8 isotope 7.

2 | fall/winter 2009
On a dark November evening a few years
back, ve artists and a dog walked along an otherwise
deserted street in upstate New York. They stopped in front
of an ordinary brick building and led through the door.
Inside, a bare room smelled of sawdust. Construction tools
lay scattered about the oor, intermingled with a Raggedy
Ann doll, a loudspeaker and a Viking hat. An artist with a
shaggy blonde beard gestured to a corner at the back of the
room. Thats where I want to put the tanks of uorescent
zebrash, he told me. And maybe uorescent rats, if we can
get them.
This was Richard Pell, a man in the process of building
a public biology laboratory on the rst oor of the building
in which he lived. His idea was to create a studio and gallery
for genetically engineered artworksas he put it, a natural
history museum thats not natural. It would be called the
Center for BioMedia.
Pell was new to this kind of thing, but he had brought
along someone who wasnt. Oron Catts, an angular gure with
a dark goatee, stood quietly assessing the space. Catts was the
Finnish-born, Israeli-raised artistic director of a laboratory
at the University of Western Australia. Since 2000, he had
run a program called SymbioticA, offering graduate degrees
in biological arts. He had recently taught students how to
grow living sculptures out of cloned tissue cells.
Only by killing those sculptures did we realize they
were alive, he told me, speaking quickly, in staccato, with
an accent as complex as his pedigree. The dog strained at her
leash, snifng his heels.
The idea of manipulating life in the name of aesthetics is
nothing new, but in recent years, this brand of work, known as
bioart, has been growing rapidly in popularity and ambition.
The photographer Edward Steichen is often credited with the
rst work of genetically altered art. In 1936, he exhibited
a series of giant, mutant delphiniumsowers produced
through chemical manipulation and selective breedingat
the Museum of Modern Art. Subsequently, plant life crept
into contemporary art, leading to fantastical, hybridized
irises, cloned trees, photosynthetic portraits and prayer plants
conducting very, very slow orchestras.
Engineering higher forms of life for artistic purposes
namely, bacteria or tissue cells or even animalshas proven a
more complicated endeavor. It is one thing, after all, to ddle
with greenery and quite another to sculpt esh. Nevertheless,
the breed of artist who in the 20
th
century worked primarily
with silicon and circuits is now being lured by the romantic
possibilities of genetics. Increasingly, like scientists themselves,
such artists are seeing the stuff of life as creative, malleable
material with limitless applications.
Pell, who is 34, migrated from robotics to cells when he
discovered synthetic biologya eld that breaks organisms
down to a series of parts, like living Legos that can be
assembled into genetic systems. In one of the earliest such
experiments, scientists produced bacteria that blinked on and
off like Christmas lights. The eld ultimately aspires to create
living machines capable of detecting toxins in the environment,
scouring our bloodstreams for cancer or exploring space.
Artists have the ability to cross disciplines willy-
nilly, Pell explained one morning that fall near the campus
of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he was then an
assistant professor. You can curate a series of organisms
and explore an issue from that vantage point, he said. On
a napkin, he began sketching a new tree of lifea common
base point fanning out into lines representing the great
variety of earths species. At the top of the tree, horizontal
dashes connected distant branches, standing for the many
transgenic organisms created in labs: zebrash and rats, for
example, carrying a jellysh gene for uorescence. Both
animals are available online, the rats for biology labs, the
zebrash as pets. When placed under ultraviolet light, they
glow green.
In the wet-lab at the Center for BioMedia, Pell said he
would restrict himself to engineering unicellular organisms
the Escherichia coli that live in your gut, for example, or the
Serratia marcescens that cause your showers grout to turn
pink. For the time being, he planned to replicate experiments
already hashed out by scientists in biology labs, inserting
genes into bacteria to make them do something different: glow
bright colors, perhaps, or smell like bananas. Eventually, he
wanted to design new systems himself. He envisioned reading
by a light bulb made of bacteria producing luciferasethe
protein responsible for the lightening bugs twinkle.
Bioart is often ludicrous. It can be lumpy,
gross, unsanitary, sometimes invisible, and tricky to keep still
on the auction block. But at the same time, it does something
very traditional that art is supposed to do: draw attention to
the beautiful and grotesque details of nature that we might
otherwise never see.
In recent years, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institutewhich
sits atop a steep hill in Troy, a quiet town set on the Hudson
Riverhas grown into an academic center for bioart. The
university began offering one of the rst undergraduate
classes in the subject in 2002. For one assignment, a student
grafted human scab cells onto a tear in a leaf and watched as
they repaired the wound.
The course was taught by an artist named Adam Zaretsky,
who before coming to Rensselaer, had spent two years at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he discovered
the Humperdinck Effect. Playing lounge music for 48 hours
to E. colispecically, Engelbert Humperdincks Greatest
Hitsseemed to increase their production of antibiotics.
