Listening the chromosome 17, 1-channel Video Installation, 2023

Marcello Mercado

Listening to Chromosome 17

21´02″, colour, stereo, HD

Single-channel video installation with immersive sound

2023

In Listening to Chromosome 17, Marcello Mercado explores the changing landscape of self-portraiture in the context of contemporary technologies. Over the course of three months, the artist conducted sound sessions in which fragments of his own chromosome 17 were translated by artificial intelligence into synthetic audio. At the same time, he used a series of mobile 3D scanning applications to scan his own head, producing fragmented, glitchy, and often inaccurate models.

These visual inconsistencies, combined with AI-generated imagery, culminate in a composite portrait that resists coherence. The resulting installation unfolds as an unstable dialogue between organic material and artificial interpretation – between the body and its machine-read counterpart.

Mercado’s work draws on the principles of bioart and performative installation, using his own genetic data as both subject and medium. The project addresses issues of identity, perception, and the performativity of technological systems, examining how algorithmic processes attempt – and ultimately fail – to stabilize or fully capture the human.

Rather than celebrating the precision of these technologies, the work foregrounds their flaws, highlighting the fractures in our digital doubles. Listening to Chromosome 17 is less a self–portrait than an evolving index of attempts: generative, broken, approximate. In this speculative interface between genome and image, sound and data, Mercado stages a meditation on disappearance, duplication, and the uneasy proximity of flesh and code.