You are on page 1of 5

The Fine Art of Creating Life Author(s): Amy M. Youngs Source: Leonardo, Vol. 33, No.

5, Eighth New York Digital Salon (2000), pp. 377-380 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1576882 Accessed: 06/05/2010 22:23
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may 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 at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=mitpress. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Leonardo.

http://www.jstor.org

The

Fine

Art

of

Life Creating

M. AMY YOUNGS

Abstract of artistictradition creatinglifeThelongstanding evolvesas technology like artworks growsfrom and DNAmanipuand chisels to computers paint are lation.Artists nowable to createdigitalworks that engage in the processes of life and biological that works existas artand actuallife. Theauthor examinesthe differingwaysin whichartificiallife smearthe boundaries and biologicalartworks and natural unnatural, betweenwhatis considered humanand nature,and exploresthe role biologicalart mightplay in relocatinghumanity withinthe complexecologicalsystems of life, ratherthanaboveor belowit.

and The Modern In his book Beyond of Sculpture: Effects Science


on Technology the Sculptureof This Century,written in 1968, Burnham predicted the possibility that artistscould create Jack amazinglylifelike artworks.He traced this artistic impulse back to the idealized human forms of Greek sculpture, followed by clockwork automata, early kinetic art, and finally the robot and cyborg art of the 1960s. He clearly predicted the artificial life art forms that are being created in silicon today, but he did not foresee the art of creating new biological life forms. Now that genetic engineering companies are bringing forth a cornucopia of new life forms, I wonder about extending into the biological realm Burnham's idea that future artworks might be "capableof intelligent intercoursewith their creators." At this point the field of genetic engineering is too specialized and expensiveto be consideredas a viable medium for most artists. So it is the genetic engineerswho are doing almost all of the creating, while the rest of us on the sidelines are watching with great are interest as traditionalspecies barriers being breachedbefore our We have seen sheep-goat chimeras, the blending of tobacco eyes. plants with firefly genes to produce luminous plants, and a variety of animals and plants with human genes inserted into them. Presumably these freakishcreatureswill end up helping humanity by enabling us to make cheaper,better medicines, cure famine, and so Amy M. Youngs, 98 WarrenSt., Columbus, OH 43215, U.S.A. E-mail:youngs.6@osu.edu.
LEONARDO, Vol. 33, No. 5, pp. 377-380, 2000 377

tradition exists the Behindmuchartextendingthrough Western a yearningto break down the psychic and physical barriers between art and living reality-not only to make an art form that is believablyreal, but to go beyond and furnish images withtheircreators. capableof intelligentintercourse -Jack Burnham [1] Forthe first time the word organicceases to be an unobtainable ideal held out to the artist;followingin the wakeof cyberwill lead to netic technology,systems with organic properties "sculpture"-if it can be called that-rivaling the attributesof -Jack Burnham[2] intelligentlife.
( 2000 Amy M. Youngs, received 1 May 2000

cause the stock market to rise forever.The other presumption is that genetic engineering will disrupt the delicate balance of life and lead to environmental destruction. As an artist, however, I am not as interestedin the polarities of this debate as I am in the ways that genetically engineered organisms challenge deeply held convictions about what is "natural"and where humankind stands as the DNA is reshuffled.