The Art is Alive!
Emily Voigt
2009 fall/winter | 7.2 isotope 9
The effect likely results from the musics vibrations, which
scientists concede could jiggle the cells and speed up their
internal reactions.
Zaretsky is a boxy gure in his early 40s with brown
hair swept this way and that. When Pell rst introduced us, he
was wearing an ill-tting tweed blazer pulled over a second
ill-tting tweed blazer pulled over a light blue, button-down
shirt printed with dragonies. His cotton slacks were torn off
mid-calf, their raggedy dark threads intermingling with his
leg hairs. He had on multi-colored, striped socks and black
dress shoes cast entirely in rubber.
Over lunch at a Turkish restaurant, he began talking
about his most recent undertaking: a full-length feature on
organic farming, sadomasochism and biotechnology. Its
about biotech organic fetish, he explained. Its an organic
farm where it seems like all the farm workers are either
wearing fetish gear or dressed in drag. In the barn, theres a
laboratory.
Im suddenly relieved I didnt show up for shooting,
said Pell.
We wouldve put you in one of the chicken coops right
away, Zaretsky assured him. We kind of did some research
in the midst of it all. We mutagenized chicken embryos and
sold them in public at the ea market. That was a weird day.
He explained how he had injected organic compounds
like ginseng and St. Johns Wort into the air sacks of ve-
day-old incubated chicken embryos. People could choose
what they wanted to inject and then buy the egg for a dollar.
Zaretsky instructed them to keep it warm, by taping it to their
bodies or tucking it between their breasts for about a week.
None of the eggs actually hatched, Zaretsky said. Then
he thought for a moment and added that it was possible that an
egg had hatched, and he just hadnt heard about it, since the
process of egg distribution was rather informal.
Chances are nothing happened, but other than that,
chances are something horrible happened, he said, conceding
that most random mutations are bad. I think theres sort of
a pushing of art into the realm of what science is allowed
to do. He sees this as an opportunity to educate the public
about scientic methods practiced everyday in labs. If his
experiments cause harm, he claims, they are also introducing
important questions into the public consciousness.
Zaretsky took a bite of a chicken kabob. I had a fear
of labs and biotechnology, and what I decided to do was go
and be in a lab and see what it was about, he explained as he
chewed. Im pretty aware of how weve been fucking up the
environment. I dont think we know what were doing with
new organisms.
At MIT, Zaretsky tried to make a two-headed sh by
slicing the head off one embryo and attaching it to another. He
was unsuccessful. (They said it would be sticky, he sighs.
It wasnt so sticky.) Later, he traveled to San Francisco
State University where one of his students caused an uproar
by accidentally releasing mutant Antennapedic Drosophila
fruit ies with legs in place of antennaeinside the art
department.
Now Zaretsky is talking about creating a frog with a third
eye. He told me he had recently visited a scientist at Rockefeller
University who was tweaking the gene that determines the
distance between frogs eyes in order to generate a third eye
on the backs of their heads. Hes utterly convinced hes
going to help people, Zaretsky said. Hes like, Im helping
blind children. And Im like, Youre growing eyes on the
back of frogs heads. And hes like, No, Im helping blind
children. And Im like, The frogs have eyes on the backs of
their heads.
Zaretsky admitted that his own desire to engineer such a
frog was morally confusing. My art is ethically suspect, he
said cheerfully. My friend sat down with me and said, Well,
you know, you say youre critiquing it and then youre actually
doing it. And I was like, You might be kind of right.
He recalled a bad experience he had killing an eel, during
a stint at SymbioticA, by trying to cut off its head. It was much
harder than he had expected, and he botched the job. He cooked
the eel for dinner, but harvested its brain and its anus for his art.
Later, he made a Brainus, brain tissue in the shape of an anus,
and an Analolly, a lollypop made of anal tissue. He invited the
public to decide which they would rather lick and why.
The essence of wet-lab artwork is that your hands are
wet, but in the context of biology your hands are wet with
blood, said Zaretsky, pushing aside his empty plate. I
mean, the lives of the organisms that you use as a vehicle of
expression are on your hands.
Pell, who had heard this story before, groaned during
Zaretskys recounting of his struggle with the eel.
Hey, I saw you pummel a chicken embryo! cried
Zaretsky, adding gravely, You could see its beating heart.
Just a few years back, when Pell himself was a graduate
student at Rensselaer, he took Zaretskys bioart class. He killed
the chicken embryo for an assignment, rationalizing that he
eats chicken anyway, but he looked uncomfortable recalling
the incident. Later, Pell said that he was not really into the class.
He is attracted to a different notion of bioart than Zaretsky
something subtler and less shocking in its realization, though
perhaps equally fantastical in its implications.
Its still all very new to me, Pell explained.
