Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics

1. Sampling and Folding: the digital and the baroque

No analogy machine exists which will really form the product of two numbers. What it will form is this product, plus a small but unknown quantity which represents the random noise of the mechanism and the physical processes involved. The whole problem is to keep this quantity down. — JOHN VON NEUMANN 1 All bodies are in a perpetual flux like rivers, and parts are entering into them and passing out of them continuously. — GOTTFRIED W. F. LEIBNIZ 2 1sampling and folding the digital and the baroque The Clone, the Sample and the Differential In the wake of late-twentieth-century entities such as the “cyborg” or the “posthuman” and with our increasing fascination for the “biotechnological” we have become accustomed to thinking of hybrids as entities that seamlessly graft machines and bodies together . A successful amalgamation of circuitry and flesh would herald our entry into an age of convergence between nature and technics. Accordingly, we no longer appear startled by manifestations of the neomonstrous, such as human hand transplantation or attempts to clone, gestate and release into the wild extinct species of animals. In 1999 the Australian Museum (Australia’s largest natural history museum, located in Sydney) embarked on a research project to clone a living Thylacine. This animal— 25 commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger—is an extinct species of Australian marsupial.3 The last recorded living Thylacine died in captivity in a zoo in Tasmania in 1936. Using preserved DNA from a pup specimen in the museum’s possession, researchers began exploring the possibility of sequencing the Thylacine genome and using cloning techniques to generate a living individual of the species. No doubt the impetus and research for this project followed close on the heels of the publicity surrounding the Human Genome Project (HGP), which reached fever pitch with the announcement of the completion of sequencing in 2001. The science fantasy surrounding the Thylacine project borrowed from and elaborated upon the rhetoric infusing the HGP. Mike Archer, the museum ’s director and the initiator of the cloning venture, fueled this alignment with comments directly referencing the HGP metaphors construing DNA as the “book of life”: “We can now begin construction of a DNA library that will contain the entire recipe for re-creation.” Elsewhere his con- flation of genetic and digital code was simply bad science: “The dead DNA extracted from the tissue of a preserved pup has been made to act in the same way as live DNA and millions of copies of the DNA have now been made.”4 The Thylacine project, however, ran out of steam when it was discovered that preserved DNA from the pup and other specimens would only render sequences for four out of a possible thirty thousand genes. In order to initiate the process of cloning, an entire genome (all of the genes of an organism) needs to be mapped. Cloning, as an idea, has proven to be more of a conduit between science and the public’s imagination than a smoothly paved road to immediate biotechnical success. The museum’s project and its projection into the public sphere captured the public’s imagination by seamlessly gliding over a series of complex scientific, cultural and environmental tensions, including the differences between sequencing a limited number of genes from DNA fragments and the mapping of an entire genome; the operations of genetic replication and digital copying; and the ethics of regenerating extinct species and releasing them into ecologically changed habitats versus preserving species that are currently endangered. Building organisms from information is proving to be a haphazard, fraught and rather contingent process. Yet the optimism that inheres in perceptions of cloning speaks to an ever-increasing perfectionism that accompanies the assimilation of the organic to the technological world. Or have the visible marks of technical operations upon bodies been reduced to such minute proportions, such invisible maneuvers, that they no longer arouse comment? Like the hidden mechanics of baroque automata, which were designed to beguile the spec26 materializing new media tator in a display of apparently self-propelled motion, clones, the millennial figures of technological wonder, also conceal their artifice. From automata to clone, a host of mutations have featured in the Western cultural imagination at critical junctures in the history of matter’s entanglement with technologies. And yet foregrounding some of the most familiar of these—Frankenstein’s monster, Fritz Lang’s False Maria, the Borg from...