Piece Title: GENE ZINE: retrospective collection 2018-2024
Date: August 21, 2023 - November 18, 2023
Show Title: Seeing the Unseen
Venue: Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art
Curator: Rebecca Trawick
Team: Elizabeth Henaff
Collaborators: Tori Coleman and Ands Sanchez contributed design and printing for GENE ZINE: CoEvolution as Intimacy; Andrew Lau printed GENE ZINE: Okayama
Summary: 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. Each zine is embedded with DNA extracted from the microbiome of a particular place, which can seed a new environment with its unique metabolic capabilities.
GENE ZINE: Gowanus was shown at NY Tech Zine Fair in 2018
GENE ZINE: Okayama was shown as part of DRIFT at the Okayama Art Summit, 2019
GENE ZINE: CoEvolution as Intimacy was shown at Data Through Design in 2022, Biodesign Challenge in 2023, and published in DISC Issue 2: Intimacy
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 these three editions of the GENE ZINE, DNA from a given environment has been blotted onto the paper publication, and its human reader instructed to tear it out and embed it in soil in need for remediation. Thus, the local microbiome can absorb and adopt functions of the other, whether is be bioremediation from the urban Superfund site the Gowanus Canal, aquatic adaptation from an ancient moat in Japan, or the microbes collected by honeybees. 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.
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