Zaretsky dabbed at the corners of his mouth. Im kind of
into the ethics of this, but Im also interested in whats possible,
he said. Id like to eventually work with humans. Secretly I
already think its going on. He looked at Pell, who was rolling
his eyes, and added, Rich and I argue about this.
Bio-artists frequently object to being
lumped together within a single movement. They point out
that they aspire to artworks as distinct as a glowing bacterium
versus a frog with a third eye. Moreover, their philosophical
differences run deep: Some see their work celebrating
scienceeven contributing to itwhile others are critiquing a
technological dystopia. For these reasons, artists working with
biological materials often object to the very word bioart.
The term was rst popularized by the Brazilian artist
Educardo Kac, under whom Zaretsky studied at the Art
Institute of Chicago. In 2000, Kac, whose previous work
had included implanting a microchip into his leg, traveled to
France and arranged to visit a laboratory producing genetically
engineered rabbits. He posed for a picture holding an albino
10 isotope 7.2 | fall/winter 2009
female carrying a gene for green uorescent protein, or GFP.
Since the photograph was not taken under ultraviolet light,
the rabbit looked normal: white and uffy with oppy ears
and red eyes.
I will never forget the moment when I rst held her in
my arms, Kac writes in an homage to the work he calls GFP
Bunny. She immediately awoke in me a strong and urgent
sense of responsibility for her well-being. Kac later claimed
he had commissioned the rabbit for an installation piece at a
gallery in Avignon. But the night before the exhibition, the
labs director recanted on the arrangement, refusing to release
the animal. It now seems apparent that Kac did not so much
commission the rabbit as ask to borrow her. Nevertheless,
the artist launched a protest, claiming GFP Bunny had been
created at his behest and lobbying to bring her back to Illinois
to live happily-ever-after with his family.
He released a picture of a brilliant green rabbit, which
circulated the Internet and later appeared in The New York
Times. Despite the fact that the gene for uorescence is not
expressed in hair or fur, every inch of the animal was glowing
brightly. Skeptics pointed out that the photograph looked as
though someone had colored it in with a highlighter. Kac
christened the rabbit Albaa name selected by his ve-year-
old daughter in the suburbs of Chicago.
Its very contested precisely why Alba was created,
says Lynda Birke, a biologist at the University of Chester
in England who, in response to GFP Bunny, published an
academic paper condemning the genetic engineering of
sentient beings for the sake of aesthetics.
I dont care what people do in art as long as they arent
cruel. If they want to go sling mud at something, its ne with
me, Birke adds, explaining that she does not object to all
forms of bioart. My only boundary is when it transgresses a
line of potential suffering. And I dont mean only something
that causes suffering in one particular animalbut anything
that creates attitude changes that could lead to suffering for
animals in the future.
The public response to Alba was a muddle of bemuse-
ment and delight, horror and indignation. Some pronounced
the rabbit a frivolous, Frankensteinian creation. Others
wanted her released immediately from a life of imprisonment
in the French laboratory. Above all, critics pointed out that
Kac had not actually created the animal in the way that artists
typically create their work. Even if the rabbit had in fact been
commissioned as a work of art, there is no question that she
was actually produced by scientists.
Whether bio-artists work with the tools of science
themselves or request parts ready-made, they generally rely
on collaborative relationships within the scientic community.
Increasingly, however, some are growing frustrated by the
limitations of such a system of patronage. Like Pell, they are
seeking to do the messy Petri dish work themselves.
SymbioticA offers workshops on how to build a home lab
for no more than the cost of a laptop. Participants are taught
how to craft air ltration devices out of spare vacuum parts
and assemble a sterile hood for less than $50. They receive a
crash-course in DNA extraction, genetic engineering, selective
breeding and basic tissue culturing techniques.
There are of course risks associated with an improvisa-
tional, do-it-yourself biology lab. Even when working with
innocuous materials, an artist faces the perils of public per-
ception: Someone is bound to inquire about the Petri dishes
in the living room. In 2004, the strange, sad case of an artist
named Steven Kurtz illustrated just how badly such a set-up
may go wrong.

In early May of that year, Kurtz, a pro-
fessor of art at the State University of New York, Buffalo,
Hydrodamalis gigas (giant water-heifer)
Robert Aquinas McNally
Commander Islands, western Bering Sea, mid 18
th
century
Wading, he stroked bark-like backs as the beasts
grazed sea-lettuce, toothless relics as big
as bull elephants, lost in this distant
seas last dark corner. Listen as Steller
did: over surf pulse and gull cries, sea cows
pufng, blowing, snorting, sighing. Shipwrecked,
he spent the winter recording their old
ways, bulbous bodies, small padded forelimbs
to pull them along in endless shoreward
feeding, half-submerged. Their meat, he wrote, was
like veal, the fat sweet almonds. This news drew
trappers who butchered them down to the last
in just twenty-seven years. Listen
again. Hear that? Surf, gulls, and then nothing.