The digital pixel-plants are fantastic, but do not give nearly as much of a sense of interaction as I had with the carbon-based plants. With this piece I am reminded that the desire to interact with life is at least as strong as the desire to createit. Louis Bec is an artist and zoosystematician who creates beautiful, colorful artificial life forms and believes that these new creatureswill serve as a kind of communication bridge between the biological and technological worlds. As lovely as his creaGenetic art fits nicely into the artistic tures are, they only appear to us on a flat tradition, which, as stated by Burnham, screen and lack the qualities of biological seeks "to breakdown the psychic and phys- life that cause me to talk to dogs and feel ical barriersbetween art and living reality." the desire to water wilted plants. Acutely He was referringnot to biological genetic aware of the impulse to create biological art but to the disciplines of cyberneticsand life, Bec asks, "Is it not the case that, at the artificial life, which were at that time just very heart of artistic endeavor, there has beginning to be discoveredby artists. Since long been the demiurgic ambition to create the time of Burnham'swritings, many fan- the living via multiple simulations? Do tastic, silicon-based organisms have indeed cloning, genetic engineering, and the crebeen brought into existence by artificial-life ation of transgenicanimals open the way to artists. These virtual creatures existing teratologicalart?"[6]. are created Humankind's position in relation to within virtual environments with genetic algorithms or genetic pro- artificial life organisms is a safe, distant gramming. Artists working in this field are detachment; after all, they are made up of concerned with the creation of life process- the same elements as video games. That es in digital media-life that interactswith humans have invented the universeswithin its environment, breeds, and evolves. Arti- which the digital creaturescan live allows ficial life maker Thomas Ray calls it "col- us the privilegedposition of creatoras well laborating with evolution" [3]. His as the knowledge that we may destroy artificial life piece Tierra is a computer- them without any consequences to our generateduniversedesigned to facilitatethe own world. Biological genetic art is very evolution of complex artificial life organ- different when one considers that we are isms. Ray speaksof Tierraas a "biodiversity made up of the same materials, that the reservefor digital organisms"[4]. His repli- same code is used to construct us and we cation of life processesoutside a biological sharethe same world. medium certainly challenges notions that life resides within carbon-basedorganisms only. On the other hand, it is not exactly The first genetically altered life forms humbling when we consider that the digiexhibited in an artistic context were tal universeis programmedby humans. The artistic team of Christa Sommerer Edward Steichen's Delphiniums.Using traand Laurent Mignonneau has created an ditional methods of selective breeding artificial-life piece called InteractivePlant along with colchicine, a drug that altered Growing,which allows humans to interact the plant's genetic makeup, Steichen was with both living and artificialplants. As a able to create strains of delphinium flowers of participant/viewer this piece, I felt like a that diverged widely from what had ever creatorof life as I moved my hands around been seen before. This kind of accomplisha living plant to generate real-time, algo- ment was generally the territory of flower rithmic plants on a projection screen [5]. hall exhibitions at county fairs, but because Yet it was a sense that would not have been of his position as a famous photographer possible without the presence of the living and his connections with the Museum of plants as an interface to the artificialones. Modern Art in New York, Steichen was

Lifelike Creatures by CreatedArtists

Altered Genetically Life Biological Forms

able to exhibit his flowers there. In 1936, the Steichen Delphiniums show initiated the science of genetics into the context of the art world [7]. Geneticallyalteredflowerswould not be shown as art again until 1988, when George Gessert's Iris Projectwas exhibited at New Langton Arts in San Francisco. Gessertcreateshis artisticirisesby hybridizing wild varietiesand discardingthe undesirableresultsin his compost pile. He keeps, and breeds, those flowers that are aesthetically pleasing to him, those that display traits such as vivid vein patterns in their petals and unruffled edges. His decision to compost the flowers that have rufflededges is both an aesthetic choice and a reaction against commercial flower breeders, who tend to breed for ruffled petals in every flower species. Gessert calls his practice "genetic folk art," and his work points to the way nature is interpreted-even authored-by humans. This is particularly evident in his Scatter project, in which he disperses extra iris seeds gleaned from his hybridizingactivities. For this he has been accused of practicing "genetic graffiti" becausehe often plants them in the wilderness, where people like to imagine that a state of never-changing purity exists [8]. Yet when logging roads are cut into the land, trees are clear-cut, and new trees planted, no one calls it genetic graffiti, even though these activities do alter the genetics of an area dramatically.With Gessert's folkstyle of genetics, he does not need the expensive tools of genetic engineering to create conceptually intriguing artworks about the interactionof humankindwith nature. Mel Chin is another artistwho has been selectively breeding plants in his work. Since 1990, he has been collaboratingwith scientist Rufus L. Chaney on RevivalField, an ecological restorationof a toxic landfill in St. Paul, Minnesota. For this experimental project, they use hyperaccumulators,a group of plants that extract heavy metals from the soil. As the plants grow on the toxic site, they absorb metals like zinc and cadmium, which can be reused once the plants are harvested, dried, and turned to ash. Their hope is that this technology will become self-sustaining, as the costs of cleaning up toxic sites might be recoverable from the recycled metal from the plants.

