genetic code

Bacterias argentinas is a dynamic model of autonomous agents that recombine genetic information eating one each other and where the genetic information is a narrative. The energy and staff circulate. Word is energy. A version of this model was used in the exhibition Juego doble (Double Game) in Mexico D.F. (Source: Maya Zalbidea) In bacterias argentinas Colombian digital artist and data visualization developer Santiago Ortiz creates a linguistic-multicellular environment that models the interactions between basic organisms in a virtual ecosystem. In Ortiz’s words, it is “a dynamic model of autonomous agents that remix genetic information by consuming one another, and in which genetic information is narrative.” In this Flash work, Ortiz explores the question of life as information by mapping linguistic elements onto color-coded “bacteria” that circulate freely in this bio-linguistic ecology. These bacteria carry changeable fragments of sentences as “genes”—they exchange genetic material upon accumulating or losing energy through phagocytosis (the feeding method of many microorganisms)—and their feeding redistributes energy in the community, since the consumed bacteria cedes its energy (measured here in terms of the length of its genetic code) to the bacteria that consumes it. In this way, the interaction between bacteria, whose feeding strings together narratives within the bacterial community, provides materia prima for metabolic processes that write narratives and also for the decomposition of bacteria whose genetics are not favorable for the narratives, thus constituting a kind of “natural” selection. This is, however, an “un-natural” selection process, according to Ortiz, since it models a principle of “infinite injustice” that Ortiz equates with neoliberal political and economic policies. It is significant that the bacteria are “Argentine,” recalling that country’s devastating 2002 financial crisis. The user can confirm their nationality by moving the cursor over each bacteria, hearing the constructed narratives recited by the Argentine “storyteller” Edgardo Franzetti. (Source: ELC 3)

Screen shots

Exhibition "Juego Doble: dos ecosistemas" (2005)

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By Audun Andreassen, 10 April, 2013

The Monstrous Book and the Manufactured Body in the Late Age of Print: Material Strategies for Innovative Fiction in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s Vas

Author

John M. Vincler

Publication Type

Conference paper or presentation

Language

English

Year

2010

Presented at Event

Electronic Literature Organization 2010: Archive & Innovate

Record Status

Tags

Abstract (in English)

In recent decades a growing number of innovative writers have begun exploring the possibility of creating new literary forms through the use of digital technology. Yet literary production and reception does not occur in a vacuum. Print culture is five hundred years in the making, and thus new literary forms must contend with readers’ expectations and habits shaped by print. Shelley Jackson’s hyptertextual novel Patchwork Girl and Steve Tomasula’s innovative print novel Vas: An Opera in Flatland both problematize the conventions of how book and reader interact. In both works an enfolding occurs wherein the notion of the body and the book are taken in counterpoint and become productively confused. Jackson’s book, alluding to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, is about a monster composed of various bodies while the book itself is also a monstrous text: a nonlinear patchwork of links across networks of words and images. Tomasula’s Vas—alluding to Edwin Abbott Abbott’s 1884 satire, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions—is set in “Flatland” foregrounding the two-dimensional materiality of the page, all while the linear novel within the pages of Vas is under siege by supplementary information about the body in the form of collaged digital images, scientific facts, and historical citations that address such issues as body modification, in vitro fertilization, genetic code, and DNA. Both Vas and Patchwork Girl can be read as exemplary works in the late age of print because they foreground the materiality of the book, while radically transforming the conventions of the book. In so doing, both works utilize paratextual and extratextual elements that at once reflect on literatures past, while pointing toward a possible literary future.