2009 fall/winter | 7.2 isotope 11
awoke one morning to nd that his wife of 20 years was not
breathing. He called 911. The paramedics who responded
found that Hope Kurtz, at 45, was already dead.
They also noticed something unexpected: a makeshift
biology laboratory, complete with an incubator, centrifuge, and
bacterial cultures, on the second oor of the Kurtzs Victorian
home. Books on biological warfare lined the shelves. To make
matters worse, Kurtz, who tended towards insomnia, kept his
bedroom windows covered in tin foil to block out the light.
The paramedics alerted the Buffalo police who called
the FBI. The following morning, Kurtz was detained for
questioning. His house was roped off, his cat was locked in
the attic, and he was not allowed to return home, or retrieve
his wifes body, for a week.
An autopsy ultimately determined that Hope had died
naturally of heart failure. The New York Commissioner of
Public Health announced that none of the materials found in
the Kurtzs home constituted a hazard. And a quick search
turned up a long list of international exhibitions documenting
the Kurtzs work as part of the Critical Art Ensemblea
small group of artists known for staging performances, such
as inviting viewers to open Petri dishes of E. coli infused with
human DNA. (When the New Museum of Contemporary Art
in New York showed this work, participants were required to
sign a release form.)
Despite this history, after Hopes death, the Justice
Department sought to charge Kurtz with the illegal possession
of biological weapons under the Patriot Act. A federal Grand
Jury eventually settled on indictments of mail and wire
fraudmild-sounding charges but punishable with up to two
decades in prison. Ultimately, Kurtz would endure four years
of grueling legal battles before the charges were dismissed.
In the midst of these travails, the Whitney Museum of
American Art invited him to display a work called Marching
Plague in its prestigious Biennial exhibition. For the piece,
Kurtz traveled to a Scottish island and recreated a mid-century
British military experiment. He loaded a barge with guinea
pigs, sailed one mile away on a boat, and then sprayed Bacillus
subtillisa harmless bacterium used as a stand-in for bubonic
plaguein the general direction of the barge. According to
Kurtz, none of the guinea pigs were harmedthough in the
video, they dont exactly look thrilled to be participating.
Intended to illustrate the ineffectuality of biological weaponry,
the work included both a documentary and display of Petri
dishes. The Whitney, however, did not care to have B. subtillis
in the building and asked only for the lm.
In America, theres a tremendous fear, especially when
there are lawyers in the room, explains Kurtz. Youre
setting yourself up for a frivolous lawsuit. Youre going to
have someone wake up the next day with the u and say, It
was that bacteria exhibition!
How exactly to display living art for
public viewing is a problem. Sometimes works are dried.
(This is how Zaretsky, for example, managed to take home
the Brainus and the Analolly, now stuck to his fridge.) But the
desire to exhibit art in a living statea shriveled, dime-sized
mass of cells cannot compare, after all, to a living Brainus
has left curators struggling with a tangle of health codes and
sustenance issues quite foreign to their line of work.
The rst major exhibition of bioart in New York, Paradise
Now, was held in 2000 at Exit Art, a gallery on an industrial
corner in Hells Kitchen. A handful of works included living
parts, such as Eduardo Kacs Genesisfor which the artist
translated a Biblical line into bacterial DNA: Let man have
dominion over the sh of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,
and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.
Jodi Handel, a prim woman with shoulder-length red
hair, was the shows in-house curator. Her job temporarily
involved installing gender-selected semen in two cryogenic
sperm banks, one pink, one blue. We had to wear gloves,
she recalled. It was really nothing. Handel explained that
the gallery had a history of displaying avant-garde art, which
a few times had integrated living entities. In the mid-80s,
she pointed out, we had an anaconda here.
Still, the Exit Art archivesshelves of neatly led
notes, emails and invoicesoffer a glimpse of some of the
incongruities with which a gallery must grapple in staging
such a show:
I just realized we never sent you the bacteriais
that something you still want? If so, how do we
send it? If not, how do we dispose of it?
We do need to know if we can get the clone
paintings and where you stand with the gummy
bears.
Every 2 days please drop in 1 ice cube Frog Food
Mix per tank.
4/25: Sperm-bank material received. To be re-
viewed. Marvin to talk to Jeanette RE sperm
donation space (cant use mens bathroom because
of legalities).
The transgenic potato and tomato are to be
encapsulated in sealed cylinders and secured to the
blackboard. Guards are to be present at all times
to ensure that the samples are not tampered with.
The area where the display is should be locked after
exhibit hours. This authorization is valid until Nov.
1, 2000, at which time the transgenic potato and
tomato are to be returned to Dr. Kirks laboratory
and disposed of by autoclaving.
I have to say we didnt do a lot of research, said Handel,
pointing out that Kacs bacteria were kept in the refrigerator
with staff lunches. She recalled how the transgenic potato
and tomato eventually rotted and were thrown out with the
trash. With everything thats happened with Steve Kurtz,
wed probably have to be a lot more careful in the future,
she said.

