Earth Without People

december 1st, 2009

Alan Weisman
Earth Without People, 2005

Given the mounting toll of fouled oceans, overheated air, missing topsoil, and mass extinctions, we might sometimes wonder what our planet would be like if humans suddenly disappeared. Would Superfund sites revert to Gardens of Eden? Would the seas again fill with fish? Would our concrete cities crumble to dust from the force of tree roots, water, and weeds? How long would it take for our traces to vanish? And if we could answer such questions, would we be more in awe of the changes we have wrought, or of nature’s resilience?A good place to start searching for answers is in Korea, in the 155-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide mountainous Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, set up by the armistice ending the Korean War. Aside from rare military patrols or desperate souls fleeing North Korea, humans have barely set foot in the strip since 1953. Before that, for 5,000 years, the area was populated by rice farmers who carved the land into paddies. Today those paddies have become barely discernible, transformed into pockets of marsh, and the new occupants of these lands arrive as dazzling white squadrons of red-crowned cranes that glide over the bulrushes in perfect formation, touching down so lightly that they detonate no land mines. Next to whooping cranes, they are the rarest such birds on Earth. They winter in the DMZ alongside the endangered white-naped cranes, revered in Asia as sacred portents of peace.

If peace is ever declared, suburban Seoul, which has rolled ever northward in recent decades, is poised to invade such tantalizing real estate. On the other side, the North Koreans are building an industrial megapark. This has spurred an international coalition of scientists called the DMZ Forum to try to consecrate the area for a peace park and nature preserve. Imagine it as “a Korean Gettysburg and Yosemite rolled together,” says Harvard University biologist Edward O. Wilson, who believes that tourism revenues could trump those from agriculture or development.

As serenely natural as the DMZ now is, it would be far different if people throughout Korea suddenly disappeared. The habitat would not revert to a truly natural state until the dams that now divert rivers to slake the needs of Seoul’s more than 20 million inhabitants failed—a century or two after the humans had gone. But in the meantime, says Wilson, many creatures would flourish. Otters, Asiatic black bears, musk deer, and the nearly vanquished Amur leopard would spread into slopes reforested with young daimyo oak and bird cherry. The few Siberian tigers that still prowl the North Korean–Chinese borderlands would multiply and fan across Asia’s temperate zones. “The wild carnivores would make short work of livestock,” he says. “Few domestic animals would remain after a couple of hundred years. Dogs would go feral, but they wouldn’t last long: They’d never be able to compete.”

If people were no longer present anywhere on Earth, a worldwide shakeout would follow. From zebra mussels to fire ants to crops to kudzu, exotics would battle with natives. In time, says Wilson, all human attempts to improve on nature, such as our painstakingly bred horses, would revert to their origins. If horses survived at all, they would devolve back to Przewalski’s horse, the only true wild horse, still found in the Mongolian steppes. “The plants, crops, and animal species man has wrought by his own hand would be wiped out in a century or two,” Wilson says. In a few thousand years, “the world would mostly look as it did before humanity came along—like a wilderness.”

The new wilderness would consume cities, much as the jungle of northern Guatemala consumed the Mayan pyramids and megalopolises of overlapping city-states. From A.D. 800 to 900, a combination of drought and internecine warfare over dwindling farmland brought 2,000 years of civilization crashing down. Within 10 centuries, the jungle swallowed all.

Mayan communities alternated urban living with fields sheltered by forests, in contrast with today’s paved cities, which are more like man-made deserts. However, it wouldn’t take long for nature to undo even the likes of a New York City. Jameel Ahmad, civil engineering department chair at Cooper Union College in New York City, says repeated freezing and thawing common in months like March and November would split cement within a decade, allowing water to seep in. As it, too, froze and expanded, cracks would widen. Soon, weeds such as mustard and goosegrass would invade. With nobody to trample seedlings, New York’s prolific exotic, the Chinese ailanthus tree, would take over. Within five years, says Dennis Stevenson, senior curator at the New York Botanical Garden, ailanthus roots would heave up sidewalks and split sewers.

That would exacerbate a problem that already plagues New York—rising groundwater. There’s little soil to absorb it or vegetation to transpire it, and buildings block the sunlight that could evaporate it. With the power off, pumps that keep subways from flooding would be stilled. As water sluiced away soil beneath pavement, streets would crater.

Eric Sanderson of the Bronx Zoo Wildlife Conservation Society heads the Mannahatta Project, a virtual re-creation of pre-1609 Manhattan. He says there were 30 to 40 streams in Manhattan when the Dutch first arrived. If New Yorkers disappeared, sewers would clog, some natural watercourses would reappear, and others would form.Within 20 years, the water-soaked steel columns that support the street above the East Side’s subway tunnels would corrode and buckle, turning Lexington Avenue into a river.

