Making art out of the wizardry of biotech.

By Amanda Schaffer 

[excerpt from web slide show]

 Joe Davis, a "research affiliate" at MIT,  makes art infused with genetics, biotechnology, and ingenious gizmology.

In the late 1980s, Davis collaborated with molecular geneticist Dana Boyd on what is probably the world's first artwork created with recombinant-DNA technology.

Davis and Boyd took a graphical icon they called Microvenus—which looks like an outline of the female genitalia and is also an ancient Germanic rune—and encoded it as a sequence of DNA. (This means they interpreted the icon as a grid of light and dark pixels, or zeros and ones, and assigned these a series of DNA bases)

Once the new DNA was synthesized, Davis and Boyd inserted it into the genome of the bacterium E. coli and grew a colony of transformed bacteria in the lab.

It wasn't much to look at. But conceptually, the project broke artistic ground by exploiting the power of DNA to carry poetic and purely whimsical information.

 

In his 1999 piece Genesis, artist Eduardo Kac encoded English text into a sequence of DNA and then inserted the sequence into bacteria, much as Davis had done. But the text he chose was more freighted: the biblical verse "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." Note to genetic artists: Stay away from the Bible. The juxtaposition of new technology with ancient religious text is all too heavy-handed and obvious.

 full article and pictures at http://www.slate.com/id/2168469/slideshow/2168530

 

 

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