at the time—perhaps the first instance in which
an animal was made out to be an artistic installation.
“It is a new era, and we need a new kind of
art,’’ said Kac told the Boston Globe at the time.
“It makes no sense to paint as we painted in the
caves.”
But many questioned what Kac was actually
trying to do. At the time, it seemed that his
only goal in creating Alba was to basically get
a glow-in-the-dark bunny. Kac would later pen
an essay after Alba was born, explaining his
artistic vision behind the , saying he wanted to
comment on the way humans are taming wild
animals into domestication and using selective
breeding to change them in ways that better
conform to our “created realities.” It reads as
disingenuous, in my opinion, and Kac comes
across as being more interested in spectacle
than art.
Moreover, it should be noted that Kac—who
did not actually create Alba himself, but simply
contracted a French lab to genetically engineer
the bunny—hasn’t got a real grasp of the science behind this . GFP works in any animal
that has no hair, under special light conditions.
The animal does not simply glow at all times,
or even in the dark—a special light needs to be
pointed at it to cause the protein in the body to
fluoresce.
“On the one hand, the green bunny is an icon
of current scientific practice, like GloFish,” says
Anker. “But on the other hand, it’s also an icon
of fraud, so to speak. And it does raise the issue
of fraud, which has been problem in art since
art began.”
More audacious, however, could be the current work by experimental Canadian poet
Christian Bok. His Xenotext has a very ambitious goal: the creation of a living poem. Bok’s
aim was to create an organism whose genetic
information, when translated, contained the
first stanza of a poem. That same genetic information would encode for a protein that, when
translated, would be the following stanza.
ing how to modify the organism in a way that
will cause it to successfully produce the desired
protein. The enciphered gene reads “any style
of life/ is prim”, and the resulting protein translates to “the faery is rosy/ of glow…”
The kicker is that the protein results in a red
fluorescence, giving the bacterium a ‘rosy’ red
glow.
Like Alba, the Xenotext results in an organism
that more or less stands as an actual artistic installation. But what Bok has done is something
even more grand in its scope: he has created an
organism that perpetuates the art indefinitely
and stores it for what may be many more years,
when considering time outside of human history. “We know of no other means of storing
information that can endure for such long periods of time,” says Bok. “We may consider using
genomes as a means of preserving information
that doesn’t relate to survival of the species.”
Of course, there’s no escaping the fact that
this field of art raises a ton of ethical issues. Any
endeavor involving the use of animals always
brings about loud voices from both sides.
“If bio art gains more respect and has more of
an institutional backing—and if artists behave
themselves, which could be a problem in the lab
since artists notoriously break rules—there’s
a bright future,” says Anker. But as is the case
with other fields of work that rely heavily on
genetic engineering of organisms, there is still a
huge concern among the public that others are
going too far. Although scientists are required
to follow a heavy set of protocols when conducting research involving live animals, many
institutions exist outside of tightly regulated
organization (such as schools), and many artists
work independently. They are largely free to act
as they choose.
At the SVA’s “Naturally Hypernatural” conference, questions from the audience on the first
day directly brought up the issue of whether
this was sound work. Anker and her colleagues
seemed quick to dismiss those notions. This
might have been out of a re