New York’s architecture isn’t as flammable as San Francisco’s clapboard Victorians, but within 200 years, says Steven Clemants, vice president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, tons of leaf litter would overflow gutters as pioneer weeds gave way to colonizing native oaks and maples in city parks. A dry lightning strike, igniting decades of uncut, knee-high Central Park grass, would spread flames through town.

As lightning rods rusted away, roof fires would leap among buildings into paneled offices filled with paper. Meanwhile, native Virginia creeper and poison ivy would claw at walls covered with lichens, which thrive in the absence of air pollution. Wherever foundations failed and buildings tumbled, lime from crushed concrete would raise soil pH, inviting buckthorn and birch. Black locust and autumn olive trees would fix nitrogen, allowing more goldenrods, sunflowers, and white snakeroot to move in along with apple trees, their seeds expelled by proliferating birds. Sweet carrots would quickly devolve to their wild form, unpalatable Queen Anne’s lace, while broccoli, cabbage, brussels sprouts, and cauliflower would regress to the same unrecognizable broccoli ancestor.

Unless an earthquake strikes New York first, bridges spared yearly applications of road salt would last a few hundred years before their stays and bolts gave way (last to fall would be Hell Gate Arch, built for railroads and easily good for another thousand years). Coyotes would invade Central Park, and deer, bears, and finally wolves would follow. Ruins would echo the love song of frogs breeding in streams stocked with alewives, herring, and mussels dropped by seagulls. Missing, however, would be all fauna that have adapted to humans. The invincible cockroach, an insect that originated in the hot climes of Africa, would succumb in unheated buildings. Without garbage, rats would starve or serve as lunch for peregrine falcons and red-tailed hawks. Pigeons would genetically revert back to the rock doves from which they sprang.

It’s unclear how long animals would suffer from the urban legacy of concentrated heavy metals. Over many centuries, plants would take these up, recycle, redeposit, and gradually dilute them. The time bombs left in petroleum tanks, chemical plants, power plants, and dry-cleaning plants might poison the earth beneath them for eons. One intriguing example is the former Rocky Mountain Arsenal next to Denver International Airport. There a chemical weapons plant produced mustard and nerve gas, incendiary bombs, napalm, and after World War II, pesticides. In 1984 it was considered by the arsenal commander to be the most contaminated spot in the United States. Today it is a national wildlife refuge, home to bald eagles that feast on its prodigious prairie dog population.

However, it took more than $130 million and a lot of man-hours to drain and seal the arsenal’s lake, in which ducks once died minutes after landing and the aluminum bottoms of boats sent to fetch their carcasses rotted within a month. In a world with no one left to bury the bad stuff, decaying chemical containers would slowly expose their lethal contents. Places like the Indian Point nuclear power plant, 35 miles north of Times Square, would dump radioactivity into the Hudson long after the lights went out.

Old stone buildings in Manhattan, such as Grand Central Station or the Metropolitan Museum of Art, would outlast every modern glass box, especially with no more acid rain to pock their marble. Still, at some point thousands of years hence, the last stone walls—perhaps chunks of St. Paul’s Chapel on Wall Street, built in 1766 from Manhattan’s own hard schist—would fall. Three times in the past 100,000 years, glaciers have scraped New York clean, and they’ll do so again. The mature hardwood forest would be mowed down. On Staten Island, Fresh Kills’s four giant mounds of trash would be flattened, their vast accumulation of stubborn PVC plastic and glass ground to powder. After the ice receded, an unnatural concentration of reddish metal—remnants of wiring and plumbing—would remain buried in layers. The next toolmaker to arrive or evolve might discover it and use it, but there would be nothing to indicate who had put it there.

Before humans appeared, an oriole could fly from the Mississippi to the Atlantic and never alight on anything other than a treetop. Unbroken forest blanketed Europe from the Urals to the English Channel. The last remaining fragment of that primeval European wilderness—half a million acres of woods straddling the border between Poland and Belarus, called the Bialowieza Forest—provides another glimpse of how the world would look if we were gone. There, relic groves of huge ash and linden trees rise 138 feet above an understory of hornbeams, ferns, swamp alders, massive birches, and crockery-size fungi. Norway spruces, shaggy as Methuselah, stand even taller. Five-century-old oaks grow so immense that great spotted woodpeckers stuff whole spruce cones in their three-inch-deep bark furrows. The woods carry pygmy owl whistles, nutcracker croaks, and wolf howls. Fragrance wafts from eons of mulch.

High privilege accounts for such unbroken antiquity. During the 14th century, a Lithuanian duke declared it a royal hunting preserve. For centuries it stayed that way. Eventually, the forest was subsumed by Russia and in 1888 became the private domain of the czars. Occupying Germans took lumber and slaughtered game during World War I, but a pristine core was left intact, which in 1921 became a Polish national park. Timber pillaging resumed briefly under the Soviets, but when the Nazis invaded, nature fanatic Hermann Göring decreed the entire preserve off limits. Then, following World War II, a reportedly drunken Josef Stalin agreed one evening in Warsaw to let Poland retain two-fifths of the forest.

