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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

–

28 abril, 2025 In 3D scanners, Archive, Art, Artist´s book, Bioart, Drawings, Exhibitions, Genome, Installation, Media, Music, paintings, Performance, Photography, Print, Publications, softart, Soundart, Videoart, Wien

Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

THE DIGITAL SYNESTHESIA GROUP

The transdisciplinary DIGITAL SYNESTHESIA GROUP consists of project leaders Katharina Gsöllpointner (media theoretician), Ruth Schnell (artist), Romana Schuler (art historian) and artists Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel. During the research process invited artists and scientists will participate as special guests in the context of certain topics and/or project phases.

Marcello Mercado

Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera, 2016

2-channel video installation, artist’s book, public audio interaction, sound installation

1. Concept

In Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera, data becomes matter, and matter becomes music. This expansive project unfolds as a tactile, audible, and visual archive, preserving fragments of life at a moment when biodiversity itself is vanishing. Thousands of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes—echoes of evolutionary memory—are mined, transformed into sound, and materialized into 3D-printed notations. Each printed form, each vibration, each surface invites the audience into a synesthetic crossing where touch, sight, hearing, and proprioception merge into a new language of the senses.

Rather than offering a closed composition, the work proposes an open, living structure, where technology and error, archive and entropy, sound and object are woven into an evolving fabric. The operatic form is no longer bound to vocality; instead, it extends into nonhuman agencies, enlisting the genetic residues of fungi, insects, mammals, and bacteria as unexpected co-authors. The traditional roles of composer and performer dissolve into a collective interaction between human bodies, machines, and biological matter.

Through a meticulous process of data mining and translation, genetic sequences are read, converted into audio, shaped into three-dimensional sculptures, and inserted into a book-object that redefines what a musical score can be. Here, musical notation is not drawn but grown—imperfect, fragmented, vibrating with the material noise of its own genesis. The haptic surfaces printed in biodegradable plastic invite direct engagement: rubbing the sculptures with piezoelectric microphones generates new sounds, transforming the audience into performers who extend the life of the archive with each touch.

In this sensorial ecology, seeing, touching, and hearing no longer operate as separate modalities but fuse into an expanded field of perception. The project inhabits the unstable zone between representation and performativity, where the archive is not preserved in stasis but activated through ephemeral acts of encounter. Glitches, printing errors, and incomplete forms are embraced as part of the work’s inner logic, mirroring the chaotic processes of mutation and decay that shape life itself.

Rather than offering stability, the opera proposes a shifting, porous system in which bodies, data, and artifacts intertwine. It is an invitation to rethink archives as dynamic ecosystems—mutable, tactile, and deeply entangled with the temporalities of both human and nonhuman lives. The speculative impulse at the core of the work gestures toward possible futures where preservation, memory, and creativity no longer obey linear or anthropocentric logics.

In Genomic Opera, the score is not merely to be read or interpreted; it must be felt, handled, listened to with the skin. The opera resists closure, insisting on the incomplete, the unstable, the open-ended. It is less a memorial to loss than a rehearsal for resilience—a sensorium in which the residues of life continue to mutate, resonate, and proliferate.

2. Primary sensory cross-modalities: TOUCH, VISION, AUDIO, PROPRIOCEPTION

In Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century, the senses are not merely pathways but forces of transformation. Touch summons sound, vision unfolds into tactile reliefs, hearing manifests as sculptural vibration. Genomic fragments—encoded in ancient, volatile alphabets of A, T, G, and C—spill beyond the limits of the readable, becoming textures, waves, and invisible resonances that the body can only partially grasp.

Each 3D-printed notation is a fossil of movement, a topography of sonic intensities frozen in plastic, waiting to be awakened by contact. Under the friction of fingertips, they whisper, crackle, and hum, offering secret frequencies to those willing to touch with intention. Listening becomes an act of caress; sight a dance over the uneven geographies of sound.

What was once hidden in molecular depths is rendered into surfaces, thresholds where biological memory, technological error, and human gesture converge. The printed forms refuse purity: glitches, collapses, and deformations are not failures but traces of a process where sensing and thinking intertwine. The body itself becomes a hybrid interface, vibrating with an archive that is no longer silent.