In 1982nearly 20 years before Paradise
Now or the founding of SymbioticA or the loosing of Alba,
the green and glowing bunny, upon the worlda young man
with long hair and a dark bushy beard arrived in Cambridge,
12 isotope 7.2 | fall/winter 2009
Massachusetts, on an overnight train from Mississippi. The
visitors left pant leg was rolled high and tucked into a leather
cuff atop a mahogany peg leg. He shufed into MITs Center
for Advanced Visual Studies and found the ofce of Otto
Piene, the institutes director. Im here to meet with Mr.
Piene, he told the administrator.
The woman protested. As she had said on the phone, the
director did not wish to meet. Besides, it was a particularly
bad day to have come; an important event was taking place
that afternoon. The man insisted, saying that he only needed
a very brief audience.
Look, if you dont leave, Im going to call the police,
said the administrator.
The mans eyes narrowed; they were wide-set and brown,
the irises ringed with a thin line of blue. He stepped towards
the desk and picked up a handful of papers. Im going to
have my three minutes, he said. Or theyre going to have
something to arrest me for.
The woman scurried off, and momentarily, Piene ap-
peared in the doorway. I hear you have been very persistent,
Mr. Davis, he said.

For the past 27 years, since the day he
rst appeared at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, Joe
Davis has been a resident artist at MIT. Since 1992, he has been
embedded in the laboratory of Alexander Richthe renowned
biologist, now in his eighties, famous for having discovered
a bizarre form of DNA that spirals to the left rather than the
right. Though the position is unpaid, it gives Davis access to
state-of-the-art equipment with which to produce his work.
Davis is now in his late fties. Gray hair encircles his
scalp and sprouts in a scruff from his chin. The angles of his
face are severe: his nose sharp, his lips thin, and his eyebrows
high and arched. The week before Christmas, he drove through
Cambridge in a peeling red car that had cost him a dollar. He
was smoking a cigarette, which he had rolled himself out of
loose tobacco and sealed with his tongue.
All the genetic manipulations in history had been to
make some kind of grotesque change in phenotype, he had
explained a few days earlier on the phone, referring to the way
a gene is manifested in a physical organism. I didnt want
green rabbits or purple dogs. I wanted a change in genotype,
not phenotype. In other words, he was interested in ddling
with the reams of silent, junk DNAthe tossed-out relics of
our evolutionary pastthat comprise over 90 percent of an
organisms genetic code.
Inside MITs biology building, Davis wove through
a series of laboratories crammed with the sterile clutter of
scientic practice. He passed a warm room, a freezer and a
solitary post-doc bent over a microscope, before stopping
abruptly in front of a large white refrigerator. He opened the
door and plucked a small, clear tube from a tray, holding it up
to the light. Microvenus! he whispered, squinting up at what
is surely the rst genetically engineered artwork ever made.
The unexceptional container held pure DNAa string of
28 nucleotideswhich Davis had synthesized himself in the
mid-80s. The sequence is encoded with a line drawing, like
an upside-down chickens foot, meant to evoke the external
female genitalia. Coincidentally, the symbol is also an ancient
Germanic rune meaning life. In 1986, Davis rst inserted the
sequence into E. coli, watching as the bacteria reproduced
billions of times, each organism containing its own silent
replica of the coded image.
How this artwork came to exist is a story that extends
from the backwoods of Mississippiwhere Davis grew up
as one of seven siblings, the son of a scientistinto the far
reaches of outer space. Early in the tale, Davis was expelled
from four high schools and two colleges, taking a job at
an aluminum extrusion plant. In his spare time, he made
sculptures, abstract assemblages of automobile parts, which
he says the local city hall threatened to dump into the Gulf of
Mexico to create nesting houses for sh.
Around this time, Davis became xated on the idea
of producing a celestial artwork. He submitted proposal
after proposal to NASAs Getaway Special program,
which provides scientists with the opportunity to y small
experiments aboard its space shuttles. Improbably, after seven
years of his prodding, NASA accepted one of Daviss ideas: a
100,000-watt electron gun designed to be set off in the earths
magnetosphere, creating an articial aurora.
At 30, Davis lost his leg: I kissed an alligator, he says, and
no more. Then the Challenger exploded, NASA adopted more
stringent safety guidelines, and Daviss funding fell through;
his plans for an electron gun were abandoned. By this time,
however, he was at MIT and had grown enamored of another
astronomical pursuit: the search for extraterrestrial life.
Davis noticed that the handful of attempts made by
scientists to communicate with aliens had omitted any
reference to how we reproduce. Pioneer 10 and 11 were
stocked with diagrams of Barbie dolls rather than women. He
set out to issue a correction.
