Human Genome re-Activation – Low Lives 3 International Festival of Live Networked Performances, 2011
Marcello Mercado
Human Genome re-Activation
Performance Streaming: Low Lives 3 International Festival of Live Networked Performances
5´27″
mono 4:3 colour
2011
30.04.2011
Buenos Aires 16:11h, Los Angeles 12:11h,
Berlin 21:11h, Cape Town 21:11h,
Salt Lake City 13:11h, Miami 15:11h
keywords:
bioart, genome, finger, soundart, genetics, synthetic voice,
DNA – Sequence alignment, chromosome 1, DNA, Nucleotides,
adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), thymine (T), DNA-Bases
In 2011, as part of the real-time performance festival Low Lives 3, Marcello Mercado presented Human Genome Re-Activation, a live-streamed procedural work exploring the convergence of human biology, sonic information, and technological mediation.
The point of departure was an early corporeal trauma: the loss of the artist’s right-hand little finger at the age of eight. Embracing a strictly processual methodology, the performance sought to stimulate latent regenerative knowledge encoded within the human genome. DNA fragments were translated into sound frequencies, while an artificial voice recited selected genomic sequences aloud, producing an acoustic field aimed at activating dormant biological memory.
Drawing upon Siegfried Zielinski’s variantology—a theory of alternative technological genealogies—Human Genome Re-Activation treated the genome as a primordial archive, a deep technological substrate available for contemporary experimental reading. Rather than constructing symbolic meaning or narrative resolution, the work operated as a live laboratory, where media archaeology and speculative biotechnology intersected in real time.
The artificial voice’s recitation transformed the informational material of the genome into vibrational events, expanding the body’s perceptual field beyond the purely tactile. In doing so, the performance displaced traditional notions of embodiment, situating the body within a continuum of sonic, biological, and computational agencies.
Far from proposing an image of figurative regeneration, Human Genome Re-Activation created a material and procedural condition: a space for investigating the body’s possible responsiveness to acoustic fields of information. The live-streaming medium—integral to the work’s realization—amplified this experiment by dissolving spatial boundaries, dispersing the vibratory intervention across decentralized receivers while maintaining an intense immediacy between transmission and corporeal reception.
Without projecting utopian promises or restorative fantasies, Human Genome Re-Activation constructed a model of speculative regeneration: an experimental archaeology of biological loss, mediated through the hybrid entanglement of obsolete and contemporary communication systems.
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1.
Siegfried Zielinski — Deep Time of the Media
«Technology is not a linear progression but a constellation of missed possibilities, alternative paths, and latent potentials waiting to be reactivated.»
(Deep Time of the Media, 2006)
2.
Jens Hauser — Art, Biology and Politics (essay)
«Bioart does not symbolize life processes: it intervenes in them, manipulates, and actualizes their potential as living, dynamic systems.»
(in Art and Biotechnologies, 2007)
3.
Bruno Latour — An Inquiry into Modes of Existence
«Modernity has always misunderstood its hybrids: it has tried to cleanse what was inevitably composite.»
(An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 2012)
4.
Amelia Jones — Body Art: Performing the Subject
«Performance art refuses the closure of representation. It opens the body as an unstable, permeable site for the enactment of process and becoming.»
(Body Art, 1998)
5.
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev — The Brain and the Algorithm
«When machines speak for us, they do not replace human presence; they alter the modalities of embodiment and distribution of knowledge.»
(Documenta 13 Catalogue, 2012)