Proprioception—the silent sense of spatial embodiment—guides the interaction, as hands navigate invisible maps encoded in plastic veins. Here, the tactile is not an accessory to the visual but its twin; the audible is not an extension of the image but its counterpoint. The book-opera offers no clear front or back, no singular voice or score, but a labyrinth where music is materialized and material becomes musical.

In this expanded sensorium, data ceases to be abstract. It sinks into the skin, resonates in the bones, flickers behind the eyes. Each page of the opera becomes a threshold: between life and its representation, between archive and metamorphosis, between noise and meaning. The genomic residues, shaped by countless generations of life, now inhabit the fragile, unstable territory of human touch—ephemeral, porous, alive.

Steps:

Recollection of multiple genomic sequences prokaryotic and eukaryotic

A Text to Speech software will read the multiple genomic sequences

Transformation from TEXT to AUDIO FILES (Aprox. 10 hours audio)

Primary sensory cross-modalities: VISION, AUDIO

Through algorithms the audio files will be transformed in 3D objects

Transformation from AUDIO to 3D OBJECTS

Primary sensory cross-modalities: VISION, AUDIO

The 3D objects will be printed with a 3D Printer.

Transformation from 3D OBJECTS to multiple 3D (TACTILE) OBJECTS

Primary sensory cross-modalities: TOUCH, VISION

The 3D printed objects will be pasted on music pentagram pages as

musical notations of a Partiture-Book

3D (TACTILE) OBJECTS + 3D OBJECT (TOUCH)

Primary sensory cross-modalities: TOUCH, VISION

The 3D printed objects will be rubbed with 2 piezoelectric microphones

in order to generate new audio files.

Transformation from 3D (TACTILE) OBJECTS to AUDIO. PUBLIC

INTERACTION

Primary sensory cross-modalities: TOUCH, VISION, AUDIO

Sounds recollections by a H4N microphone

The new audio files will be collected by a SYNCHRONATOR device that

will enables to visualize the sounds.

Transformation from AUDIO to IMAGE.

Primary sensory cross-modalities: VISION, AUDIO

Sounds as VIDEO

Transformation from AUDIO to VIDEO

Primary sensory cross-modalities: VISION, AUDIO

3. VIDEO

PASSPORT VIMEO: 1663

Within Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera, the public becomes an active agent in the generation of new sensory experiences. Equipped with handheld dynamic microphones, visitors are invited to drag or rub the microphones across the tactile 3D-printed genomic notations. As the microphone picks up the minute surface textures, it translates these physical gestures into bursts of electronic noise. These sounds, inherently glitchy and irregular, are immediately processed and visually transformed into color fields projected onto the gallery wall. Thus, the act of touch is synesthetically extended into the auditory and visual domains, creating a dynamic and ever-changing chromatic landscape generated by the audience’s own explorations.

Rather than simply observing, visitors sculpt ephemeral sound-images, becoming co-authors of a live, evolving opera of genomic noise. In this multisensory choreography, the genetic fragments materialize simultaneously as sound, color, and gesture, emphasizing an entangled relationship between body, data, and environment.

4. Bestiarium der Gedanken des 21. Jahrhunderts

Synästhetische, genetische Oper in 4 Akten

Die Musik ist vom Herrn Genmeister Marcello Mercado

2015

Personen:

Genbanker 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 und 8 ……………………Basssänger

Protein_id ……………………………………………………..Sopran

Adenylyltransferase ………………………………………..Sopran

Gene_desc …………………………………………………….Sopran

Eukaryotischen Genoms ………………………………….Basssänger

Prokaryotischen Genoms ………………………………..Tenöre

Bacillus subtilis aldolase ………………………………….Tenöre

Ribosomale RNA, tRNA und andere RNA …………….Countertenöre

Die Besetzung der Rollen ist nach Mercados thematischem Verzeichnis:

Prokaryotischen Genoms ………………..Sgre. Genbanker 1 und Sgra. Blast 2

Eukaryotischen Genoms …………………Sgre. Genbanker 2 und Sgre. Gebanker 3

Ribosomale RNA, tRNA und andere RNA …..Sgre. Genbanker 4, 5, 6, 7,und 8

Protein_id……………………………………………….Sigra. Proteasa und Sigra. Locus

Gene_desc …………………………………………….Sigra. Alkaline Phosphatase

Bacillus subtilis aldolase ………………………….Sgre. Bacillusmandini

Adenylyltransferase ……………Sigra. ADP-heptose synthase von Cyclohydrolase

Inhalt:

Ouvertüre

Akt 1:

Chor Locus 7267896

Terzett Locus 326123

Duett Locus 424371

Chor Locus 037232

Arie Locus 70076

Akt 2:

3D Recitative und Arie

Duett (Idyll aconitate hydrase)

Chor (Prokaryotische Chor)

Marsch (Erlöschen!!!)

Sextett (Flammen!!! Salve Regina!!!)

Akt 3:

Bacillus Schmerz: Racheduett

3D Fanfare: Oh Plastik!

Protein_id Klage

Monolog der Gene_desc

Ribosomale RNA Todesmotiv

Akt 4:

Melodie der Abfälle

3D Drück Siegeshymne

Freiheits – Duett

Lactobacillus Menuett

Tragisches Schicksalsmotiv

Wahnsinnsszene des Genoms

Kußmotiv der sterbenden Genbanker

ENDE

5. Examples of some of the pages from the artist’s book:

Marcello Mercado

Bestiary for the minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

DATA mining – 3D printed Genomic Opera

2-channel video installation + artist´s book + public audio interaction

ABS-plastic (ABS) and Polylactic acid (PLA) (bioplastic) on Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)

(copper colored) 3D printing errors (glitches) + 3D remains + Data Mining process on Genoms

from mammals, insects, fungi and bacteria converted into plastic 3D Printed objects

Opera – Artist´s Book, 90 pages,

40 cm x 60 cm x 30 cm,

2015

Marcello Mercado

Bestiary for the minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

DATA mining – 3D printed Genomic Opera

2-channel video installation + artist´s book + public audio interaction

ABS-plastic (ABS) and Polylactic acid (PLA) (bioplastic) on Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)

(copper colored) 3D printing errors (glitches) + 3D remains + Data Mining process on Genoms

from mammals, insects, fungi and bacteria converted into plastic 3D Printed objects

Opera – Artist´s Book, 90 pages,

40 cm x 60 cm x 30 cm,

2015

Marcello Mercado

Bestiary for the minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

DATA mining – 3D printed Genomic Opera

2-channel video installation + artist´s book + public audio interaction

ABS-plastic (ABS) and Polylactic acid (PLA) (bioplastic) on Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)

(copper colored) 3D printing errors (glitches) + 3D remains + Data Mining process on Genoms

from mammals, insects, fungi and bacteria converted into plastic 3D Printed objects

Opera – Artist´s Book, 90 pages,

40 cm x 60 cm x 30 cm,

2015

Marcello Mercado

Bestiary for the minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

DATA mining – 3D printed Genomic Opera

2-channel video installation + artist´s book + public audio interaction

ABS-plastic (ABS) and Polylactic acid (PLA) (bioplastic) on Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)

(copper colored) 3D printing errors (glitches) + 3D remains + Data Mining process on Genoms

from mammals, insects, fungi and bacteria converted into plastic 3D Printed objects

Opera – Artist´s Book, 90 pages,

40 cm x 60 cm x 30 cm,

2015

–

6. The artist’s book:

Marcello Mercado

Bestiary for the minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

DATA mining – 3D printed Genomic Opera

artist´s book

ABS-plastic (ABS) and Polylactic acid (PLA) (bioplastic) on Polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA)

(copper colored) 3D printing errors (glitches) + 3D remains + Data Mining process on Genoms

from mammals, insects, fungi and bacteria converted into plastic 3D Printed objects

Opera – Artist´s Book, 90 pages,

40 cm x 60 cm x 30 cm,

2015

7. **Text by Siegfried Zielinski, 2015:**

«Genomische Oper: Ein Bestiarium für Bewusstseine des 21. Jahrhunderts»