To realize that all of Europe once looked like this is startling. Most unexpected of all is the sight of native bison. Just 600 remain in the wild, on both sides of an impassable iron curtain erected by the Soviets in 1980 along the border to thwart escapees to Poland’s renegade Solidarity movement. Although wolves dig under it, and roe deer are believed to leap over it, the herd of the largest of Europe’s mammals remains divided, and thus its gene pool. Belarus, which has not removed its statues of Lenin, has no specific plans to dismantle the fence. Unless it does, the bison may suffer genetic degradation, leaving them vulnerable to a disease that would wipe them out.

If the bison herd withers, they would join all the other extinct megafauna that even our total disappearance could never bring back. In a glass case in his laboratory, paleoecologist Paul S. Martin at the University of Arizona keeps a lump of dried dung he found in a Grand Canyon cave, left by a sloth weighing 200 pounds. That would have made it the smallest of several North American ground sloth species present when humans first appeared on this continent. The largest was as big as an elephant and lumbered around by the thousands in the woodlands and deserts of today’s United States. What we call pristine today, Martin says, is a poor reflection of what would be here if Homo sapiens had never evolved.

“America would have three times as many species of animals over 1,000 pounds as Africa does today,” he says. An amazing megafaunal menagerie roamed the region: Giant armadillos resembling armor-plated autos; bears twice the size of grizzlies; the hoofed, herbivorous toxodon, big as a rhinoceros; and saber-toothed tigers. A dozen species of horses were here, as well as the camel-like litoptern, giant beavers, giant peccaries, woolly rhinos, mammoths, and mastodons. Climate change and imported disease may have killed them, but most paleontologists accept the theory Martin advocates: “When people got out of Africa and Asia and reached other parts of the world, all hell broke loose.” He is convinced that people were responsible for the mass extinctions because they commenced with human arrival everywhere: first, in Australia 60,000 years ago, then mainland America 13,000 years ago, followed by the Caribbean islands 6,000 years ago, and Madagascar 2,000 years ago.

Yet one place on Earth did manage to elude the intercontinental holocaust: the oceans. Dolphins and whales escaped for the simple reason that prehistoric people could not hunt enough giant marine mammals to have a major impact on the population. “At least a dozen species in the ocean Columbus sailed were bigger than his biggest ship,” says marine paleoecologist Jeremy Jackson of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “Not only mammals—the sea off Cuba was so thick with 1,000-pound green turtles that his boats practically ran aground on them.” This was a world where ships collided with schools of whales and where sharks were so abundant they would swim up rivers to prey on cattle. Reefs swarmed with 800-pound goliath grouper, not just today’s puny aquarium species. Cod could be fished from the sea in baskets. Oysters filtered all the water in Chesapeake Bay every five days. The planet’s shores teemed with millions of manatees, seals, and walrus.

Within the past century, however, humans have flattened the coral reefs on the continental shelves and scraped the sea grass beds bare; a dead zone bigger than New Jersey grows at the mouth of the Mississippi; all the world’s cod fisheries have collapsed. What Pleistocene humans did in 1,500 years to terrestrial life, modern man has done in mere decades to the oceans—“almost,” Jackson says. Despite mechanized overharvesting, satellite fish tracking, and prolonged butchery of sea mammals, the ocean is still bigger than we are. “It’s not like the land,” he says. “The great majority of sea species are badly depleted, but they still exist. If people actually went away, most could recover.”

Even if global warming or ultraviolet radiation bleaches the Great Barrier Reef to death, Jackson says, “it’s only 7,000 years old. New reefs have had to form before. It’s not like the world is a constant place.” Without people, most excess industrial carbon dioxide would dissipate within 200 years, cooling the atmosphere. With no further chlorine and bromine leaking skyward, within decades the ozone layer would replenish, and ultraviolet damage would subside. Eventually, heavy metals and toxins would flush through the system; a few intractable PCBs might take a millennium.

During that same span, every dam on Earth would silt up and spill over. Rivers would again carry nutrients seaward, where most life would be, as it was long before vertebrates crawled onto the shore. Eventually, that would happen again. The world would start over.

Originally appeared in Discover Magazine, February, 2005. Copyright © 2005 by Alan Weisman.

Present the Present

mei 4th, 2009

‘Are you present in the present to present the present?’ – Jamila Adeli, artistic director of BodhiBerlin asking independant curator Manray Hsu during a dialogue called: Can The Same Exhibition Happen Everywhere? in the framework of Rotterdam Dialogues: The Curators, March 7th 2009, Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.

Félix Gonzàlez-Torres
Untitled (Perfect Lovers), 1991

Felix Gonzales Torres

Parallel Encyclopedia

september 14th, 2008

Batia Suter
Parallel Encyclopedia
, 2007

batia-suter parallel encyclopedia

The result of a long term investigation, this voluminous encyclopaedia of Batia Suter contains solely images collected from other books, and reads as an exhilarating and extremely rich filmic sequence. Suter’s interest lies not only in the iconographic value of images and the way that the human brain processes visual information, but also the causes by which images become charged with associative values. The book is a collection of possible future histories.

