Since the beginning of time, all artists have been working to incorporate life into their works, be it progressively more photorealistic representations of objects, people, and places or the emotionally resonant explorations of the many nuanced aspects of the human condition. But with the advent of new technologies in the late 20th and current 21st century, some artists have taken the exploration and depiction of life to new and much more literal heights. Two such artists are the the collaborative team of Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer and the bio-artist Eduardo Kac.
Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer create artificial, digital life forms in their artwork. Both have experience and formal training in biology and art, and their backgrounds in both these fields come across equally strong in the pair’s work. Many of their pieces deal with themes of natural selection and evolution and the creation of life, and as any of their pieces are interactive, it is frequently the viewer who is acting as the hand of nature (or God, depending on how you look at things) that manipulates and interacts with these artificial life forms.
A piece that incorporates all of these elements in an engaging and striking way is Life Spacies, a digital, interactive piece that simulates evolution as it would occur in nature. There are two ways that viewers can interact with Life Spacies; the first is through the internet, where people can pull up the piece’s website and send e-mails to the work itself. Once the e-mail has been received, the text is converted by the artwork’s coding into a unique “genetic code”, which in turn is used to create a digital creature. The complexity of the e-mail (presumably meaning it’s length or variety of characters) also determines the complexity of the creature.
The second way viewers can interact with Life Spacies is by being present at the gallery where the piece is being exhibited. Through the use of video capture and motion detection technology, viewers can interact with and influence the environments and creatures in the piece’s digital world as if they were actually touching them. For example, there is a great deal of virtual foliage in the piece, which the created creatures hid in. By waving their arms over these areas, viewers can flush the creatures out into the open, where they can be interacted with in a similar manner, this time making the creatures divide into perfect copies of themselves or made to mate with one another, combining their genetic codes to create yet another totally unique creature. This is how Life Spacies becomes an evolution simulator, and how it puts the viewer in a God-like position. Because the piece has no creatures pre-programmed into it, much of what this work of art looks like is determined entirely by the viewer. In fact, without audience participation both with the physical piece and trough e-mail, the piece would hardly be art at all, and it certainly wouldn’t convey what Mignonneau and Sommerer had intended.
Interestingly, if something like Life Spacies were released on the iPhone or a gaming system, the piece would likely be regarded more as a simple video game more than a work of art. Recent games like Spore have had a similar evolution-simulator premise, so without the museum context, most people might not make the connection to art at all. Sommerer and Mignonneau even created another piece, entitled Life Spacies 2, which featured additional interactions between the viewers, the creatures, and the digital world in which the latter resided. Doesn’t that sound a lot like a sequel to a video game? Sommerer and Mignonneau may have intended to ask the question “What is life?” with this piece, but the question that ultimately comes to mind is “What is art?”
While the digital creations of Mignonneau and Sommerer are certainly lifelike, nobody would argue that their work is actually alive. This is not the case with artist. Called the father of bioart, Kac makes art that incorporates (or sometimes are) living, genetically modified organisms. Between writing converting biblical scripture into morse code and transcribing it into a microbe’s DNA and contributing his own genetic material to create a new hybridized flower that is part Petunia and part Eduardo Kac. Despite employing many cutting edge technologies, Kac fervently believes that what he is doing is not science; Science, as he describes it, is about testing and hopefully proving a hypothesis in a way that others can perfectly replicate. Art is about making statements, and in the art work, replication of someone else’s work is called plagiarism.
Kac’s most famous work is undoubtedly his “GFP Bunny”, a rabbit that had a green fluorescent protein, normally found only in a particular species of jellyfish, inserted into it while it was an embryo. Under a special blue light, this rabbit, named Alba by Kac and his family, will glow a vibrant green color. Though a profound statement on the nature of art in the 21st century, “GFP Bunny” has stirred up a great deal of controversy. Many critics have claimed that Kac’s creation is unethical; the reasons for which run the gamut. Some are offended by Kac’s use of genetic technology simply for the purposes of art, believing that such powerful forces should be used only for scientific and medical purposes. Even the laboratory that created Alba ultimately refused to allow Kac to take the rabbit away from the lab permanently, referring to the creature as a “research object” that Kac had “nothing to do with”. Other opponents of the “GFP Bunny” say that the creation of a glowing rabbit is a violation of animal rights, as Alba had no choice in the unusual and artificial circumstances that lead to her creation. Still more opponents have a religious opposition to the GFP Bunny, as one such critic stated “In addition to appropriating without permission a gene that was clearly the intellectual property of the Supreme Being, the act of exploiting an innocent creature for such a nefarious end is horrific.”
In light of the criticism GFP Bunny has received, Kac’s own views on his glowing, furry work of art are very moderate and will undoubtedly put at ease some of the people who were afraid that Kac might be the Victor Frankenstein of the art world. For one thing, Kac makes it clear in an interview that works of art that are also living creatures are not to be regarded at all in the same way as inanimate art objects would. By creating a genetically modified animal, the creator suddenly has an enormous duty to see to this creatures needs and safety. As Kac himself puts it, “When you bring a life form into the world, you cannot treat that life form as you would a car or a vase or a bottle. That being is alive, and it immediately demands our responsibility”. Kac’s views are reflected in his original intentions to take Alba home with him after exhibiting her and raise her with his wife and child as a pet. The lab that produced the GFP Bunny ultimately refused to let Kac remove her from their custody, so he now flies a flag outside his home featuring the silhouette of green rabbit, showing his commitment and continuing sense of responsibility to the creature he helped bring into the world.
Despite his obviously strong feelings regarding the GFP Bunny, there is some debate over whether or not Kac and really call this work “art”. After all, the actual job of inserting the florescent protein into the embryo that would become Alba was done by scientists, not the artist himself. And prior to Alba’s creation, scientists had created genetically modified animals (some of them rabbits) for the purpose of research, so Kac cannot claim that this a brand new frontier he’s entered into which he can define however he likes. The GFP Bunny is certainly a testament to scientific progress, but can such a creation really be called art? Surprisingly, Kac says no, he does not consider Alba alone as a work of art. In fact, he does not consider his glowing rabbit alone to be “GFP Bunny”. Rather, it is the rabbit, the dialogue that it creates amongst both professionals in the fields of art, science, and philosophy and the general public, and the changing relationship between mankind and all other living beings on this Earth, which Alba is representative of, that make the completed work. In this way, GFP Bunny becomes a social experiment and social commentary, a mirror with which Kac and reflect the current state of the world we live in. Alba is the canvas, the world’s notions and opinions about genetic modification the pigment, and Kac is the painter who brings the two together.
Like Sommerer and Mignonneau, Kac’s work leaves us questioning our own definitions of art, but both do so in nearly opposite ways. Kac presents us with a single work, like his GFP Bunny, and leaves us wondering if what he is showing us is a work of art, despite being quite different from what we traditional consider art to be. Sommerer and Mignonneau on the other hand presnet us with a single work, like their Life Spacies, and leave us wondering whether numerous other things, like video games, are works of art, despite being quite different from what we traditionally consider art to be. Both artists also deal with themes of life, and interaction, using their artwork to allow people to communicate with each other in new ways. And though Sommerer and Mignonneau take unnatural elements and make them lifelike while Kac takes life and makes it unnatural, both have similar messages and ask similar questions, like what it means to be alive and how much interference from man are we willing to accept in living things other than ourselves.
Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age
Digital Currents: Art in the Electronic Age
