wales, Newport, United Kingdom. Aninternationally recognized artist using new technologies to create interactiveand telepresent installations, he is currently involved in what he callsTransgenic Art. According to Kac,Transgenic art, I propose, is a new art form based on the useof genetic engineering techniques to transfer synthetic genes to an organismor to transfer natural genetic material from one species into another,to create unique living beings. Molecular genetics allows the artist toengineer the plant and animal genome and create new life forms. The natureof this new art is defined not only by the birth and growth of a new plantor animal but above all by the nature of the relationship between artist,public, and transgenic organism. Organisms created in the context of transgenicart can be taken home by the public to be grown in the backyard or raisedas human companions. With at least one endangered species becoming extinctevery day, I suggest that artists can contribute to increase global biodiversityby inventing new life forms. There is no transgenic art without a firmcommitment to and responsibility for the new life form thus created. Ethicalconcerns are paramount in any artwork, and they become more crucial thanever in the context of bio art. From the perspective of interspecies communication,transgenic art calls for a dialogical relationship between artist, creature/artwork,and those who come in contact with it [10].Kac has genetically altered a rabbit, fish, mice, bacteria and plant-lifeso that they generate green fluorescent protein, which causes the entityto glow green when placed under UV light. These animals, bacteria, andplants are placed in installations where they sometimes interact with machinesknown as �bio-bots� and where local and telepresent spectators can interactor alter them in some manner.
Firstly, the goal of this essay is to ask some very basic questionsabout how Kac's transgenic and interactive work operates in the traditionof modern art. Secondly, it is to begin an inquiry into the philosophicaland ethical issues that Eduardo Kac's art raises, namely, the eliminationof the borders between art and life, virtual and embodied spectatorship,aesthetic genetic-engineering, the ethics of robotics and the responsibilitiesof the artist to the art of monsters and machines.
I. The Re-Materialisation of the Art Object: From Conceptualism to Installationto Biologically-Based Work
Although Eduardo Kac's transgenic art is establishing new frontiers ofart practice that challenge the boundaries of biology, robotics and aesthetics,the manner in which the artworks generate meaning and construct spectatorshipare similar to the practices of much conceptual and installation art ofthe twentieth century. In conceptual and installation art, idea and processare promoted over representation and object through a dematerialisationof the art object in a contextualised space. While the goals of transgenicart and conceptualism and installations share certain concerns, the biologicaland mechanical certainty of objecthood in Kac's work represents a radicalre-materialization of the art object a re-materialization with certainproblems.Art critic Lucy Lippard modeled the trajectory of modernist art as aprocess of the dematerialization of the art object [15].*From abstraction to action painting, from happenings to conceptualism,installations, video and performance, the effect has been to challengethe representational element and objecthood in art in favour of its conceptualisationand process. The deconstruction of the object and its location in spaceand time in the paintings of the Futurists and Cubists in the early twentiethcentury was the opening salvo of the battle to eliminate the problem ofrepresentation from the discourse of art. Multiple planes of space andaccelerated depictions of time reordered the ways in which both the objectand the subject were constructed as coherent and chronological phenomena.During the post-World War II era the process of ridding art of representationand object status was pursued in the action paintings of Jackson Pollockwhere the trace of the artist's gesture was as critical as its painterlyaccident on the canvas. Further, the incorporation of performance in artpractice by artists working in happenings presented the penultimate attackon the object. At the point that performance superceded objecthood in theproduction of art, conceptualism and installation were established as centralmodalities of art production.
Succinctly and reductively defined, conceptual art, through its insistenceon idea and process over object, offers a critique of art production andinstitutions of the culture industry that evaluate and market the art product.The spectator's commodity fetishism is likewise challenged in the conceptualart that forgoes artifact. Simultaneously, conceptual works pose philosophicalquestions regarding the nature of art. When John Baldassari in �I Am MakingArt� (1971) stands before a video camera making simple gestures while repeatingthe phrase �I am making art� for twenty minutes, the viewer is invitedto dialogue with the work about the truth of his statement. The statementraises the question as to whether or not he is creating art, which requiresa definition of art, which requires some philosophical reflection. Theloss of the object opens a space for thought.
