In 2000, the artist Eduardo Kac made an announcement that he had the "creation" of a transgenic rabbit named "Alba" in order for network television news. The PR campaign included an iconic image of a rabbit photographically enhanced in a specific spectrum of light to appear green, because it was used in the zygote of one of the ancestors of Alva green fluorescent protein (GFP), which was the DNA extracted from the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. Kac said all the discussion, which became known to the GFP Bunny - in German, as "light rabbit" [Note kindle translator's] - should, as well as the social integration of the rabbit on his family, to his work. The controversy and the discussions have been selectively documented in a series of subsequent, widely publicized. The proposed social integration has been turned into a campaign to "free Alba", as the French Institute National de la Recherche Agronomique, where the rabbit had been created; it is prohibited in a dispute about the exact arrangement that the rabbit is leaving the premises. The details of this little controversy, the artist does not seem to be addressed, at least they appear neither in his book on the subject, nor in the photos of Alba-filled stories and glamorous places to read newspapers. Nor are they available in the interactive on-screen work, which can combine the audiences from Alba headlines biotech buzz.
For much of the general public GFP Bunny may have been their first contact with this kind of art. In the art world, where curators and critics are quick Institution when it comes to flags on a new island in the stream, it has produced a name: The subgenre already existed for some time in various more or less technological mediaphilic forms well before Y2K. The first exodus of artists from the landscape screen and into the natural environment occurred around the time when the planet's inhabitants to have been aware of spaceship earth, a mother ship, which itself was in need of parental responsibility. Artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer applied in the 1960s, the principles of conceptual art and minimalist art is on the box itself. Soon flourished has an entire genre, incorporating the first generation of the environmental movement, feminism and utopian perspectives of the 1970s in it. Today, contemporary art, which refers to the earthworks of a former generation, integrates new technologies. It does so in the knowledge that technology as much as anything else, the concepts of human relationship to the natural. Nothing makes this clearer than by being pushed by the biotechnologies, the meteoric rise of life sciences in the thirty-five years since the first Earth Day (Earth Day), in 1970.
In May 2004 I found myself in the situation that some FBI agents in Buffalo, New York, the artist's legitimate use of high-tech biological equipment to try to explain. I had flown to Chicago to be with my friend Steve Kurtz, a founding member of artist collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), the day after his wife died suddenly in her sleep. When the police arrived to investigate the death of the woman, they found a table laden with laboratory equipment. Confused by the statement that Kurtz used this equipment for his art, they called the special unit to combat terrorism (Joint Terrorism Task Force). When I arrived the next day, the FBI had also arrived to detain Kurtz and lock him out of his house, then to organize a search, which included confiscation of all his research materials including two computers, and many personal records. I was detained with my friend and questioned. It was not a new experience for me, which was trying to draw me to this type of art to account, but the fact that this time, a friend under suspicion of bioterrorism, gave it a new urgency.
The arrest turned out to be illegal and after 22 hours - after Kurtz was able to contact a lawyer on the phone - we were going. All that CAE has done in the eighteen year history has been public; much of it staged with the support of established art institutions. CAE's work is documented on their website and in a number of books published by Autonomedia Press, independent as well as in numerous articles. Nevertheless, prompted many of his colleagues, the nature and legitimacy of this kind of art to declare to the press and the public, as the U.S. Justice Department pursued a case against Kurtz.
It quickly became apparent that the case is giving us opportunities to speak publicly about the very issues that had tried to bring the artistic activities of the CAE to the public. For the previous decade, their work had focused primarily on the implications of various applications of genetic engineering. The government had confiscated the equipment of a mobile lab for testing processed food for genetically modified ingredients. The research, which they confiscated, based on a new project, which involved the diversion of resources from the field of public health, bio defense programs. Shortly after Steve Kurtz's nightmare began (it goes on, more lately), I set out to formulate not only a justification for the artists' participation in the sciences, but also a set of criteria for such endeavors. Assuming the current role of the life sciences as a driver of economic gold rush as well as given the fact that scientific advances are only a tiny part of the world's population, is in the development of criteria about the projects that are bent on to interrupt those from those developments, which ultimately reinforce them.
Is the Bio-Bio in biology the same as in the bio-power?
The explosion funded specializations in biology, particularly in the fields of genetics, bioinformatics and biotechnology, is largely a function of how the biology in the mechanisms of the doxa of our time is to fit into the neo-liberalism. As a political economic theory, neo liberalism, that individuals and society can best flourish if the government limits its function to the guarantee and protection of private property, free markets and free trade. This ideology has gained through its association with moral notions of individual freedom and human dignity of extraordinary influence; especially in the face of those they perceived enemies: the totalitarian regimes of communism and, since the end of the Cold War, Islamic fundamentalism. Promoted this way, it seems, of course, the desire for such a system for universal human too.
Using this ideology becomes legally articulated as something that a party at the expense - literally - a different one: not only real estate, material products and technological innovations, but also the basics of life, health and safety: knowledge, creativity, nutrition, sanitation, medicine, water. Consequently, we have - and certainly not only in the sciences - a transformation of the living world in an inalienable right to profit as well as unlimited opportunities to stake legal ownership. Add to this a jurisprudence that grants companies the rights and protections of individuals to play, and the status of these companies interpreted to mean that in cases where there is an individual opposed to actual persons, companies, de facto privileged will. All this in turn is situate in the context of a system of public research and education institutions, which, again in accordance with neo liberal principles that have gradually expanded and now rely increasingly on corporate partnerships and the production of patented, marketable knowledge products. The whole system will then use brutal trade agreements in which intellectual property regimes of the world's greatest military and economic superpower in the world. This is the context of the life sciences.
Under neo liberalism, arrogate to themselves the forces of the market, the Government of the vitality and fertility of whole populations, which Michel Foucault conceptualized as bio power. In the United States are increasingly, pension funds and retirement plans, diet and sanitation, vaccination and antibiotics, transferred the control of birth rate and extended longevity under the primacy of property and individualized perspectives into private areas of responsibility. The advertising apparatus of both biotech research and the market economy promises access to an idealized norm of a continually improved human existence. Obtained at the level of the individual body, it is sold at the level of the mass media, and decisions for the entire population are made on the premise of its widespread availability. However, if it comes through at all, it will only be available for those who have the means to purchase it on the market.
For much of the general public GFP Bunny may have been their first contact with this kind of art. In the art world, where curators and critics are quick Institution when it comes to flags on a new island in the stream, it has produced a name: The subgenre already existed for some time in various more or less technological mediaphilic forms well before Y2K. The first exodus of artists from the landscape screen and into the natural environment occurred around the time when the planet's inhabitants to have been aware of spaceship earth, a mother ship, which itself was in need of parental responsibility. Artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer applied in the 1960s, the principles of conceptual art and minimalist art is on the box itself. Soon flourished has an entire genre, incorporating the first generation of the environmental movement, feminism and utopian perspectives of the 1970s in it. Today, contemporary art, which refers to the earthworks of a former generation, integrates new technologies. It does so in the knowledge that technology as much as anything else, the concepts of human relationship to the natural. Nothing makes this clearer than by being pushed by the biotechnologies, the meteoric rise of life sciences in the thirty-five years since the first Earth Day (Earth Day), in 1970.
In May 2004 I found myself in the situation that some FBI agents in Buffalo, New York, the artist's legitimate use of high-tech biological equipment to try to explain. I had flown to Chicago to be with my friend Steve Kurtz, a founding member of artist collective Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), the day after his wife died suddenly in her sleep. When the police arrived to investigate the death of the woman, they found a table laden with laboratory equipment. Confused by the statement that Kurtz used this equipment for his art, they called the special unit to combat terrorism (Joint Terrorism Task Force). When I arrived the next day, the FBI had also arrived to detain Kurtz and lock him out of his house, then to organize a search, which included confiscation of all his research materials including two computers, and many personal records. I was detained with my friend and questioned. It was not a new experience for me, which was trying to draw me to this type of art to account, but the fact that this time, a friend under suspicion of bioterrorism, gave it a new urgency.
The arrest turned out to be illegal and after 22 hours - after Kurtz was able to contact a lawyer on the phone - we were going. All that CAE has done in the eighteen year history has been public; much of it staged with the support of established art institutions. CAE's work is documented on their website and in a number of books published by Autonomedia Press, independent as well as in numerous articles. Nevertheless, prompted many of his colleagues, the nature and legitimacy of this kind of art to declare to the press and the public, as the U.S. Justice Department pursued a case against Kurtz.
It quickly became apparent that the case is giving us opportunities to speak publicly about the very issues that had tried to bring the artistic activities of the CAE to the public. For the previous decade, their work had focused primarily on the implications of various applications of genetic engineering. The government had confiscated the equipment of a mobile lab for testing processed food for genetically modified ingredients. The research, which they confiscated, based on a new project, which involved the diversion of resources from the field of public health, bio defense programs. Shortly after Steve Kurtz's nightmare began (it goes on, more lately), I set out to formulate not only a justification for the artists' participation in the sciences, but also a set of criteria for such endeavors. Assuming the current role of the life sciences as a driver of economic gold rush as well as given the fact that scientific advances are only a tiny part of the world's population, is in the development of criteria about the projects that are bent on to interrupt those from those developments, which ultimately reinforce them.
Is the Bio-Bio in biology the same as in the bio-power?
The explosion funded specializations in biology, particularly in the fields of genetics, bioinformatics and biotechnology, is largely a function of how the biology in the mechanisms of the doxa of our time is to fit into the neo-liberalism. As a political economic theory, neo liberalism, that individuals and society can best flourish if the government limits its function to the guarantee and protection of private property, free markets and free trade. This ideology has gained through its association with moral notions of individual freedom and human dignity of extraordinary influence; especially in the face of those they perceived enemies: the totalitarian regimes of communism and, since the end of the Cold War, Islamic fundamentalism. Promoted this way, it seems, of course, the desire for such a system for universal human too.
Using this ideology becomes legally articulated as something that a party at the expense - literally - a different one: not only real estate, material products and technological innovations, but also the basics of life, health and safety: knowledge, creativity, nutrition, sanitation, medicine, water. Consequently, we have - and certainly not only in the sciences - a transformation of the living world in an inalienable right to profit as well as unlimited opportunities to stake legal ownership. Add to this a jurisprudence that grants companies the rights and protections of individuals to play, and the status of these companies interpreted to mean that in cases where there is an individual opposed to actual persons, companies, de facto privileged will. All this in turn is situate in the context of a system of public research and education institutions, which, again in accordance with neo liberal principles that have gradually expanded and now rely increasingly on corporate partnerships and the production of patented, marketable knowledge products. The whole system will then use brutal trade agreements in which intellectual property regimes of the world's greatest military and economic superpower in the world. This is the context of the life sciences.
Under neo liberalism, arrogate to themselves the forces of the market, the Government of the vitality and fertility of whole populations, which Michel Foucault conceptualized as bio power. In the United States are increasingly, pension funds and retirement plans, diet and sanitation, vaccination and antibiotics, transferred the control of birth rate and extended longevity under the primacy of property and individualized perspectives into private areas of responsibility. The advertising apparatus of both biotech research and the market economy promises access to an idealized norm of a continually improved human existence. Obtained at the level of the individual body, it is sold at the level of the mass media, and decisions for the entire population are made on the premise of its widespread availability. However, if it comes through at all, it will only be available for those who have the means to purchase it on the market.
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