AW: [-empyre-] Poetics of DNA II

["Johannes Blank" <blank@el36.de>]

---
biochemistry is neither an alphabet nor a language
---
... it can be..
maybe you look to our project. artists and molecular biologists
joined and found out a technique to visualize words by using peptides.

PEPTOMICS.ORG found out a new technique to 
TRANSFER WORDS INTO AMINO ACID STRUCTURES.

The molecular structure of Amino Acids in cells is defined by a unique
sequence of letters. 
Nearly every sequence of letters also exists in natural organisms. 
Peptomics.org created a process to find the sequence of letters in a word in
proteins. 

the project is running already some time. we also tried to find
people/galerists,
but no one seemed to be interested. 
the thing is, that the process of reinterpreting words like we do at
peptomics can be done only by a few scientists
worldwide. it was a big luck, that some of them are around and joined the
project.

i think the most interesting part of the project is that words do not only
receive a new visualisation but also
a "real" biological function.
at the end the amino acids which visualize each word could also be liquified
(and drunken).

so we will continue to develop more words (started with some german words).
if someone has some wishes for words to be transferred, please tell us... 

see: www.peptomics.org


greetings, johannes blank.



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JOHANNES BLANK
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T. +49(0)89.121 38 316
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M. +49(0)179.10 26 135

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www.treib-stoff.com




-----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
Von: empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[mailto:empyre-bounces@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] Im Auftrag von Judith Roof
Gesendet: Mittwoch, 3. Oktober 2007 15:10
An: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Betreff: [-empyre-] Poetics of DNA II

Greetings To All Comers (and with thanks to Nick for devising this)

The Poetics of DNA: The Evacuation of Representation

Although a notion of the ?poetics of DNA? would seem to suggest that
language and representation are quite powerful, the other side of this
formulation is a contemporary trend towards evacuating representation
itself.  There is no more art, nor ambivalence, nor ambiguity, nor anything
other than a machinic transmittal of true meaning/?reality?/matter.
Representation has become a vector without meaning of its own. Modes of
representation (language, narrative, image, etc.) are regarded by many as
merely transparent and pragmatic vectors by which the authentic, the
factual, or even the True are unproblematically conveyed.  The vagaries of
language disappear in favor of the delusive truth of the empirical whose
communication has miraculously overcome its medium. We now favor memoir over
fiction and worry when an autobiography turns out not to be ?true.?  If
language and metaphor condition our understandings of DNA, then our
imaginary of DNA has started to condition our considerations of language and
metaphor.

The desire to locate DNA and genes as a nonarbitrary and fixed substratum
accounting for all biology (as well as all social, economic, religious, and
artistic impulses) represents a displacement of complexity, uncertainty, and
multivalence into a delusional other language in which ?A? finally and
unequivocally equals ?A?.  Of course biochemistry is neither an alphabet nor
a language nor are traits singular and definable entities governed by
singular genes (nor are they actually often a "trait" at all, whatever that
is). The impetus to so simplify, however, still regularly haunts news
reports, popular conceptions of  biochemistry, and more comprehensive
notions of ?science? itself.  And now, in a curiously reflexive reversal,
such automatonism affects our concepts of language, narrative, drama.

Last week in a film theory class I teach, a bright student suggested that
film theory is irrelevant, since all things aesthetic, narrative, and
imagistic are already genetically programmed. We do not, he suggested, need
to struggle with conceptions of how film  
works as a complex mode of representation.  The answer is clear.   
Films are the way they are because that?s the way our brains are (and not
the way Hugo Munsterberg meant it when he proposed the idea 90 years ago).
Our brains are that way because it is all already in our genes. The answer
to all of the niggling enigmas of film theory is that film is genetic (a few
steps beyond the causal reductions of historicism).

The student?s belief in the ultimate biological materialism of
representation takes the final turn of a full circle in which language,
narrative, and metaphor condition what we believe about biochemistry, which
then partly influences the kinds of research and understandings that are
accomplished, whose reporting in the original recycled metaphors then
reinforces apparent materialization of those metaphors, which by now have
become truisms, which then promulgate ways of thinking, such as my
student?s, by which language, narrative, and metaphor become the tethered
and predictable products of the more certain and happy genetic universe for
which they are (in a far more figurative way) partially responsible.

This result is all too easy and ironic in a world that eschews complexity
and grasps even more desperately towards singular truth, ?reality,? and
reliable signifiers. Of course the representation/ science binary is false,
but it exists firmly enough to enable the one to take the hit for the other.
That representation (language, image, narrative) becomes the sacrifice
suggests not a turn towards science or logic or any recognition of
biochemical complexity, but rather a turn away from uncertainty, complexity,
and systematicity displaced into representation as that set of practices
that can be brought to heel by simply ignoring that there is any ambiguity
over which we might ever puzzle.  In this world ?A? does equal ?A,? but the
tautology short circuits all of the ways of thinking that might be valuable.

The foreclosure of representation as a complex ambiguous, uncertain, yet
material (in the sense that it can produce the operative yet
immeasurable) force may well be an effect of grief over the loss of the
kinds of indexicality that represented presence, the fading predominance of
structures (and structuralist ways of thinking) that signaled control and
regularity, and the rapid dissolution of even airline-based gauges of
temporal/spatial relations, among other epistemological warpings.  Or the
evacuation of representation may compensate for the nearly incomprehensible
complexity of  science--of cellular biochemistry in league with quantum
theories, for example.  
The more non-figurable these processes become, the more transparent we
believe the figurative to be.

Judith Roof_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre