From Wired: an artist is using DNA as the media for his work. He translated Descartes' cogito, ergo sum in to a DNA sequence and inserted it in to a tomato plant.
The process "is a lot simpler than people may think, which takes away the mystery of the project. People may think 'Ooh, genetic engineering and art' -- but it's not really hard to do." ... In fact, "you could do genetic engineering in your house."
Not that you can see much difference in the plant, mind. But I'm intrigued by the glowing bunny rabbit and the e. coli virus a researcher induced to blink on and off.
Posted by toby at March 7, 2004 10:26 AMGo take a look at the Cactus project (http://www.lauracinti.com/)
It is a transgenic artwork involving the fusion of human genetic material into the cactus genome resulting in the cactus expressing human hair
Disturbing to say the least.
Posted by: Eric at March 7, 2004 01:38 PMVery cool. In my work at GBN, I remember visiting a bizarre "bioartist" at San Francisco State University, Adam Zxxx?, who used the lab as his workshop. He created all kinds of strange things, mutating frogs with other animals, etc. and was very interested in the idea of perversion. That this is the new role of bioartists, to push our comfort zones by blurring the boundaries between art and biology, and thus forcing us to ask hard questions about the relationship between our society and science. Here are some recent papers on the subject:
http://www.fuzzysignals.com/Tan_Shen_Mynn.pdf
http://www.fuzzysignals.com/Khong_Wai_Han.pdf
Plus one disturbing perversion:
http://www.fuzzysignals.com/images/Gene(sis)
The reason I have this stuff? One of the novellas I plan to write, called "Boundary Conditions" is based on this character. So thanks for more material!