Published by Roma Publications, Amsterdam (Order Here

(GENE)SIS

oktober 2nd, 2007

Steve Tomasula
(GENE)SIS, 2000

In the Beginning, God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness,” and He formed man of clay and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, punning adam, Hebrew for “man,” with adamah, “earth.” Soon afterwards, Adam, in God’s image, created language–Man’s first creation–his every utterance the birth of another word as he cried out names for the other animals in Eden. Some seven thousand generations after Adam (according to DNA theory), Eduardo Kac creates the transgenic art work Genesis, re-enacting these primal conflations of language and earth and by doing so critically reanimating the myth that is most central to the West’s conception of humankind, nature and progress.

Entering the exhibition space of Genesis, the viewer stands before a large projected image: a circular field suspended in blackness and reminiscent of astronomical photographs–a sky filled with galaxies, each composed of millions of suns–circled by how many Edens? As in those photographs, though, scale belies creation. For the God’s-eye view afforded by Kac’s Genesis comes from a micro-videocamera not a telescope, and the “galaxies” are actually bacteria in a petri dish. Each bacterial body is written in the same genetic language as our bodies, as are all bodies, even if some of them carry a gene unlike the genes of any body. That is, in Kac’s eden, some of the animals carry a synthetic gene he fashioned, not from mud, but by arranging genetic material into an order that did not exist in Eden, and today does not exist in nature.

Specifically, Kac’s genesis begins with the genetic alphabet: the chemical bases, Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine and Thymine, abbreviated as A, G, C, T. By chaining together, these chemical bases make up the rungs of the DNA molecule, the double-helix whose sequences of letters–genes–serve as both blueprint and material for the creation of life. Just as the dot-dot-dot | dash-dash-dash | dot-dot-dot of Morse Code can form a message, here an S-O-S, sequences of three genetic bases, e.g., AGC | GCT | ACC, form particular amino acids. Particular strings of amino acids form particular proteins, while particular proteins form the particular cells of particular organisms, be they a serpent, an apple, or the rib of a man. Thus each DNA molecule is both material and message, both the book and its content: a book that is its message embodied. Alter this sequence, and the new message will produce a different book: a mutation, for example, that brings into existence the larynx that allows human speech, or a Frankenfruit, as environmentalists refer to genetically engineered fruits and vegetables. Or the cells that make up the bacteria in Genesis.

While the sequence of letters that make up the “artist gene” in Genesis are artificial, though, they were not arbitrary. Significantly, they embody a sentence from the Biblical Genesis: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” To translate this natural language into the language of the cell, the AGCTs of DNA, Kac used Morse Code as an algorithm. The dots and dashes of Morse Code easily translate into the 1s and 0s used by a digital computer to represent the alphabet–information in a form that can easily be sent around the globe or across the microscopic distances within an integrated circuit. Similarly, in Genesis, information is given its physical corollary: after translating the biblical passage into the dots and dashes of Morse Code, the dots were replaced by the genetic base Cytosin (C); dashes were substituted with Thymine (T); word spaces were replaced by Adenine (A); while letter spaces replaced by Guanine (G). This unique string of AGCTs constitutes a gene that does not exist in nature, an “art gene.”

The “art gene” carrying the coded biblical passage was then combined with a protein that glows cyan when illuminated by ultraviolet light. Both protein and art gene were inserted into a species of E. coli similar to that found in the human intestinal tract but which is unable to live outside of the medium in the petri dish. Art and science are thus collapsed into one another through two characteristics of E.coli: its ability to carry DNA from unrelated organisms, and its facility for self-replication. Together they make E. coli useful as a living factory for genetically engineered products, such as insulin; they also allow it to function as a microscopic “scribe” copying out the narrative carried within the “artist gene.” These genetically engineered bacteria were then placed in a petri dish along with a strain of E. coli that will glow yellow under an ultraviolet lamp but that do not carry the Genesis gene.

Like one of the seventy scholars who first translated Genesis from Hebrew into Greek, then, Kac has translated Genesis into a new language, and like them, embodied it in a “book” that is both a product and reflection of his times. Consider the illuminated manuscript, and how its body expressed medieval culture. Its materials were all natural, its text linked to the earth by inks and pigments extracted from minerals, berries or flowers, and scratched onto sheepskin with quills from a goose. Writing the text was an act of physical as well as mental labor. The words themselves were written with no separation just as creation was thought to be a single parchment, God’s book, an uninterrupted Great Chain of Being from the lowest dregs to the celestial spheres where, as Augustine put it, “the angelic and blessed pass their nontime reading a language without syllables, a text that is unequivocal and eternal because it is the face of the Word itself.” In Eden, it was believed, God, man, and animals all spoke the same language in which words and things had the direct one-to-one correspondence Adam gave them. Or as Emerson later put it, “Every word was once an animal.” In this way, written words were natural objects: visible traces of God’s mind, as was the rest of the world, shapes that could be read for meaning just as a later age taught itself to read the history of weather in the rings of trees. Letters, words, sentences, pages merged into sacred books of mysteries serene as the primum mobile in their gilt capitals and painted illustrations, their ornaments and imposing page layouts, displayed on high altars for the adoration of the faithful.