Installations found favour with those artists during the 1950s and 1960swho wished to structure a context in which their concepts could be playedout. Distinct from sculpture or theatre, installation art offers a presentationof conceptual matter that remains outside of simple objecthood. The workof installation represents the staging of an art concept through the creationof a spatial context. The saleable and knowable object is still disenfranchisedfrom the art moment as the environment of an installation is a presencealways already in the process of dematerialization, given its performancein a timed manner. In the last decade artists' use of video and interactiveinstallations has risen dramatically indicating an interest in establishinga performative space for the virtual environments of electronic communications.
Eduardo Kac's transgenic art carries with it the remembrance and theresults of the temporary disappearance of the art object into concept andthe performance of that loss in installation. This may seem a strainedrelation to model, as the objects of transgenic art are biological andmechanical. The art object is very much there. Yet, this is the very pointI wish to make. The biological subjects and performing machines of Kac'stransgenic art are constructed as idea and placed within installationsfor philosophical reflection. Therein lies the rub: animal bodies and machinebodies revealed not within their own destiny but altered within and servingunknowingly an aesthetic discourse. In an interview included on the EighthDay web site Kac states that, �A lot of the art I make is both an attemptfor me to grapple with an issue, to try to develop an understanding formyself and create a context, not in which I convey my understanding tothe public but always create a context in which the public can develophis or her own understanding, their own understanding of an issue.� Whatis at issue in transgenic art is an aesthetics of conceptualism housedin installation, which is built on the bodies of altered animals and articulatedthrough machines. The animals and machines are fuel for the art engine.
This is not necessarily a bad thing. I am offering a structural analysisof the signifiers of transgenic art. I am not at all interested in makinga moral judgement or drawing ethical lines within Kac's work. Given thevolatile nature of his art he strives to foreground the ethical ramificationsof the process. I am not trying to decide if he is right or wrong. Hisexploration of biological and mechanical transgressions give us a remarkablepath to think through the current revolutions of science that are unmakingand redoing our bodies, subjectivity and identity.
II. As Posthuman Subjects
In a short comment featured in this publication, I attempted to reflecton the performance work of art technologist Stelarc through the conceptualmodel of posthumanism. I wrote,Posthumanism, under a variety of names, is an ongoing projectinitiated in the late nineteenth century. As a counter-argument to thenotions of humanism, which tend to essentialise categories of gender andrace, defer difference and construct a �family of man� as the centre ofall things, strands of posthumanism have been promoted in the writingsof Nietzsche, Freud and Marx. The scheme of dethroning a centralised �man�in favour of more marginalised concerns has continued in poststructuralist,feminist and postmodern thought. More recently, posthumanism, as a componentof digital culture and theory (developed and critiqued most clearly inthe work of Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles), argues for a modelof identity that is dramatically altered within technological cultures.Posthumanism argues that western industrialised societies are experiencinga new phase of humanity �wherein no essential differences between bodilyexistence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biologicalorganism, robot teleology and human goals, exist. . . . Embodiment is seenas an accident of history and consciousness is an evolutionary newcomer�[5]. Both the body and its conscious (no separation intended)and the spaces it inhabits are challenged and reconfigured. The technologiesof scientific visualisation of the body through magnetic resonance imaging,the territorialising of the body through genome mapping and genetic engineering,and the alteration of the body through aesthetic and sexual reassignmentsurgery and mechanical, electronic and biological prosthetics, mark thespeed of change in the ways the body is seen, controlled and constructed.Additionally, this posthuman body �lives� within new spaces of virtualenvironments and ubiquitous surveillance [2].My thumbnail sketch of posthumanism is designed to demonstrate that humanism,an invention of the Enlightenment (or Renaissance, depending on the historyyou rehearse), is being reconfigured through digital culture, new scientificvisualisations, and the body and genetic alterations of biology. In Kac'stransgenic work, art object and spectator function as posthuman (or post-biologicalin the case of the genetically altered animals).
