Sheer Tenacity

Timothy Druckrey


Biological and genetic metaphors haunt the discourses of computation and networks as deeply as its faux collectivities or ubiquities. Yet the logic of the biosciences is poised to instantiate itself in relation to any number of fields, from bio-computing to cloning, from genetic profiling to so-called genetic art. Little will be immune from the often solipsistic reasoning that roots progress in the life- sciences to accelerated evolution.

From the A-Life community of Chris Langton we find life described as "logical form," a phrase that Katherine Hayles decodes as insuring that "the programs qualify" in the tautology that invokes the western assumption of "form logically separated from matter." From AI we find Daniel Dennett riveted in an algorithmic rational for the "dangerous idea" of Darwin. From Richard Dawkins the transmorgrification of the gene into the meme. These idealizations come from the technosciences as a cross between universalization and essentialism, and they remind us that the rotten pathologies of the material sciences have themselves become digitized and have emerged as rotten digitial pathologiesóoften stripped of their representability as they are encoded into the human genosphere. And as Evelyn Fox Keller reminds us "informationóas either metaphor or or as material (or technological) inscriptionócould not be contained."

Yvone Volkart's exhibition and symposium Tenacity: Cultural Practices in the Age of Information and Biotechnology "departs from the question, how the connections betwen art, new technologies and activist practices can be applied to resist global culturalism" by asking: "As transnational, globalized and politically engaged cultural workers, what are our possibilities to steer towards an open culture ...Is it enough to analyze and provide awareness? Is art an appropriate medium to go further.."

These questions loomed hazily too in the last year at Ars Electronica is Life Sciences conference (that was more startling for its cozy bio- corporatism than for its critical relationship with the political dimensions of the deeply troubling appropriation of the conference as a harmless gesture of good conscience masking bad faith), or the VIPER conference (that at least set some opposition between the frankly ridiculous pronouncements of Susan Blackmore, author of The Meme Machine, that "everything around here is memetic" with slightly more blunt comments by Staal Stenshile that we have ceated a culture of "less pain, but little pleasure" in the context of linking of "high tech and low tribalism."

But it seems precisely in this terrain between that the most pertinent work will be done. And the Tenacity project ventured to pose the issues in the clear, functional connection between the discourses of gender, identity, biotech, technoscience, and art. The twelve projects presented (see > http://www.thing.net/~tenacity/<) clearly need more scrutiny than can be done here, but two might serve as pointers to a willingness to break the art as conscience issue:

Natalie Jeremijenko's In Touch utilized synthesized human skin devoid of its material foundation as a signifier of a kind of destabilized membrane in which interchangibility, bio-mass production, and the still eerie presence of faux-flesh will come as the skin of an engineered future where the boundaries are not to be drawn between real and virtual but at a more disquieting level at the border between reality and its double.

Ricardo Dominguez's performance Mayan Technology for the People: A Zapatista haiku on the question of technology and the politics of intervention, posed the problem in terms of the social body rather than of the individual flesh. Invoking the still powerful "social netwar" of the Zapatistas, Dominguez exploded the assumptions of the opposition of high and low in a series of hacker deconstructions that overturned the discourse and reminded us that the population of the electronic sphere is never to be limited to Western ideologists (or imperialists!) and their veiled military tactics.

Tenacity was a modest event with an immodest proposal, that informed determination and expression can undo the fallacy that art can merely reflect. The works posed alternative as much as they represented discursive positions. As Volkart suggests in her introductory text: "without being driven by melanchloia"... we "are stronger than we think."


This review has been written for Springerin, Heft 3/00, Wien