Few of the materials of Kac’s “book” are natural–even its biological materials are highly mediated by technology. Yet this fact is barely noticeable, seeing as it has become “natural” for us to spend most of our time in artificial light, artificial heat, eating and sleeping not when we are hungry or tired but when the clock says it is time. In the dim temple-like atmosphere of a gallery, viewers are drawn closer by the beauty of Genesis, its projection of the petri dish, round as a rose window, and luminous as stained glass. A diffuse blue light reflects off lettering on walls that complete what can be thought of as a triptych: on the right-hand panel are the words extracted from the biblical text, “Let man have dominion over every living thing.” The left-hand panel displays its genetic translation–the string of AGCTs used to encode the biblical passage in the bacteria, printed out in a computer’s block letters without separation just as genes are found before mapping reveals the mystery of their identity and function. The gallery space is thus transformed into a polyglot in which the same passage is presented in three languages: a natural language, a language of chemicals, and Morse Code, that first electronic language, whose first transmitted words–“What hath God wrought?”–ushered in an age of global communication. Reading this polyglot, we begin to understand how to a contemporary sensibility all the world is a text–even unto the lowest dregs commonly found in the colon–and how, like that world, Kac’s book is densely coded. Standing at a pulpit that presents the petri dish as if it were an open book, viewers/readers realize that what they have been admiring in Kac’s staging is the beauty of bacteria, the beauty of the flower in the crannied wall, that if understood, could reveal all in all.

Yet the artistry and significance of Genesis is not in Kac’s creation of aesthetic objects. Rather, its meaning unfolds as its viewers participate in the social situation he has orchestrated. Visiting Genesis at home via the Internet, or by using a computer in the gallery that is likewise networked through the Internet, viewers constitute a world-wide community able to write upon Kac’s text. By clicking their mouses, they control an ultraviolet light trained on the petri dish. When they do, the “rose window” flashes blue as if animated by a primordial spark, the bacteria glow. The bacteria carrying the text of Genesis as part of their bodies give off cyan light; those without it give off yellow. More importantly, as viewers activate the ultraviolet light they become Kac’s co-authors by accelerating the natural mutation rate of the bacteria. Some descendants retain their original color, others exchange plasmids with one another and give off color combinations, such as green, while still more lose their color. Operating the light to observe this evolution within Kac’s microcosm, the viewer realizes how impossible it is to walk in the Garden without altering it. Looking down upon this microcosm, finger on the button, it’s hard to not want to alter the bacterial garden if for no other reason than to see what will happen. Understanding that changing the bodies of the bacteria also changes the message they carry, we realize that the seduction of Genesis is also the seduction of science–word and body, art and world–all intimately linked.

No one knows the origins of Genesis–the biblical text Kac incorporates into his microcosm. For centuries it circulated in various forms along with other creation myths until it was written down, sometime in the 8th century BCE. Thus, as is said of the Odyssey and other scribal texts, the “author” was the aggregate of all the people who wove and rewove oral teachings, reworking, corrupting and embellishing the stories to fit their circumstances. This is why the inconsistencies we find in Genesis today, including two contradictory stories of creation, were of so little consequence to those first “users” that they could all be taken up and passed on together. As biblical historian Karen Armstrong writes, believers of all three monotheist religions regarded the creation of a myth in the best sense of the word: as a symbolic account which helped people to orient themselves to ontological, and theological questions as well as their present circumstances. It was only long after Genesis was written down that it began to ossify into an official doctrine believed to be factually true.

Indeed, contemporary scholars distinguish between the open text of scribal cultures, and the closed text of print cultures: that is, between the text that is continually turning into new versions of itself, and the text that has reached its final form and is thus closed to revision. In the middle ages it was common for readers to add their comments to a manuscript by writing between its lines, or in its margins, altering a text as they saw fit and passing it on as though the alterations were part of the original book. Since “original” was thought to be “that which was there since The Origin,” writing was an act of proliferation, not the “creation” of a unique utterance. Conversely, reading was the act of eliciting from a text that which had remained hidden, or unspoken. In this sense, every text was ripe with more than it said, with myths being the most open of texts, the most incomplete in that myths held the most potential meaning. Conversely, the authority of a text resided in its ability to remain fecund, to be the first word, not the last word. Midrash, the Jewish practice of scriptural explication, was (and to this day still is) the practice of incorporating all of the previous commentary into the text. The text itself was conceived of always being in need of refiguring to present circumstance. That is, the point of Midrash was not literal interpretation, but to guide people through the complexities and contradictions of their own lives, their own moment in history. The text in this sense was always being made new. And since making it new was figured as a way of life, it was obvious who had the authority to say what the text meant. It was obvious who had the responsibility to understand what it meant: Everyone.