Animal Objects
Kac works with fish, amoebae, mice, rabbits and plants genetically alteredwith green fluorescent protein (GFP), which is isolated from Pacific Northwestjellyfish. Under UV light, the animals will glow green. Regarding the processof aesthetic genetic engineering, Kac writes,Genes are made of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) molecules. DNAcarries all the genetic information necessary for a cell's duplicationand for the building of proteins. DNA instructs another substance (ribonucleicacid, or RNA) how to build the proteins. RNA carries on the task usingas its raw material cellular structures called ribosomes (organelles withthe function of bringing together the amino acids, out of which proteinsare made). Genes have two important components: the structural element(which codes for a particular protein) and the regulatory element (�switches�that tell genes when and how to perform). Transgene constructs, createdby artists or scientists, also include regulatory elements that promoteexpression of the transgene. The foreign DNA may be expressed as extrachromosomalsatellite DNA or it may be integrated into the cellular chromosomes. Everyliving organism has a genetic code that can be manipulated, and the recombinantDNA can be passed on to the next generations [10].What is of interest, and perhaps a bit dangerous, is not the process ofgenetic engineering, although that has enough people up in arms, but thatin transgenic art life is framed as art. The animals carrying the transgeneare framed as aesthetic objects within Kac's model. The problem of conflatingart and life has a rich theoretical history. In the eighteenth centuryDenis Diderot wrote in his Encyclopedia that �In the arts of imitationthe truth is nothing, verisimilitude everything, and not only does onenot ask them to be real, one does not even want the pretence to be theexact resemblance� [4, p.289]. Heidegger in outliningthe aesthetics of Nietzsche suggested that �Art is worth more than �thetruth�� [6, p.75]. What all three philosophers are statingis that the convergence of art and life is a corruption of both phenomena.If you believe that art is life and life art, then you do not understandeither one or the other. The lies that form art, the dissimulation thatconstructs its beingness, the illusions that build its world, mysteriouslyopen to an appearance of the truth. Nietzsche would argue that the real,or the �truth,� simply leads to more illusions. Aesthetics as an autonomousactivity shows us the truth of life. Life has a tendency to be devaluedwhen it stands in for the goals of art. Walter Benjamin suggested a furtherproblem when he argued that aestheticising politics is the performanceof fascism. Conversely, he suggested that politicizing aesthetics is exemplaryof communism.
Is the framing of altered animal life as an aesthetic a similar problem?
The Posthuman Spectator
The spectator in Kac's interactive and transgenic art is positioned, inpart, as a disembodied participant. Entry to the work is either throughtraditional appearance in a gallery space or through virtual participationonline. Kac describes how telepresence offers interaction with his workUirapuru (1999):�Uirapuru� merges virtual reality with telepresence throughthe internet. Virtual reality offers participants a purely digital spacethat can be experienced visually and in which one can be active, in thiscase the VRML forest populated by six flying fish. Telepresence providesaccess and a point of entry to a remote physical environment [12].The insistence on a virtual spectator is one of Kac's more interestingconstructions. Traditionally, spectatorship in art and performance hasbeen identified with presence. The present spectator brings with her choice,agency and self-determination. The object of art is constructed by theviewer's perception. Kac's transgenic art offers a model of spectatorshipbased on internet interactivity activated by streaming media, virtual simulationsof the actual art environment and telepresence through computer-mediation.The telepresent spectator inhabits a virtual environment where agency,choice, and responsibility are available, but challenged. Clicking thejavascript switch for an action one cannot witness �in person� can invitean �impersonal� attitude to the activity.
In Kac's interactive and transgenic installation, Genesis (1999),present and telepresent spectators are offered the opportunity to effecta change in the biological entity (E. coli bacteria) through computer-mediatedmanipulation. Kac describes the work:
The key element of the work is an �artist's gene,� a syntheticgene that was created by Kac by translating a sentence from the biblicalbook of Genesis into Morse Code, and converting the Morse Code into DNAbase pairs according to a conversion principle specially developed by theartist for this work. The sentence reads: �Let man have dominion over thefish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thingthat moves upon the earth.� It was chosen for what it implies about thedubious notion of divinely sanctioned humanity's supremacy over nature.The Genesis gene was incorporated into bacteria, which were shown in thegallery. Participants on the Web could turn on an ultraviolet light inthe gallery, causing real, biological mutations in the bacteria. This changedthe biblical sentence in the bacteria [11].The spectator of Genesis is then able, with the click of a mouse,to engage in a rudimentary biological alteration. Hardly earth shattering,but evocative of the effortless activities of virtual action performeddaily throughout the datasphere of digital culture. The California-basedmachine performance group, Survival ResearchLab (SRL) is using similar technologies that permit online users tofire a real cannon during their performances. It is not difficult to comparethese aesthetic practices with contemporary weapon systems, whose strategyconsists of disengaging both the soldier and spectator from the �real�component of the action, namely the target. The impersonal nature of thetelepresent user alters both engagement with the activity and the ethicsof behaviour in that action.