378

Life The AmyM. Youngs, FineArtof Creating

Fontaine. Fig.1. EduardoKac'sAlba,a livetransgenicbunnythat glows in the darkundercertainlights. Photo by Chrystelle Chin believes that more efficient metal recovery will be possible with bioengineered plants [9]. While it is well-known that human intervention has toxified many environments, Chin and Chaney's project demonstratesthat humans are also capable of engineering organic solutions. The Revival Field project blurs our culturally constructed ideas of what is natural and unnatural. Here humans-who frequently dominate the natural world in ways that contaminate it and so renderit "unnatural" -are instead dominating a natural plant, by making it seem less "natural" alteringits but the end result is a genetic makeup, purifying agent for previously contaminated environments. The dichotomy between nature as pure and humanity as its contaminating agent is not so clear here. Working with bioengineers at MIT, artistJoe Davis interveneswith nature on a microscopiclevel. His interferenceoccurs at the structurallevel of E. coli, a living bacterium. He is in a sense creating a new strainof bacteriallife by insertinga synthetic piece of DNA into the E. coli that will in turn replicatein future generations.He has encoded a message that can be read back through the DNA sequencing process and decoded to read as an icon he names which representslife, earth, "Microvenus," and human female genitalia [10]. Like Steichen, Gessert, and Chin, Davis is altering the genetics of living beings, but by using the techniques of genetic engineering he is able to directly insert a human message inside an organism.That this strain of bacteria will forever have the mark of human culture may seem to fundamentally denature it. But this perception exists only if nature is assumed to be an entity separate and untouched by humanity. As environmental writer William Cronon points out in his essay"The Trouble with Wilderness," "everythingwe know about environmental history suggests that people have been manipulating the naturalworld on various scales for as long as we have a record of their passing" [11]. Cronon disputes the dualism between humanity and nature on the grounds that "we therebyleave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in naturemight actuallylook like" [12]. Cloning is another method that has been used to literallycreate life as artwork. Ratherthan changing the structureof existing life forms, artist Natalie Jeremijenko makes her statement about genetics by cloning a single black walnut tree 100 times (again, with help from scientists). The baby trees were displayedat the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in an exhibition entitled Ecotopias,but the work will exist for many years to come, as the trees are being planted throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. By revealing the cultural and environmental differences of their particularlocations (although they are geneticallyidentical), the trees will stand as a challenge to the popular notion that genetics equals destiny [13].

Not Colorful Animals? Why Cute,


So "why is it that dogs aren't yet blue with red spots, and that horses don't yet radiatephosphorescentcolors over the nocturnal meadows of the land?"[14]. Over a decade has passed since that question was posed in Artforumby writer Vilem Flusser, and still we do not see these creaturesbeing createdby artists.Artificial-lifeartistscould certainly mock up this kind of scenario in digital form, but it is still out of the reachof artistsworkingwith biologicalgenetics.The creation of new mammalian life forms has certainly occurred in the world of science, but no artistshave been able to participate as of yet. This will likely change as the tools and techniques become more availableand we all become accustomed to the new ways of creatinglife. The creationof a transgenic animal-a dog that glows with the green
Life 379 The AmyM.Youngs, FineArtof Creating

