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27 abril, 2025 In Archive, Art, Bioart, Brühl, Compost, Genome, Installation, Media, Performance, Radio, Soundart

Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies

Marcello Mercado

Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies, 2007

Bio-Performance / Bio-Installation, 2007

In Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies, Marcello Mercado crafts a meditation on mortality, memory, and the biological archive, unfolding across two interconnected actions in Kassel and Brühl in 2007. Initiated by the extraction of DNA from red poppies gathered from Sanja Iveković’s Poppy Field at Documenta Kassel, and culminating in its dissolution into the aquatic habitat of Biomphalaria glabrata worms, the project weaves together ephemeral transmission, organic processes, and technological mediation.

At its core, the work proposes a volatile circuit of memory: by transmitting the worms’ own genomic sequences back to them via walkie-talkies, Mercado reenacts an ancient gesture—the whispered reminder of mortality to a triumphant general—reinscribed into the molecular language of life. Rather than offering a static image of death, the piece stages a living, recursive inscription, where information becomes both a medium and a memento.

The project aligns with ideas of media deep time, where archives are not merely human inventions but are entangled with biological and environmental substrata. Rather than preserving information, Memento Mori Genómico lets it mutate and circulate, embodying a processual temporality that challenges linear notions of memory and death. The unstable transmission through radio frequencies mirrors the instability inherent in biological memory itself, where error, mutation, and dissolution are constitutive forces.

Drawing implicitly from contemporary curatorial thinking that sees archives as dynamic, entropic systems—never fixed, always partial—the performance dissolves the separation between biological material, technological mediation, and cultural residue. It suggests, as certain strands of contemporary theory have proposed, that every act of storing, transferring, and sharing information is also an act of transformation and loss.

In this fluid landscape, biological entities are no longer passive subjects of observation but active carriers of information, echoing broader shifts in contemporary bio-art towards performative, unstable, and relational practices. Mercado’s choice to use the fragile and modest technology of walkie-talkies further displaces the narrative of technological mastery, foregrounding instead a poetics of vulnerability and transmission error.

Between Kassel’s global stage and the quieter, hidden life of Brühl, Memento Mori Genómico moves between monumental cultural time and the microscopic temporality of organic life. It inhabits a space where memory is not monumentalized but continuously renegotiated—where archives are not preservations of presence, but processes of inevitable metamorphosis.

In the end, Mercado’s work suggests that mortality, memory, and information share a deeper kinship: all are fleeting, porous, and materially bound. All are, inevitably, transmitted with noise.

Marcello Mercado
Making consistent volatile ideas by broadcasting bio-information
through plants, DNA, worms and Radio Frequencies, 2007
Bio-Performance – Bio-Installation,
04′ 00″
stereo 4:3 colour

27 abril, 2025 In Archive, Bioart, Brühl, Compost, Genome, Installation, Live Streaming, Media, Performance

transferring, storing, sharing and hybriding: The perfect humus

Marcello Mercado

Transferring, Storing, Sharing, and Hybriding: The perfect humus, 2010 – 2011

Series of Ephemeral Video-Installations

In Transferring, Storing, Sharing, and Hybriding, a series of ephemeral video-installations created in 2010 – 2011, Marcello Mercado addresses the unstable materialities of memory, inheritance, and technological residues. Drawing from the human genome, sound art, satellite streams, and digital archives, these works cultivate a living humus where organic and synthetic legacies are intertwined, constantly shifting, never fixed.

Memory is not presented as a static repository but as a volatile negotiation—a territory of transmission, mutation, and erosion. Information, whether embedded in DNA sequences or encoded in cultural databases, leaks, hybridizes, and transforms. It is less about the accumulation of gigabytes, terabytes, or zettabytes, and more about the precarious entanglements that such excess inevitably generates.

Set within natural environments, these installations articulate an ecology of interdependencies: moss, water, wood, speakers, radio waves, and glass vials compose fragile assemblages where the biological and the technological are co-implicated. Rather than illustrating hybridity, the work enacts it, inserting the viewer into circuits of multispecies, multimodal transmission. The satellite feed merges with the genome, the sound frequencies seep into the moss, the archival impulse dissolves into entropy.

Contemporary existence, the installations suggest, is conditioned by acts of translation, contamination, and remix. Storage becomes indistinguishable from distortion; preservation, from mutation. Rather than clinging to the idea of pristine archives, Transferring proposes memory as a field of unstable assemblages, a site where pasts and futures cross-contaminate each other.

This sensibility resonates with a broader shift in curatorial and theoretical practices toward non-linear temporalities, recursive histories, and distributed agencies. The installations breathe with the recognition that every archive—genetic or digital—operates under conditions of uncertainty, exposed to forces beyond control. Storage is never neutral; it is a practice haunted by loss, noise, and decay.

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By embracing the ephemeral, Mercado’s work departs from traditional notions of durability and fixity. It stages memory as performative, fugitive, and entangled with material processes of transformation. The event of the installation is not a means to preserve information, but a way to let it mutate and regenerate—through sound, matter, time.

In Transferring, no single medium or agent holds primacy. Human, machine, organism, and environment form shifting networks of action and reaction, echoing deeper inquiries into posthuman entanglements and networked materialities. Information is neither inert nor pure: it is an active participant in an ecology of residues.

Ultimately, these ephemeral constellations reflect a vital awareness: that in an era of accelerating technological proliferation, what matters is not the preservation of stable identities, but the capacity to inhabit instability, to cultivate porous, living archives that remain open to transformation.

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