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C104
article
Words and images most severely
distorted
When the text is the genetic
code, and the visual is a photograph of our galaxy, word
and image can travel far-flung routes. James Elkins reports
here on how the Milky Way became DNA.
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frared
image of the Milky Way from the COBE satellite;
courtesy NASA
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In art history, the field of
word and image studies has been flourishing for several
decades. The literature that is produced, however, tends
to stay close to a sense of 'word' that identifies writing
with Roman script, and 'image' that identifies visual
art with realist images in the Western tradition. There
are many counterexamples - studies of Chinese painting,
studies of texts that only imply images, conceptual art
- but by and large the interest of scholars has been focused
on Western iconic images and Western systems of writing.
The most interesting advances in the field have been methodological,
as in Mieke Bal's enormous polemic Reading "Rembrandt":
Beyond the Word-Image Opposition.1
For that reason I thought it might be interesting here
to eavesdrop on a work in progress that leaves those constraints
far behind.
I think that one of the most
interesting artists working today is Joe Davis. Just a
few years ago he was relatively unknown: now, belatedly,
he is getting a fair amount of press. So far that publicity
has not translated into a secure job, and Davis remains
one of the vanishingly small number of artists who have
unpaid jobs, no grants, and no secure prospects. For twenty
years he has occupied a couple of dozen feet of lab space
at MIT; as of this writing, he is being compelled to look
for a new home. Davis is also interesting in the history
of funding, because he remains the only major artist I
know who has neither an academic teaching post nor sufficient
fame to support himself. It is still possible to starve
in a garret, provided you make work absolutely no one
knows how to buy or sell or classify.2
(He is also a perfect candidate for a benevolent philanthropist:
if you have money, and you'd like to support a genuinely
radical artist, one who remains off the art world's radar
screen, here is your person.)
Because of the recent publicity
there are several places to learn about Davis's work,
and in addition his essays are readily available.3
So instead of introducing him, I will describe just one
project that bears on the word and image question.
For several years, Davis has
been working on a way to put an image of a galaxy into
the cells of a mouse, where it would become part of the
mouse's genetic code and be passed on to future generations.
Davis began with an infrared astronomical image of the
Milky Way galaxy.4 In the
original, the picture is a nice-looking, low-res picture
of a galaxy (ours) on its side, displayed in a range of
false colors that make it look like glowing embers. (That
particular false-color combination is one of two built
in to various astronomical software, such as Xephem. The
other default false coloration runs through the whole
spectrum like false-color Doppler radar.)
He displayed the image in digital
form, using hexadecimal notation, so that it became, in
part:
He then devised a series of codes
that change the sixteen characters of hexadecimal notation
into DNA base pairs. The challenge was to create a code
that would accurately transcribe the image and still be
viable as DNA in a living cell. His final 'supercode',
which I won't describe in detail (it's a code that reads
amino acids from a base-20 code) yields this sequence
of thymine, guanine, adenine, and cytosine DNA bases:5
This 'supercode' is a biologically
viable and stable form of the digitized image of the Milky
Way. Once it is sequenced, it would be 'amplified' (copied)
and inserted into the cells of a self-sustaining strain
of twenty-two laboratory mice, using viral vectors (viruses
that effect the implantation of the DNA), or by injecting
the DNA directly into a mouse oocyte. From there is could,
in theory, be passed on from generation to generation.
Barring significant random mutations Davis expects it
to remain stable for "geological time," which means it
could even be passed on to creatures in the dim future
who will be the evolutionary descendants of mice.6
That would make Davis's project one of the first truly
immortal artworks. Long after the David is dust, some
creature might be scurrying around with Davis's DNA sequence
in its cells.
