Piece Title: GENE ZINE: Micro News Biome Letter
Date: December, 2018
Show Title: NYC Tech Zine Fair
Venue: School for Poetic Computation
The School for Poetic Computation is organized around exploring the creative and expressive nature of computational approaches to art and design. The school approaches writing code like creative writing — focusing on the mechanics of programming, the demystification of tools, and hacking the conventions of art-making with computation.
The NYC Tech Zine Fair showcases the ways in which visual artists, writers, engineers, technologists, illustrators, and designers are using the space of zines and similar DIY creations to examine what we consider to be “technology” and offer a fresh perspective on digital culture.
Press:
Summary: The microbiome of the Gowanus Canal has evolved bioremediation metabolisms that enable it to degrade many toxic compounds. This zine facilitates exchange of genetic material with the goal of supporting bioremediation of landscapes affected by anthropogenic contamination.
This zine along with two additional issues are now part of the permanent collection at the Wignall Museum of Art.
Description: Molecular biologists have long used paper substrates as a medium to exchange DNA between laboratories: pipetting a few microliters onto filter paper, letting it dry and mailing it to a far-away collaborator. Gene exchange is also common between microbes, where a single-cell organism can absorb free DNA from its environment, for example released from another cell upon its death. This project aims to use this paper-based technique to allow exchange between distant microbiomes. Zines are informal, underground publications that have focused on social and political activism, musical genre subcultures and radical trends. In this edition of the GENE ZINE, DNA from the Gowanus Canal has been blotted onto the paper publication, and it’s human reader instructed to tear it out and embed it in soil in need for remediation. Thus, the local microbiome can absorb and adopt the bioremediation functions developed by the Gowanus Microbiome. When most scientific instrumentation establishes hierarchies of control, this project aims to create a collaborative relationship with microorganisms as a key to living in the Anthropocene. Indeed, these organisms are the most capable of adapting to our rapidly changing planet and the damage humans have wrought. Borrowing from practices in molecular biology and the tradition of zines as small-scale publications, GENE ZINE is a genomic note from the underground serving the subculture of multispecies collaboration.
Materials: custom lasercut rubber stamps, acrylic ink, watercolor paper, purified DNA from the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, NY
Detail View
all photos Elizabeth Henaff unless otherwise noted
Process
Catalog
screenshot from www.techzinefair.org