The Posthuman (?) Artist
Perhaps it is only the artist who evades the posthuman, postbiologicalcondition. He remains in control while offering irreversible body alterationsfor the animals and virtual multiple choice and javascript off/on switchesfor a telepresent and disembodied spectator. The ironic use of biblicalphrases that Kac has borrowed from the Judeo-Christian tradition pointtoward a construction of the artist as a god over his genetically engineeredworld. The old question of whether the artist is offering a critique orpromotion of a particular problem by re-enacting that dilemma arises inthinking through transgenic art. As I argued above, the work offers usthe opportunity to think through some of the more pressing issues of theday. The artist's intentions are interesting, but not central.III. Writing, Splicing and Buying the Body (Human Genome Project)
The construction of Kac's interactive and transgenic artwork Genesisas described above in section two consists of an �artist's gene� createdthrough a translation process (Morse Code to DNA pairs) linking a biblicalsentence to a gene. The work resonates in several interesting and troublingways. The language of the biblical quotation transposed and linked throughthe primitive technology of Morse Code to the new technology of geneticengineering through the bacteria points toward the ways in which the bodyand subjectivity are being reconceived and rewritten through biologicalinterventions. As we know, the human genome project to identify all theapproximately 30,000 genes and determine the sequences of the 3 billionchemical base pairs that make up human DNA, will be completed in 2003.The mapping of the human DNA is leading to patenting and marketing of thehuman code of life. The U.S. Human Genome Project states on its web sitethat, �Another important feature of the project is the federal government'slong-standing dedication to the transfer of technology to the private sector.By licensing technologies to private companies and awarding grants forinnovative research, the project is catalyzing the multibillion-dollarU.S. biotechnology industry and fostering the development of new medicalapplications� [7]. Like the California Gold Rush, thehuman genome project has led to claims being staked and territory markedout for ownership of our interiority. The human is being portioned andpurchased.Genesis depicts the constructed character of the Judeo-Christianmodel of nature as natural and essential while demonstrating the mutablestructure of our biological coding. Kac's installation implies that lifeis a game of chance, but in this artwork, who controls the aleatory experience?The telepresent spectator of Genesis is offered the opportunityto engage in the switching on of the alteration technology. They are notwitness, nor are they required to take responsibility for their actions.Is there a cost to such telepresence?
In another reading, Genesis might be seen as a model of the unconscious,structured as language, as Lacan argued, and set to dreaming, connectedto a responsive virtual dreamscape wherein the body of the dreamer is reformed.The copula between language and biology is orchestrated by a third elementof information flow engendered through the surveillance and interactionof internet users logged into the system. In both readings there is a technologythat when switched on creates a chain reaction of chance systems for whichno model has been formed. The results of these bio-alterations are unknown.
IV. Taking Care of the Anxiety and Ethics of Being with Monsters and Machines
Transgenic art must be created �with great care, with acknowledgment ofthe complex issues at the core of the work and, above all, with a commitmentto respect, nurture, and love the life thus created� [13].Recently, critics have made much of the performativity of animals andmachines [16]. In an article for Theatre ResearchInternational, I attempted to understand the use of the supplementalperformers of children, animals, and machines in the performance work ofthe Italian collective, SocìetasRaffaello Sanzio. I wrote:
The presence of the machines brings an uncanny charge to thestage as they are always already �in performance.� The human performerwalks on and off the stage, begins and ends a performance, but the performingmachine or object is always �on.� The timelessness of the machine, theinexhaustible performativity of the object, summons forth a revealing ofthe timed nature and fatigued performance of the human. Mortality is broughtback to the stage through the immortal nature of the machine [3].The simple point I am trying to make in the above text is that the �permanence,�steady state and constant performativity of the machine foregrounds theimpermanent, fluid state and negotiable performativity of the human.**The performativity of the animal is similarly placed in question as itsconsciousness of performance is limited and task oriented. An animal wanderingthrough a stage set may or may not have any reference understanding ofthe act. The animal's unreflective act of being points to the always alreadydoubled nature of a human on stage. The human's consciousness of performanceindicates agency on the one hand, but a confinement in representation onthe other. Kac's use of animals and machines operates in a less dramaticsystem of difference, but suggests useful ways of thinking through howhumans construct the world through the assistance of these animals andmachines.