Similarly, Kac’s Genesis opens itself up as a myth for our times in the sense of poet John Dryden’s description of translations as “transfusion,” i.e. the transfusion of new life into an old text. The thousands of people who transmitted the Biblical Genesis as oral teachings, its co-authors, finds its corollary in Kac’s co-authors: the thousands of engineers, scientists and technicians upon whom Genesis’s existence depends. Their labor offers up a vocabulary of “gene splicing,” and “interactivity,” and “nucleotide polymorphisms” without which Kac’s Genesis couldn’t be written. Incorporating the traces of this labor as layers in his own palimpsest, Kac creates an allegory of Origins, of Nature, and man’s relation to them. By enabling ordinary readers all over the globe to join in the rewriting of this text, he stresses the communal nature of allegory–how authorship itself has become communal in an age when physical diaspora is mitigated by global communication, a development anticipated by Morse Code. Indeed, at the turn of our century, the increased speed and interaction of global communication has accelerated an evolution of reading as the practice of reading between the lines, to reveal all that is unsaid. Grande Historie has become petite histoires in which the body has been the only closed book–a naturally impermeable text that could be re-read, but not re-written.

But biotechnology has opened up ever wider spaces for new authors to write between the lines, just as biotechnology revealed how the structure of E. coli bacteria would allow Kac to copy in the text of Genesis. With the sequencing of the gene, the practice of rewriting “the fish of the sea, fowl of the air and every other living thing” is becoming so common as to precipitate a shift in our conception of nature analogous to the shift in the conception of earth at the advent of the telescope. Those critics of Copernicus who refused to accept that the earth revolved around the sun, Thomas Khun wrote, were not entirely wrong. To them, “earth” meant “fixed, immovable position.” Looking through Galileo’s telescope and seeing evidence for the earth’s orbit and rotation thus entailed a semantic leap as well as a shift in perspective. The world could only change, after Galileo, to the degree that language changed. Similarly, it’s becoming easy to think of animals not as fixed “objects” in nature but as re-arrangeable packets of DNA. Over the past decade, the list of patents issued world-wide for bioengineered products is long and varied and includes the combination of cow embryos with human genes in attempts to grow human replacement parts and tomatoes with the genes of a codfish to make them less susceptible to freezing. Chickens carry the genes of the salmon while sheep receive tobacco genes, and worms, after Methuselah, have been engineered to increase their life span to the equivalent of 600 human years. Using a genetically altered bacteria (trade name “messenger”) basic crops like wheat and corn are engineered to protect themselves by killing insects.

As our garden becomes populated with more, and more extreme, varieties of transgenic plants and animals, as these techniques are increasingly applied to humans, can the Adamic conception of the self remain any more constant? Dramatic advances such as the cloning of our primate cousins receive the most attention. But it is perhaps the thousands of small steps that coalesce, like myths, into habits of mind that have the most profound effects: calls for genetic national identity cards; the permission we give on the back of our driver’s license for our bodies to become recyclable material, permission that allowed Matthew Scott to receive the hand of a cadaver by transplant, the hand that John Doe, it’s previous “owner” had used to write his name, to clasp in prayer, now taking up a new name, new prayers. Artificial skin; artificial bone. In petri dishes like the one used in Genesis, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School have been able to grow cartilaginous ears and noses. Other labs claim to have discovered genes that determine everything from shyness to rape to altruism; first steps to practical applications soon follow, such as those taken by researchers at Yale University who by manipulating a gene identified as important to memory have created a strain of super-smart mice. Once the genetic tree of knowledge is completely sequenced, won’t we begin in earnest to rewrite genes to increase longevity, manipulate skin color, personality, indeed, all the traits that make us us?–to completely throw off the original sin and destiny of biology? Considering how conceptions of the self have had profound consequences for laws, for customs–for how people order society and conduct themselves and behave toward others–can we do without springboards to meditation such as Kac’s Genesis?

When the prospect of “personal evolution,” the prospect of individuals altering the genes of their descendants became a reality, the U.S. National Bioethics Advisory Commission turned to religious traditions as one factor in formulating its recommendations on how public policy should react. Its members cited the centuries people have used these traditions to guide their own behavior in the face of a changing world. By putting a global audience in collective control of his Genesis, by making their actions impinge upon an excerpt from the Biblical Genesis, Kac puts his audience in a position to consider tradition–or its erasure–as one factor in their response to the biological course we are just beginning to navigate. The evolution in a petri dish we communally alter underscores how the use of technology is not always planned, its consequences not always foreseen, nor benign. Standing in the box formed by the walls of Genesis, it’s easy for viewers to reverse the scale and think of themselves in the position of the bacteria with ultraviolet light streaming down (possibly through a hole in the ozone layer?). We’re invited to contemplate consequences of interfering with evolution when Kac translates, at the end of the exhibit, the DNA code of his original message back into English:

