[spectre] Use This One!: Art(s, Sciences) and Anarchy (ruben coen cagli) with a link!

[Adam Zaretsky]

Hey the debate is finally getting rich.
Here is some more fodder.
Deeply in the BioArt endzone
but not without a twist of Social Science and Anarchy:

The point may not be how has art furthered scientific progress. These days,
the focal project for both artists and scientists, the cultural trope of
most allure, is the reprogramming of the flesh. Transgenics is alchemical
Golem work.  Creative genomic application of technologised human will is
artistic and sculptural regardless of the primary investigator¹s intent.
Human health and developmental stages are canvases for cultural performance,
eventually stable and inherited.  This is the trope to trait pipeline.

 

If my cultural colleagues have historic reflectivity and awareness of
present states of human endeavorŠ it is fair to say that we are still lost
in the woods of ethics and aesthetics.  I am an American and I can safely
say, we are easy to mold into the racist flavor of the week. So if genomic
engineering is couched in mass eugenic ideology towards hygiene and utopia
instead of master race masterbation, men and women will surrender their
embryos.  

 

Therefore, when speaking of art and science, lets not pretend that the
history of Ethics is simply morality and our canon of aesthetics rest
squarely in the realm of beauty.  The Ethics and Aesthetics of Genomic
Collage do not meld in a cognitive ideal of moral beauty. Our history of
applied Ethics and Aesthetics in terms of human populations have been a
collaboration alternating in Placating and eroding the enclaves of the
defenseless. Biotechnology gives us more than law and architecture, more
than cyberspace and porn.  Trangenic humanity gives us the real as an
installation. The project of re-engineering the human genome might be a case
of science in the service of Art (even when artists are nowhere nearby.)
Art is not moral or beautiful.  Art is culture with all its flaws and
degradations.  Art is Assisted Reproductive Technology meets Hans Bellmer.
Art is Depleted Uranium in the Fertile Crescent.  And this is Genomics as a
sculptural form.

Adam Zaretsky

www.ciac.ca/magazine/archives/no_23/en/index.html

www.pfarm.org/ussmeac.pdf