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28 abril, 2025 In Archive, Art, Bioart, Denmark, Installation, Live Streaming, Performance, Radio, Soundart, Transcripts

Live Streamings from Dolmens: DNA-Performance-Installation-Soundart

 

Marcello Mercado

Live Streamings from Dolmens, 2011

 

DNA-Performance-Installation-Soundart

 

Flintinge, Denmark — 19/06/11 14:17 PM

 

 

 

 

 

Live Streamings from Dolmens unfolds as a quiet yet potent act of temporal entanglement. Beneath the ancient stones of Flintinge—dolmens whose origins drift somewhere between archaeology and speculation—the artist instigates a dialogue between the molecular traces of human evolution and the enduring architectures of prehistory.

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Fragments of the human genome, translated into sound, drift through the heavy air beneath the capstones, inhabiting the same acoustic cavities that may once have sheltered the dead. The sonification of DNA collapses boundaries between symbol and matter: what is usually confined to the microscopic becomes vibrational, inhabiting the body of the listener, the body of the earth, and the massive stone thresholds of the dolmens themselves.

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Rather than presenting the dolmens as inert relics, the work reactivates them as transmitters—live, vibrating sites that absorb and refract an ephemeral sonic flow. The installation escapes traditional notions of the archive; it does not merely preserve, but reanimates. Memory here is neither linear nor fixed; it unfolds across shifting materialities, weaving genomic remnants and megalithic architectures into a shared, unstable temporality.

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The choice of live streaming—the insistence on the present tense—infuses the work with an immediacy that resists the stasis often associated with historical monuments. Each broadcast is a fleeting, irreversible encounter, underscoring the precariousness of both biological and cultural continuity. The genome itself, an archive of survival and mutation, is no longer silent but rendered audible, insisting on its presence through sonic textures that evade easy recognition.

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The performance-installation constructs a landscape where informational residues become aesthetic material. Sound is not employed here as a representation of life, but as a direct extension of it—a mutable field where code, stone, air, and consciousness converge. It suggests a media archaeology that does not privilege technological linearity but embraces dispersed, contingent histories—histories that oscillate between the organic and the constructed, between deep time and the volatile present.

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In this terrain, the dolmens cease to be merely objects of contemplation; they become agents within a living system of transmission, modulating the genome’s silent speech into vibrations felt as much as heard. The body of the listener, the ancient stones, and the coded remnants of human life form a single, extended organism: an ephemeral, networked being that pulses across space and time.

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Ultimately, Live Streamings from Dolmens proposes an ecology of existence where the molecular, the monumental, and the ephemeral are co-constitutive. It gestures toward a reconfiguration of how we understand archives, rituals, and communications—favoring a model not of permanence, but of transmission, resonance, and becoming.

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DNA-performance-installation- soundart

(LIVE) 19/06/11 14:17 PM

Place: Flintinge, Denmark

Dolmen 2: 54° 44´23.99″ N 11° 47´23.36″ E

 

 

 

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

 

 

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20 junio, 2023 In Live Streaming, Performance

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)

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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)