Lange Zeit funktionierte der Dualismus als bequeme Denkprothese. Wir unterschieden zwischen Künstlern, die ihre Gestaltungsprozesse wesentlich als Kopfgeburten generieren und solchen, die wesentlich aus dem Bauch heraus operieren. Begrifflicher und medientheoretisch ausgedrückt: Soft- und Hardwareorientierung wurden als oppositionelle, oftmals als antagonistische Haltungen interpretiert. Das war im 20. Jahrhundert die Entsprechung zum Körper-Seele-Dualismus des europäischen Mittelalters, der in der Moderne ausgefächert entfaltet worden ist.
In der subversiven Perspektive der Alchemie zum Beispiel wurde im Hinblick auf diesen Dualismus schon in der Vormoderne heftiger Widerspruch angemeldet. Dass die Seele selbst ganz und gar Fleisch wäre, weil die Materie nichts anderes als modifizierter Geist mit sehr unterschiedlichen Erscheinungsformen darstellt und folglich umgekehrt das Geistige filigrane Ausformulierungen des Materiellen darstellt, war aus der Tradition der vor-sokratischen Philosophie der alten Griechen bekannt. Die Adepten und Zauberlehrlinge der Alchemie machten eine experimentelle Praxis und eine geheimnisvoll und hermetisch begründete Weltanschauung daraus. Der lapis philosophorum, der Stein der Weisen, der in der letzten Stufe der Transmutation auf die immer noch gemeine Materie geworfen wird, um sie schließlich zu veredeln und mit meta-physischer Bedeutung aufzuladen, ist beides: pulverisierter Stoff der Verwandlung und Algorithmus im Sinne einer Order, die aus den naturwissenschaftlichen Experimenten heraus destilliert worden ist.

–

In einer solchen subversiven Tradition arbeitet der argentinische Künstler Marcello Mercado mit radikaler Konsequenz wie schier überbordender Energie und Einbildungskraft. In einer der ersten Performances, die ich von ihm vor nahezu 20 Jahren sah, konfrontierte er die komplexen elektronischen und digitalen Maschinen einer millionenschweren Nachbearbeitungsanlage mit seinem nackten Körper und den Nöten der in ihn eingeschlossenen und herausdrängenden Psyche. Mit der ganzen Kraft seiner sinnlichen Erkenntnis und Erfahrung arbeitete er sich in das Generieren künstlicher Bild- und Tonwelten ein und entwickelte mit Das Kapital einen gigantischen Werkzyklus, der kein Ende finden kann, weil er Obsession und folglich nicht linear, sondern dynamisch und chaotisch organisiert ist. Die visuelle und akustische Sprache, die M2 für seine extrem idiosynkratische Interpretation des Kapitals als einzelner politischer Ökonomie des Körpers erfunden hat, ist ein ständiger Prozess der Transformation von Daten und Relationen in erfahrbare Sensationen und Aggressionen, die exzessiv wuchern und bereits eine Gesamtlaufzeit von weit über 40 Stunden erreicht haben.

–

Parallel zur Verwandlungsarbeit Das Kapital begann M2 in den letzten gut zehn Jahren, sich an genomischen Materialien zu versuchen. Sein Atelier wurde zum biologischen und chemischen Versuchslabor; er grub im Freien, extrahierte Lebenssäfte von Pflanzen und Tieren und begann, sie ebenso obsessiv aufzutrennen und zu mischen, wie er das mit den Datenpaketen seines Computers und den aufgezeichneten Materialien seiner Analogmaschinen tut. Der schwule Kino-Mythos Fassbinder und der heterosexuelle Fluxus-Mythos Vostell waren real nie zusammen. M2 mischte die genetischen Informationen der beiden vermittels von Extrakten, die er aus Blumen von ihren Gräbern gewann, und vereinigte sie in Zeichnungen, die er mit den gewonnen Genommaterialien realisierte. Die Grenzen zwischen Virtualität und Realität verschwimmen.