In a giant wooden pod of his own construction, Davis
proceeded to record the vaginal contractions of volunteers and
translate them into radio signals, which he broadcast to four
neighboring star systems from a giant radar at MIT. He called
the work Poetica Vaginal and transmitted a 20-minute broadcast
before the Air Force phoned to put an end to the operation.
Some time thereafter, Davis went out for a drink with
his friend Dana Boyd, a microbiologist at Harvard Medical
School, who had provided parts for the Vaginal Recording
Device. The two men ordered Guinness and began to
contemplate the number of bacterial spores you could t in
a one-pint glass, which they calculated to be greater than
the number of stars in the universe. They talked about the
high capacity for information storage contained within the
bacterial genomethose long stretches of unexpressed DNA.
And it occurred to them that E. coli are capable of enduring
the harshest of environmental conditions, extreme cold and
dehydration. Davis slammed down his st, upsetting his beer.
We have to make it into an organism! he cried.
His idea was to encode the censored image of female
anatomy into DNA, using the nucleotides, GTAC, like the
zeros and ones in a computer script, and then to infect the
cosmos with bacteria carrying this hidden message. Eventually,
Boyd helped him synthesize the DNA at Harvard, where they
inserted the genetic material into E. coli. Galleries proved too
2009 fall/winter | 7.2 isotope 13
squeamish to exhibit Microvenus, and the bacteria remained,
vacuum-dried, in a freezer in MITs biology building until
2000, when Ars Electronicaan avant garde art festival in
Linz, Austriainvited Davis to exhibit the work. He traveled
to Europe to reproduce the organism from scratch.
In reality, Microvenus, on view behind glass in Linz,
looked like blue and white splotches on agar platesno
different to the naked eye than bacteria not encoded with an
upside-down chickens foot. Though it was never Daviss
intention to change the organisms physical appearance, the
new gene did seem to make the bacteria a bit uncomfortable.
They elongated a little, he explains, which is a sign that
they dont like something.
An African Xenopusan aquatic frog
prized in laboratories for the large size of its reproductive
cellssquats on the oor of a tank in the foyer of Daviss
apartment in Cambridge. Its bottom feet are large and webbed;
its tiny hands have eight perfectly formed amphibian ngers.
At feeding time, it leaps toward each oating pellet, sinking
back onto its hind legs and clutching the food to its mouth like
a squirrel nibbling on a nut. At night, when the house is dark
and still, the Xenopus begins to singa high, sweet chirping
soundmercifully oblivious to its owners creation, a few
years back, of a ying machine powered by disembodied
frogs legs.
Down the hall from the tank is a room the size of a large
closet. Red and blue bottles with neatly printed labels (res-
ins, brass ttings, alchemy) are crammed onto wooden
shelves. A homemade loft bed abuts one wall, lined with
asks containing hundreds of jittery white-eyed fruit ies, jars
of magnetic bacteria and a small container holding a leech
from a local pond. There are also a couple of centrifuges, a
frequency generator, a vortexer and a DNA amplier, which
reads Property of MIT, though Davis points out it was a
gift.
Even after so many years at the uni-
versity, Davis worries about losing access
to his workspace. Because his income is
derived from a hodge-podge of speaking
honoraria and sculpture sales, his nancial
circumstances are often dire. He has resort-
ed, in the past, to living in his car.
I have to explore how I can do stuff
outside the lab safely and legally, he said,
after returning from the biology building
and settling into a chair, his peg leg
crossed over his knee. He picked up a jar
of fruit ies and shook it gently. Ah, my
Heraclitus ies, he murmured.
A few years ago, Davis isolated the
strains gene for white eyes and encoded it
with a line of text by the Greek philosopher
Heraclitus, whose On Nature was praised
by his contemporaries as the greatest book
of his age. A mere 11-page fragment of the
work survives, which Davis intended to
preserve in a place where it would be safe
from yellowing and oxidation, ruthlessly conserved by nature.
He never got around to putting the gene back into a y. But
had he done so, it has been suggested that art, by mistake,
could have blinded itselfa contention that infuriates Davis
despite the elegance of its Oedipal reverberations.

The following morning, Davis drove to
Mount Auburn Cemetery, a 19
th
-century parkland situated on
a hill above Cambridge. Initially, he had intended to collect
organisms from one of the graveyards man-made ponds.
But he had been out past 1 a.m. the previous night, drinking
Guinness with Dana Boyd, now a white-haired, respectable-
looking scientist, at the same local bar where the two rst
stumbled on the idea for Microvenus. At one point in the
evening, Davis had removed his peg leg and tooted it, along
with the band, like a horn.
At noon, his eyes were still heavy, and his voice was
gruff. The day proved to be cold and windynot ideal for
collecting. And nally, he discovered he had forgotten to
bring his sterile mason jars. So he drove in silence along
the winding cemetery roads, the cars engine sputtering, the
gas level nearing empty. He slowed to admire some of the
monuments.