In The Eighth Day, Kac and his associates at Arizona State Universityhave devised a biologically driven robot known as a biobot. The artistexplains,
A biobot is a robot with an active biological element withinits body which is responsible for aspects of its behavior. The biobot createdfor �The Eighth Day� has a colony of GFP amoeba called Dyctiostelium discoideumas its �brain cells.� These �brain cells� form a network within a bioreactorthat constitutes the �brain structure� of the biobot. When amoebas dividethe biobot exhibits dynamic behavior inside the enclosed environment. Changesin the amoebal colony (the �brain cells�) of the biobot are monitored byit, and cause it to slowly go up and down, or to move about, throughoutthe exhibition. Ascending and descending motion becomes a visual sign ofincrease (ascent) and decrease (descent) of amoebal activity. The biobotalso functions as the avatar of Web participants inside the environment.Independent of the ascent and descent of the biobot, Web participants areable to control its visual system with a pan-tilt actuator. The autonomousascent and descent motion provide Web participants with a new perspectiveof the environment [14].Kac writes of an �ethics of robotics� that will need to be considered asthe links between machine, animal and human are solidified. The biobotis a crude example of how the biological organisms and machine forms mightcreate co-dependent entities. In a piece called A-Positive Kac designeda system that would draw oxygen from the blood of an individual to powera flame [9]. The traditional master/slave narrative ofhuman and machine are troubled in Kac's work and suggest the time is ripefor a reconsideration of our ethics in regards to machines. As the machinesare invited into our bodies and biological organisms introduced into machines,the neat boundaries of what marks a human are being complicated. Andy Warhol'swish to be a machine is becoming a reality.
The GFP Bunny �Alba� is one of Kac's first transgenic creations.Fixed with the gene that codes for the green fluorescent protein, Albaglows green under a UV lamp. Kac writes on his web site that the life ofAlba is an artwork in three stages.
The first phase of the �GFP Bunny� project was completed inFebruary 2000 with the birth of �Alba� in Jouy-en-Josas, France. . . .The second phase is the ongoing debate, which started with the first publicannouncement of Alba's birth, in the context of the Planet Work conference,in San Francisco, on May 14, 2000. The third phase will take place whenthe bunny comes home to Chicago, becoming part of my [Kac's] family andliving with us from this point on [13].The art is not placed in a physical or virtual installation but framedthrough the existence of the rabbit. The art is not performed, presentedor represented. It exists. The boundaries of art are extended to a presencethat will only stop at death.
Martin Heidegger's notion of human existence as a phenomenon of �being-in-the-world�might be a useful model for understanding the problem that transgenic artoffers us. Heidegger's �being-in-the-world� exists through an operationof �care.� Caring is structured as a three-part process of projection wherein�being-in-the-world� �projects upon or towards its possibilities to be,�throwness �into and among these possibilities,� and fallenness among thepossibilities �to the neglect of [the being-in-the-world's] own deepestpossibility to be itself� [1, p.227]. These movementsare experienced in the �being-in-the-world� as anxiety. The human is responsiblefor her life and must take care of it. The artist is responsible for hercreation. She must take care of it. As the infinite quality of our possibilitiesaccelerates in the advent of new science and technology, we must take carenot to be overtaken by the anxiety of fallenness and find that both ourselvesand creations are incapable of revealing our separate and unified destinies.
As Dr. Frankenstein learned, that which we create desires our care andresponsibility. We are animals, and our machines are our extensions, supplementingand sometimes, displacing, ourselves. Transgenic art is a process for themanufacturing of monsters and machines and thereby must become the �care-taker�of these other beings. Without a concerned �care-taking,� these monstersand machines will return with desires and demands no posthuman can supply.
Notes
- *
- As I was reminded by an editor for Crossings, it is important toremember that like all historical outlines, Lippard's model is reductiveand fails to address the multiple critiques (language, technology, politics,etc.) inherent in conceptualism in favour of a privileging of the crisisof representation.
- **
- I am using the term of �performativity� in this essay not in terms of adeconstructive reading of Austin's work on iterability, but as a signifierfor a �condition of performance.�
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