LET AAN HAVE DOMINION OVER THE FISH OF THE SEA AND OVER THE FOWL OF THE AIR AND OVER EVERY LIVING THING THAT IOVES UA EON THE EARTH

The now corrupted sentence calls to mind other literatures of constraint: those texts, such as Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Million Million Poems, that have been generated out of a self-imposed rule. In Queneau’s work, a traditional fourteen-line sonnet is combined with ten other fourteen-line sonnets in such a way that any one line can be combined with the thirteen lines of any of the other sonnets. Thus, the poem as a whole allows the meaning held as a potential within the dull mass of language to emerge: a potential of 1014 sonnets, a quantity of text, as François Le Lionnais notes, “far greater than everything man has written since the invention of writing, including popular novels, business letters, diplomatic correspondence, private mail, rough drafts thrown into the wastebasket, and graffiti.” Conversely, Kac’s corruption also calls to mind literatures of non-constraint, such as Luis Borges’s hypothetical 1,000 monkeys typing on 1,000 typewriters in the hopes of producing an exact copy of Don Quixote. With over 3,000,000,000 genetic letters in the book that is the human, Genesis asks us to consider the ramifications of typos–and their transmission to future generations. Unbridled, typos cumulate into gibberish quickly, for as Alice learned in Wonder Land, even a sentence of only ten words has 3,628,800 combinations, only one or two of which will make sense. Mutating any three letter word, say APE, into another three letter word, say MAN, by randomly switching one letter at a time takes thousands of generations to hit the right combination. But if the changes are governed by the constraint that each step must make sense, then the mutation can be made in only eight steps:

APE

ARE

ARM

AIM

RIM

RAM

RAN

MAN

Thus can be seen the apparent paradox of how the application of a constraint directs rather than stifles creation: the application of a constraint allows the process to ignore all the other constraints that would take it into other directions. Before man’s intervention, “survival of the fittest” was the dominate constraint under which changes were made to the book of each organism, including humans. While gene management has resulted in hairless Chihuahuas, seedless watermelons, indeed every strain of plant and animal not seen in Eden, it is only with the advent of bio-engineering that changes could be made that skip intervening steps. As Kac’s genesis illustrates, which potential literature will be offered up from among the thousands of potentials dormant in the mud of genetic language will depend on the constraints under which change operates. So it’s instructive to note how much of both the Biblical and the artist’s Genesis is concerned with lineage. Indeed, the Hebrew innovation in regards to the creation myths that circulated among the Israelites was to use them to shape their identity as a people–an identity traced through their bodies in a direct line of descendancy to Adam and Eve who were fashioned in the likeness of God. Thus, the mother of this people was named Eve, hawwa in Hebrew, related to hay “living,” the mother of all the living to follow. Reconstruction of genetic trees estimate that this woman–not the first woman, but the last woman every person now alive on earth is descended from–lived 143,000 years ago. For 5,700 generations, then, or 120,000,000 years if we count our ancestry back to the original cells, our biological identity has been shaped one letter at a time. In Kac’s Genesis, though, we see an icon for our new-found ability to rewrite ourselves–instantly, and in ways whose ramifications might not become apparent for generations. In an age when people are increasingly looking to chromosome stains to explain the difference between Cain and Able–as well as differences in sexual orientation, intelligence, personality, and hundreds of other human traits–Kac’s Genesis reminds viewers of the wisdom in tempering change with reflection.

That is, Kac’s Genesis calls us to consider which identity we are fashioning for ourselves, for our species, for nature, by the constraints we do or do not place on the potential literature of our bodies. Will the constraint of survival be replaced by economic gain? It wasn’t until 1967 that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission ruled that blood could be bought and sold. Up until then, blood with all of its metaphorical richness was considered a gift that could be given, like life, but was too sacred to be bought and sold. Today, the world market for blood is a $19-billion business and constitutes only a small segment of a bio-trade that includes on-line auctions for human eggs and sperm (www.ronsangels.com) among other human “components,” from whole corpses to fetal “products.”

Will the only constraint placed on these new potential literatures of the body be technological progress? Can constraints not be political? Does the ability to manipulate a gene, say for one of the 5,000 diseases now known to be inherited, carry with it the responsibility to do so? Who has the authority to alter the germ line of future generations? Who has the authority to determine the fate of the tens of thousands of embryos accumulating in storage tanks, the leftovers of reproduction technologies that allow couples to select the most genetically viable embryos while abandoning the rest? Will the constraints of bio-technology be social?–preferences for skin color or hair texture? Will they be legal?–such as the legal fights over who can copyright a person’s genetic information? Kac’s Genesis asks us to consider these issues by having us revisit the language of “dominion over every living thing.” By making us his co-authors, he emphasizes how the name we give ourselves can be in the spirit of “masters” or “caretakers” of our garden, how our collective actions will be our Midrash.


References

Armstrong, Karen. A History of God: The 4,000 Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

Bruns, Gerald L. Inventions: Writing, Textuality, and Understanding in Literary History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

Cavalli-Sforza, Luigi Luca. Genes, Peoples, and Languages. New York: North Point Press, 2000.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Queneau, Raymond. One Hundred Million Million Poems. Trans. John Crombie. Paris: Kickshaws, 1983.

Originally published in Dobrila, Peter T. (ed.). Eduardo Kac: Telepresence, Biotelematics, and Transgenic Art (Maribor, Slovenia: Kibla, 2000), pp.85-96. republished in : Thurtle, Phillip and Robert Mitchell (eds.), Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information (Routledge, 2003).

Steve Tomasula is the author of the novels VAS: An Opera in Flatland (Station Hill Press) and IN & OZ (Ministry of Whimsy Press). His short fiction has appeared widely and most recently in The Iowa Review, Fiction International, and McSweeney’s. Recent criticism and essays are included in Musing the Mosaic (SUNY Press); Data Made Flesh (Routledge); Leonardo (M.I.T. Press); the New Art Examiner, and other magazines both here and in Europe. He contributes often to The Review of Contemporary Fiction, the American Book Review, Rain Taxi, and the electronic book review. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Steve Tomasula is Assistant Professor of English, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana.

The RE- generation

juli 25th, 2007

We Re-act
Re-adjust
Re-admit
Re-affirm
Re-afforest
Re-animate
Re-appear
Re-appoint
Re-arrange
Re-ascend
Re-assemble
Re-assert
Re-assume
Re-assure
Re-baptize
Re-bind
Re-birth
Re-bound
Re-build
Re-call
Re-capitulate
Re-capture
Re-cast
Re-cede
Re-charge
Re-claim
Re-clothe
Re-cognize
Re-coil
Re-collect
Re-commence
Re-commend
Re-compense
Re-compose
Re-condition
Re-conduct
Re-conquer
Re-consider
Re-construct
Re-count
Re-cover
Re-create
Re-criminate
Re-crudesce
Re-current
Re-deem
Re-descend
Re-develop
Re-distribute
Re-double
Re-draft
Re-draw
Re-dress
Re-duplicate
Re-echo
Re-edify
Re-elect
Re-eligible
Re-embark
Re-enact
Re-enter
Re-establish
Re-examine
Re-export
Re-fashion
Re-fill
Re-fine
Re-fit
Re-float
Re-form
Re-fresh
Re-fuel
Re-fund
Re-furbish
Re-generate
Re-group
Re-habilitate
Re-house
Re-import
Re-incarnate
Re-inforce
Re-insert
Re-instate
Re-insure
Re-introduce
Re-invent
Re-invest
Re-issue
Re-iterate
Re-join
Re-juvenate
Re-kindle
Re-lapse
Re-lax
Re-lay
Re-lease
Re-legate
Re-light
Re-live
Re-make
Re-mark
Re-marry
Re-member
Re-mind
Re-miss
Re-model
Re-mould
Re-move
Re-name
Re-nascence
Re-new
Re-occupy
Re-open
Re-organize
Re-pass
Re-pay
Re-peal
Re-people
Re-percussion
Re-petition
Re-place
Re-plant
Re-plenish
Re-polish
Re-populate
Re-pose
Re-possess
Re-pot
Re-present
Re-press
Re-print
Re-produce
Re-prove
Re-publish
Re-pulse
Re-purchase
Re-sale
Re-search
Re-seat
Re-seize
Re-sell
Re-serve
Re-set
Re-settle
Re-ship
Re-shuffle
Re-sign
Re-solution
Re-solve
Re-sort
Re-sound
Re-source
Re-strain
Re-strict
Re-surgent
Re-surrect
Re-survey
Re-tell
Re-tire
Re-touch
Re-trace
Re-tract
Re-treat
Re-turn
Re-unite
Re-use
Re-value
Re-vision
Re-view
Re-vote
Re-wind
Re-write

Ontological Internet

april 13th, 2007

internet ontology

A representation of the internet
(Credit: Bill Cheswick, Lumeta Corp.)

In both computer science and information science, an ontology is a data model that represents a domain and is used to reason about the objects in that domain and the relations between them. Ontologies are used in artificial intelligence, the semantic web, software engineering and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it.

The term ontology has its origin in philosophy, where it is the name of a fundamental branch of metaphysics concerned with existence. According to Tom Gruber at Stanford University, the meaning of ontology in the context of computer science, however, is “a description of the concepts and relationships that can exist for an agent or a community of agents.” He goes on to specify that an ontology is generally written, “as a set of definitions of formal vocabulary.”

swoogle

Swoogle is a search engine for the Semantic Web on the Web. Swoogle crawl the World Wide Web for a special class of web documents called Semantic Web documents, which are written in RDF (Resource Description Framework). Swoogle is a research project being carried out by the ebiquity research group in the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).