–

In seinem Bestiarium für Bewusstseine des 21. Jahrhunderts führt M2 nun verschiedene Stränge seiner Arbeit aus den letzten Jahrzehnten zusammen und treibt sie so zu einem Höhepunkt. Wie beim Kapital, das er als Oratorium konzipiert und für das er mehrere Libretti schrieb, treibt er sein Experiment mit der Oper als einer ästhetischen Gattung voran, in der Präzision und Leidenschaft auf besondere Weise miteinander dialogisieren. Klänge werden in visuell wahrnehmbare Muster übersetzt. Im Unterschied zu den legendären Figuren Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladnis aus dem 18. Jahrhundert transformiert er allerdings die zeitlichen Ausdehnungen und Intervalle im Hörbaren nicht nur auf der Fläche, sondern in dreidimensionalen Objekten. Die Klänge werden nach ihrer Verwandlung in Datenpakete als längliche Skulpturen in schreienden Farben ausgedruckt, die auf einer Notation als wellige Informationsstrukturen im wahrsten Sinn des Wortes erfassbar sind. Mit piezo-elektronischen Mikrophonen als Interfaces kann der Besucher der Oper die Oberflächen des Materials abtasten, der experimentelle Apparat übersetzt die dadurch neu entstehenden Klänge wiederum in graphische Strukturen und macht die ursprüngliche Komposition nun als Ergebnis taktiler Begegnungen im Ton-Bild-Werk noch einmal und ganz anders erfahrbar.

–

Dass M2 mit dieser Genomischen Oper einen Beitrag zur Weiterentwicklung des Variantenreichtums unserer biologischen Welt leisten will, den er im zeitgenössischen Standardisierungsschub bedroht sieht, ist eine zusätzliche Leseebene, die zu kennen aber keine notwendige Voraussetzung für den ästhetischen und intellektuellen Genuss des Werkes ist. Wie in Das Kapital entfaltet sich sein Drängen in die nicht zu disziplinierende Heterogenität als Akrobatenakt auf dem Drahtseil, das zwischen Programm und Imagination, zwischen Vorschrift und aus der Zensur drängenden Phantasie über dem Abgrund unserer Wirklichkeit aufgespannt ist.»

–

Siegfried Zielinski, Berlin 2015

8. Exhibition I, 2016:

DIGITAL SYNESTHESIA Exhibition

Opening at Angewandte Innovation Laboratory in Vienna on March 10, 2016

Angewandte Innovation Laboratory
Franz Josefs Kai 3
1010 Vienna, Austria

9. Exhibition II, 2016:

16.05.2016 – 22.05.2016

ISEA2016: 22nd International Symposium on Electronic Art

ISEA International Foundation
C. Kouwenbergzoom 107
3065 KC Rotterdam
The Netherlands

ISEA International Headquarters
University of Brighton
Faculty of Arts
School of Art, Design and Media
Grand Parade
Brighton
BN2 0JY
United Kingdom

10. Book, 2016:

Digital Synesthesia

A Model for the Aesthetics of Digital Art

Edited by: Katharina Gsöllpointner , Ruth Schnell and Romana Karla Schuler

De Gruyterbrill

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, Art, Bologna, Exhibitions, Installation, Language, Performance, Robot05 Bologna, softart, Soundart, Videoart

DELETE

Marcello Mercado

DELETE

Interactive Video Installation

In DELETE, language ceases to be a transparent medium for communication and becomes both subject and residue. Conceived in 2012 as an interactive video installation, the project reflects on the impossibility of truly erasing information within digital and mental architectures. Instead, it proposes the invention of a maintenance-language: an operational system that paradoxically seeks to erase by generating a new linguistic code.

At the core of the installation lies a speculative alphabet composed of 210 graphemes, each detached from conventional meaning. A grapheme in DELETE is not an «A» or a «B,» but a carrier of fluid semantic densities—philosophical texts, visual data, noise, or pure absence. The work articulates what Simon Sheikh has termed a “linguistic act,” wherein the action of writing, speaking, or coding constitutes an autonomous mode of being rather than a tool of communication. In this context, DELETE manifests not merely as a representation of language, but as an ongoing event of linguistic exhaustion and reconfiguration.

Throughout the performance-installation, the artist engages in a glossolalic duel: seated before the audience, typing on a laptop while simultaneously articulating invented sounds. Language here is dismantled, compressed, re-coded, and finally suspended in a liminal state between visibility and erasure. The public is invited to participate, not by deciphering meaning, but by contributing their own residues of thought—thus enacting a collective maintenance of mental debris.