Davis thinks of his project as
a variations on 'pictures' that animals and plants already
have encoded in their genetic material. He says his galaxy
picture may be "redundant," because "mice and other living
organisms already inherently possess subtle 'maps' of
the local cosmos," in the form of responses to diurnal
and annual rhythms.7 There
are 'pictures' hidden in many microscopic forms, and who
knows? - perhaps mice even have an awareness of the Milky
Way. From a scientific standpoint, that part of Davis's
work is entirely speculative: the Milky Way sequence,
when it is synthesized, will have begun as an image, while
diurnal rhythms and other behavioral codes were never
images; and in addition Davis's supercoding is designed
not to be read by the mice, which would therefore never
exhibit behavior attributable to the code. But as art,
the theory is wonderful because it draws on a nearly incomprehensibly
capacious notion of images.
Is there a text-image relation
that is more torturous than Davis's Milky Way project?
If there is, I don't know it. Consider the astonishing
topological transformations, from the CCD camera in the
COBE satellite that took the photograph, to the sequence
of hexadecimals, to the supercode, to the actual synthesized
DNA, and its replication through billions of cells in
twenty-two organisms, and then - in an unimaginable future
- its dissemination through unknowable numbers of organisms...
and even its hypothetical recovery by some future geneticist,
who could in theory read the code, revert it to hexadecimals,
and print a nice picture of the Milky Way galaxy.
From 1998 to 2001 Davis was searching
for funds to underwrite the long synthesis required for
his project. Peter Seidler, an art collector in New York,
funded the sequences necessary to construct the Milky
Way DNA, in part because he wanted to own the work as
idea, in the tradition of conceptual art. Davis pointed
out that the Milky Way DNA would be real rather than conceptual
since it would be embodied in "quite visible, inarguably
tangible" mice. Seidler's idea, in art-historical terms,
was to own the work as concept, and Davis's interest was
to insist on the absence of intangible concepts. He prefers
real words and real images, even if both are wholly illegible
as words or images. He offered the patron "detectable
amounts" of synthesized Milky Way DNA "suitable for public
or private display": an uninteresting reduction of the
project to a conventional art object. Some of the oligonucleotides
(sequences) necessary to make Milky Way DNA (mwDNA) have
been synthesized and were exhibited in May 2002 in A Biologia
como Art Medium at Lugar Comum in Barcarena, Portugal.
8
Later in 2001, Dana Boyd, a researcher
in Harvard Medical School's Beckwith Laboratories, wrote
software that can decode Davis's supercode. Davis suggested
to him that the supercode could be used as a 'silent,'
unexpressed vehicle for carrying potentially endless amounts
of information. In that way, all
recorded knowledge could then be incorporated into routine
DNA synthesis carried out for science and commerce and
this extra information could be added at little or no
cost. DNA supercode or a close cousin thereof may be used
to "underwrite" non-expressed, or passive data into sequences
that are "overwritten" with sequences that have desired
translation products.
Such an overwriting project would
eventually constitute a "kind of genome project of the
word." It would, in other words, be a latent image with
all the world's words embedded in it.
James Elkins will be Chair
of the Department of Art History, University of Cork,
beginning January 2004; see www.imagehistory.org.
1
2In a letter of 2001, Davis
sums up the situation. He says he has been rejected when
he has applied for arts grants "because it has seemed
to them to be too scientific and 'insufficiently artistic'
(a now much too familiar rejoinder). I am not able to
apply to public or private scientific funding agencies
for support to create the Milky Way DNA because it is
not science in the first place, and because my classical
credentials are exclusively artistic. It would in fact
be considered unethical to divert monies to art which
have been previously set aside for the search for cures
for disease or the advancement of basic scientific knowledge."
All letters in this essay courtesy Joe Davis.
4The
image is from the COBE satellite. For further information
see E. Wright, "The COBE view of the Galaxy," in Proc.
Surveys in Astronomy Symposium, September 16-18 1992 (Pasadena,
CA: Caltech, 1992).
7Davis, "Milky Way
DNA," unpublished draft, revised 29 January 1999
8Ines Pinto Queiroz, "A Biologia ao Serviço da
Arte,"
Article reproduced from CIRCA
104, Summer 2003, pp. 55-57.
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