fluorescentprotein of a jellyfish-has been proposed by artist EduardoKac in his article "Transgenic Art."A projectlike this will a lab with specialized equipment, require but since this protein has alreadysuccessfully been incorporatedinto mammaliancells, such an animal is entirelypossible [15]. The artist'sdesire to geneticallyalter a dog may at first seem immoral, until, perhaps, one considers that dogs did not exist before humans genetically altered them through the selective breeding of wolves. While Kac's project has remained unrealized, he has recently succeeded in the creation of a transgenic rabbit that glows green under special lighting. Kac considershis rabbit an artwork,a family pet (named Alba), and an instigator of dialogue on issues such as genetic engineering, biodiversity,normalcy, heterogeneity, purity, and interspecies communication [16]. Whether the art of today has lived up to Jack Burnham's predictions of intelligent interaction between humans and nature may be in question, but there is no doubt that genetic artistshave been able to create works that do, as he says, "breakdown the psychic and physical barriers between art and living reality." Steichen Strain delphiniums, for instance, are available for purchase online at the Burpee Seed Company Web site at a cost of $2.95 for a packet of fifty seeds [15]. Gessert's irises grow in people's gardens and maybe out in the wilderness somewhere; Joe Davis's Microvenus-encoded bacteria is a living testament that nature and culture can reside together in one organism; Mel Chin's pioneering hyperaccumulator plants are working to clean up human-made toxic dumps; and Natalie Jerejimenko's 100 cloned trees are incorporated into the urban forest of the San FranciscoBay Area. As the rhetoric of the biotechnology industry focuses on the control of biology for the good of humanity, the manipulation of DNA to create new biological life forms seems to assert the superiority of humans over the rest of life on earth. However, the intentions of the artists who have altered biology in their work are not the same as those of the biotech industry,and their artworks do not reinforce the hierarchy that places humanity at the apex. In fact much of their work deeply celebratesnonhuman
380 The Life AmyM. Youngs, FineArtof Creating

life while acknowledging-even pointing to-humanity's interconnection with it. Perhapsthis kind of work has the potential to do what some environmental thinkers believe is imperative: relocate humanity within the complex ecological systems of life ratherthan above or below it.

References
1. Jack Burnham, BeyondModernSculpture:The and Technology the Sculpture on of Effects Science of This Century (New York:George Braziller,1968), p. 312. 2. Ibid. [1] p. 320. as in 3. ThomasS. Ray,"Evolution Artist," Art@Science,ed. ChristaSommererand LaurentMignonneau(New York: 1998), p. 82. Springer, 4. Ibid. [3] p. 88. 5. Christa Sommererand LaurentMignonneau, Interactive Plant Growing, MachineCulture,SIGat GRAPH'93, Anaheim,California. 6. LouisBec, "Artificial underTension:A LesLife son in Epistemological in Fabulation," Sommerer andMignonneau p. 98. [3] 7. Ronald J. Gedrim, "EdwardSteichen's 1936 of Exhibition DelphiniumBlooms: Art of Flower An Breeding," History of Photography 17, No. 4, 352-363 (Winter1993). 8. GeorgeGessert, "Noteson GeneticArt,"Leonardo 26, No. 3, 205-211 (1993). 9. Mel Chin, "Rising Above Our Garbage," lecture deliveredthe Exploratorium,San Francisco,Jan. 28-30, 1993. 10. Joe Davis,"Microvenus," 55, ArtJournal No. 1, 70-74 (Spring1996). 11. William Cronon, Uncommon Ground:Toward Nature (New York:W.W. Norton & Reinventing Co., 1996), p. 83. 12. Ibid. [11] p. 81. exhibition 13. Ecotopias Yerba catalog(SanFrancisco: BuenaCenterforthe Arts,1998), p. 14. 14. Vilem Flusser, "Curie's Children," 27, Artforum No. 2, 9 (1988). 15. EduardoKac, "Transgenic ElecArt,"Leonardo tronicAlmanac6, No. 11 (Dec. 1998); http://mitpress.mit.edu/LEA/. 16. Eduardo Kac, GFP Bunny (2000); http://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html. SeedWeb Site:http://burpee.goshoppin17. Burpee gonline.com/detail.asp?catID=search&prodID=376.

Amy M. Youngs was born in 1968 in northern California. She creates mixedmedia interactive sculptures and environments which reveal her interest in the complex relationship between technology and our changing concept of nature and self. She has exhibited her works nationally and is currentlya part-timefaculty member at The Ohio State University.

You might also like