| Genesis Links "Genesis" by Eduardo Kac was among the first transgenic art pieces that transformed genetics into an interactive virtual interface amplifying the man's capacity to recode his surroundings, turning the microorganism into a microcosm for man's almost hubristic power over living things, including himself. First, Kac took a sentence from the bible, "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth," translating the words into morse code. This morse code "sentence" was then converted into DNA base pairs, forming what he called "the artist's gene." Next, the gene was inserted into the DNA of ultra-violet sensitive bacterial specimens displayed center-stage in a gallery. As viewers connected via the world wide web controlled the on-off state of an ultra-violet light surrounding the bacteria, the bacteria's genetic code mutated, rearranging and organizing the sentence itself as well. A screen behind the bacter's podium displayed the ever-changing gene, which was also posted on the website. In the end, when transcribed back to morse code and then english, the sentence has lost its original meaning, having mutated as well. What I find most interesting in this work is the hubristic notion of man's capability to take over the foundations of biological functioning, to in effect, become not just master of the earth, but God himself. What fascinated me more is the futility of this hubris in the context of the project, and its guise of control and supremacy: a religiously loaded sentence is coded by an arbitrary system into an arbitrary gene is inserted into a living thing, which man collectively transforms into yet another arbitrary structure. In the end, the result effaces his power, but is in itself meaningless, a string of jumbled words. His transformations are lost to jargon, and the greatest feet--to change himself--has neither been attempted nor accomplished. Submitted
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