This stone carving was done when it was still a masters
art, he said. There are no stone carvers who can do this
anymore. Maybe in Italy. After a moment, he smiled. Well,
its nothing so dramatic as what I do with cells.
Every so often, he stopped and got out to scrape chunks
of amber sap from the trees. At one point, he left the car behind
and strode down towards one of the larger pools, pausing on
the grassy slope to point out the grave of B.F. Skinner. The
Harvard behavioral psychologists name is immortalized by
the Skinner Box, a sort of experimental cage for laboratory
animals, replete with levers yielding rewards. Adam Zaretsky,
for the rst two years of his life, slept in a variation of this
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14 isotope 7.2 | fall/winter 2009

contraption called an air-criba sort of plastic-coated
incubator in which an infant may lie naked, urinate freely and
move about without constraint. His father, a devout Skinnerian
and psychology student at the time, trained him to retrieve
colored yarns by rewarding him with M&Ms; Zaretsky could
identify puce and ecru before he could speak. It was fun for
him, recalls his father, who also studied pigeons and rats. It
was a term paper for me!
When Zaretsky graduated from the Chicago Institute of
Art, he wrote Davis, asking to come study with him. Davis
obliged, arranging a two-year, unpaid appointment in a nearby
laboratory. The two artists worked together. For some time,
they even shared an apartment.
Watch out, said Davis, as he reached the waters edge.
This is where the leech comes from. I used to collect without
wearing gloves, and theyd try to crawl up my ngertips.
He had hoped to bottle Magnetospirillum magnetotacti-
cuma naturally occurring magnetic bacteria, which he is
attempting to use as a semi-conductor in a functional radio.
He looked around for a pair of herons or a turtle, but the pond
was still and empty.
Eventually, there was a falling out between Davis and
Zartesky. Davis says he objects to Zaretskys sensationalisma
characteristic he sees in much of the bioart movement. For
his part, Zaretsky admits he was not a good follower. Were
gruff but respectful, he says, adding that while he admires
Davis, he sees his work as uncritically pro-science. Im not
a technophobe, but there are certain things I worry about
nonetheless, Zaretsky explains. We have a really ckle
culture. Im mostly worried about eugenics and uncontained
mutants doing strange things to the environment. At the
same time, he says he understands, for example, what an
AIDS vaccine would mean for the world and he doesnt think
an artist is going to make it by mistake.
A few years ago, a man in Minneapolis saw Davis on
television demonstrating a shing apparatus he had designed
to catch microbes in a drop of water. A microscopic hook was
connected, via an amplier, to a full-size deep-sea shing rod,
so that snagging a paramecium felt like reeling in a marlin.
He had small-cell lung cancer, said Davis. And he
wanted me to cure him. He wanted me to use shhooks to
catch the cancer cells. I think he was scientically literate. He
probably knew that I wasnt going to go shing in his lungs,
but he wanted me to think about it.
At rst, Davis avoided the calls, but the man was
persistent, and eventually, they began to speak often. At the
time, Davis was experimenting with growing microbes in
deuterium oxide or heavy water, which slows some of their
internal processes and causes them to giantizerendering
a paramecium, for example, visible to the naked eye. This
happens, Davis explained, because it takes much more energy
to make and break a deuterium bond than the sort of hydrogen
bond found in regular water.
I thought, oh my god, maybe I could slow down the
cancer cells, he recalled. Because theyre just reproduction
machines, the small-cell lung cancer cells. Theyre all nucleus
with a thin layer of cytoplasm. Theyre almost like a virus.
So I thought maybe deuterium might be useful to slow
them down. Within a few months, however, the man from
Minneapolis had died.
Davis left the pond and wound up the hill toward an
elaborate marble rotunda, the tomb of Mary Baker Eddy who
founded the Church of Christian Science. He passed a group
of women wearing black veils. Gloomy, he said.
A bush quivered by the side of the road, and he stopped
to peer in at a ock of sparrows. At the top of the hill, he
walked up to one of the marble benches encircling Eddies
tomb. Look at that, he breathed, bending down to run his
ngers along the curved underside, where a tangle of vines
and birds seemed to bubble out of the stone. The detail! In
the least visible part.
Davis says no one right now is truly sculpting art out of
lifeat least not in the way that we will. He wrote an entry
on Genetic Art for Natures Encyclopedia of the Human
Genome. Perhaps the day is not so far away, it reads, when
artists will nd themselves creating functional genomes,
organisms made from whole cloth or from scratch There
are indications here too that, like the story by Jorge Luis
Borges of the Chinese emperor creating a map of the world
that would exactly coincide with the real world, art is already
realizing the poetic idea of a time in which all the worlds
recorded knowledge will be endlessly reproducing itself,
contained in genomic archives of nature, and doubling as the
living shadow map of the world itself.
