transferring, storing, sharing, and hybriding: The Perfect Humus (Long Version)
Hybrid DNA Performance / Bio-Installation / Video, 2010–2011
Transferring, Storing, Sharing and Hybriding: The Perfect Humus (2010–2011) constructs a circulation system between biological matter, cultural objects and digital information. Human and plant DNA, films, television series, paintings, photographs, online accounts and computer files are converted into sequences, storage sizes, sounds, QR codes and physical materials.
Small loudspeakers transmit encoded information through trees; DNA is extracted from plant matter; printed data is introduced into containers with soil and worms; digital errors, inaccessible files and corrupted characters appear alongside genetic sequences and cultural archives.
The work treats these materials not as stable objects to be preserved, but as substances capable of being transferred, decomposed and recombined. “The perfect humus” is the resulting substrate: a mixture in which biological code, cultural memory and digital residue lose their original hierarchy and become material for further transformations.
Rather than opposing nature and technology, the work constructs temporary circuits between them. Information moves repeatedly from organism to code, from code to sound or image, and from those representations back into physical and biological processes. What is stored is therefore never identical to what entered the system.
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https://vimeo.com/37691031
Marcello Mercado
transferring, storing, sharing, and hybriding: The perfect humus
Hybrid-DNA-Performance-Bio-installation
2010-2011, Germany
Running time: 16’23»
4:3
Colour/B/W
Music by Marcello Mercado
transferring, storing, sharing, and hybriding: The Perfect Humus (Long Version)
Hybrid DNA Performance / Bio-Installation / Video, 2010–2011
In transferring, storing, sharing, and hybriding: The Perfect Humus, Marcello Mercado constructs a speculative ecology in which biological material, digital information and cultural memory circulate through the same system. The work brings together fragments drawn from the human genome, satellite transmissions, digital archives, databases, networked communication and environmental recording, treating them not as separate categories but as equivalent forms of matter capable of being stored, displaced, transformed and recombined.
The installation departs from a simple but unsettling question: what is accumulated every second within the contemporary world? Human memory stores images, words and affects; hard drives and servers accumulate immense quantities of data; genetic material preserves biological instructions; satellites register the surface of the planet; databases classify and reorganize existence. Rather than presenting these systems independently, Mercado imagines them as layers of a single informational terrain.
The “perfect humus” of the title is not an agricultural substance but a conceptual and material substrate formed through the continuous sedimentation of data, memory and organic residue. Information extracted from multiple sources—digital files, genome sequences, network activity, sound recordings and environmental traces—is hybridized until distinctions between archive and organism, technology and ecology, body and machine become unstable.
Throughout the work, processes of transfer and translation play a central role. Data becomes sound, sound becomes action, action becomes biological trace. QR codes, databases, networked interfaces, mobile technologies and public-space interventions appear not as neutral tools but as mechanisms that reorganize how information circulates and how bodies are connected to larger technological systems. The piece proposes that contemporary existence is defined less by fixed identities than by permanent states of exchange, contamination and mutation.
At the same time, The Perfect Humus addresses the increasingly fragile status of privacy and memory in a world saturated by surveillance and permanent recording. Genetic information, online activity, satellite imaging and personal archives are all treated as materials that can be stored, copied, appropriated and redistributed. The work asks what kind of ecosystem emerges when every form of life and every fragment of experience can be transformed into transferable information.
Combining bioart, performance, generative systems, sound, network art and installation, Mercado develops an environment in which the archive ceases to function as a static repository. Instead, it becomes a living, unstable and transgenic field: an ecology of signals, residues and hybrid forms in continuous transformation.
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