In November, before accompanying
Richard Pell to inspect the Center for BioMedia, Oron Catts
had given a talk at Rensselaers new Center for Biotechnology
and Interdisciplinary Studies, a large brick and glass building at
the center of campus. He spoke about SymbioticA and ipped
through slides of his semi-living sculptures. The works were
grown from cloned cells and sustained in bioreactors; they
had to be fed and eventually killed. Because of the limitations
of tissue-culturing technology, which is a slow and delicate
process, Catts conceded that his works were necessarily small
and tended to look similarlike balls of snot.
There were tiny pigs wings cloned from live pigs
cells, an ear-shaped object grown out of human tissue, and
victimless meatround disks cultured from sheep muscle,
created entirely independently from any living sheep.
Catts had produced this last work at Harvard Medical
School but was prohibited from ingesting it in Cambridge.
So he headed to France, where he biopsied a frog, cloned
its cells and served them at a dinner party, which the frog
attended, in a performance piece called Disembodied Cuisine.
Because the coin-sized steaks comprised pure, unexercised
muscle, sans any fat or connective tissue, their consistency
was roughly that of jelly. Catts, like most of his guests, did
not make it through the meal. Later, he exhibited photographs
of what people had spat out in a show called The Remnants of
Disembodied Cuisine.
As a teenager in Israel, Catts spent one summer working at
a neighboring foie gras farm, where his job was force-feeding
grain to geese; but it was the aftertaste of his artworkthe
gooey texture of cloned frog cells on his tonguethat nally
convinced him to become a vegetarian.
2009 fall/winter | 7.2 isotope 15
When he had nished ipping through the slides, Catts
turned to the audience and asked, Should artists be allowed
to work in such situations? Should they be allowed to work
with life?
A man towards the back of the room raised his hand. It
was Robert Linhardt, the director of Rensselaers biotech-
nology center, who earlier that week had agreed to sponsor
a proposal introducing artists into the institutes laboratories.
He hoped the collaboration might result in some work to
dress up the lobby. Theres a risk involved, he said to
Catts, explaining that his concern stemmed from the publics
general ignorance about scientic practice. You have to
be careful because your art is going out to people with an
uneducated viewpoint.
Catts nodded. But scientists run the same perceptual
risks, he argued. In his opinion, the most challenging images
of the 20
th
century had come from science, not art.
Linhardt gestured to the screen, where Catts had projected
a pair of lumpy, glistening worry dolls grown out of human
tissue. When I look at this, he repeated, I see the risk.
Linhardt would later say he was of-
fended by the use of elegant scientic instruments to make
something ugly. While he did not object to artists employing
the tools of biologycreating fantastical chimeras to illumi-
nate natures hidden cornershe felt scientists should retain
control over such work. He had not yet been to see the Cen-
ter for BioMedia but was skeptical about the project, citing
the complications of bringing recombinant microbial systems
outside a scientic establishment. It seemed like a dangerous
undertaking, he said.
In December, Pell met with Rensselaers Environmental
Health and Safety Committee. Apparently the idea of the words
public and bio-lab occupying the same sentence set alarms
off, he wrote in an email at the time. Unfazed by voluminous
health code manuals, he decided that building the laboratory
would be its own kind of social sculpturelike suggesting you
had commissioned a glowing bunny, inviting a frog to a feast
derived from its own haunches or holding up a glass vial of
transparent DNA encoded with an image of female genitalia.
A year later, when Pell left for a job at Carnegie Mellon
University, the public wet-lab in downtown Troy had hosted
little more than a bioart workshop for high school students,
the buttery collection of a Korean artist and a few tanks of
transgenic sh. In his absence, it became a bike rescue.
Sometimes somebody says something to you, said Joe
Davis one morning, as he sat in his studio in Cambridge assaying
his collection of microbes, and youre slightly distracted, or
theres some noise, and you think they said something they
didnt say. He paused to rearrange two glass vials. It made
a lot of sense, what you thought they said. But you wouldnt
have thought of it unless they said what they didnt say.
Thats collaboration! he cried, his voice hushed,
his brow furrowing into deep ssures. And its the only
kind of real collaboration that can exist. Where something
happens only because you both were there. By mistake or on
purpose.
Plastination
after seeing the Body Worlds 2 exhibit
My sister would have wanted
to be ensed and frozen
into a construct
breathtaking as a paper wasp nest,
shoulder bones splayed out
from their roots,
gateway to the spines stepping stones.
It wouldnt have mattered
if articial eyes attached from
stalk-ended muscles
were forever crossed, the wrong hue,
or the bowels alleyways,
petried lava.
Her wildest wish to be the one
to ride a Harley off deaths platform,
split bilaterally to show
how the skin is a disguise,
or mated with Exploding Man
traveling for years from one museum
to the next, their parsed bodies
stretched on silver strands
like space debris,
precise calculations amazing
visitors who lean forward to stroke
her violin-string veins.
Madelyn Garner