This mechanism resonates with Beatrix Ruf’s reflection on contemporary art’s inclination toward «contaminated systems,» where meaning is always already inflected, unstable, and exposed to collapse. DELETE embraces such contamination, understanding deletion not as a return to purity, but as a continuous cycle of residue production. The act of «deleting» becomes, paradoxically, a generative force—a production of new illegible archives.

The philosophical tension between inscription and annihilation is further underscored by the use of digital tools: projectors, laptops, audio systems, and satellite data streams, all forming a fragile ecology where deletion leaves inevitable traces. In this sense, Daniel Birnbaum’s notion of «chronology loops»—moments where linear time folds back onto itself—is mirrored in DELETE: every attempt at erasure re-inscribes itself, creating new temporalities within the act of forgetting.

Through this critical engagement with language and digital memory, DELETE also echoes the concerns articulated by curators such as Hans Ulrich Obrist and Maria Lind regarding the unstable thresholds between performance, documentation, and residual materiality. What remains after the gesture of deletion is not emptiness but a sedimented field of semiotic debris—a landscape of ghost-meanings.

Finally, the performative logic of DELETE aligns with the traditions of language-performance outlined by RoseLee Goldberg, yet extends them into the space of algorithmic and infrastructural critique. By treating deletion as both a technical impossibility and a poetic necessity, Mercado confronts us with the ultimate paradox of the digital condition: that to erase is, inevitably, to create.

Marcello Mercado

DELETE/ Löschen, 2012

HD single channel video, 10min 05sec

B/W Stereo, 16:9

Interactive Video Installation

Prix Ars Electronica 2012

30.08.2012 – 03.09.2012

Price: Anerkennung – Honorary Mention
Category: Interactive Art
Marcello Mercado
Löschen/ DELETE [+]

ARS ELECTRONICA ARCHIVE – PRIX

DELETE, Performed by Marcello Mercado, Palazzo Re Enzo (Bologna), Call4roBOt, 2005

Marcello Mercado, DELETE, Installation, La Ira de Dios Gallery; Buenos Aires, 2014

26 abril, 2025 In 3D scanners, A.I., Animation, Archive, Berlin, Bioart, Collection, Das Kapital, Denmark, Drawings, Film, Genéve, Gödel, Grant MacArthur Foundation, Installation, Kapital, Köln, Media, Music, Music Notations, paintings, Performance, Radio, softart, Soundart, Texts, Videoart

Transitory Artefacts: : A Journey through Time and Media

Marcello Mercado

Transitory Artefacts: : A Journey through Time and Media

2000 -2025

Dead Code Anatomies

The Economy of Residues: Temporal Assemblages of Capital and Body

Gödel Suite, 2009

Marcello Mercado: Gödel Devices and Epistemic Apparatuses: A Performative Construction (Geneva, 2006)

Marcello Mercado: Images become containers; containers become images: A Performance in Seven Movements, 2005

DELETE

Bestiary for the Minds of the 21st Century: Genomic Opera

transferring, storing, sharing and hybriding: The perfect humus

Trace, Burn, Archive, 2005 – 2008

Index – Generator, Performance, 2004

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

Human Genome re-Activation – Low Lives 3 International Festival of Live Networked Performances, 2011

To whom belongs the Time?

How to explain to a dead mole the difference between…? Performance, 2001

Azimuth 77, Performance, 2006

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Images become containers; containers become images: A Performance in Seven Movements, 2005

Images become containers; containers become images: A Performance in Seven Movements

2005

Conceptual Framework
This performance unfolds within a conceptual triangle: Max Weber’s reading of Calvinism as the ethical substrate of capitalism, John Calvin’s moral rehabilitation of profit through moderation and discipline, and Karl Marx’s critique of capital’s capacity to profit from catastrophe. The work weaves biography, theology, botany, and financial history into a live epistemological and aesthetic protocol.

Movement I: Grave Visit / Extraction

Location: Geneva, Switzerland
On the first day, I visited the unadorned grave of John Calvin, marked No. 707, in the Cimetière des Rois. The site itself resists monumentality, mirroring Calvin’s ascetic rejection of iconography. In a gesture of symbolic extraction, I collected a branch of Ligustrum vulgare (common privet), growing near the burial site—an act of vegetal sampling, situated between pilgrimage and appropriation.

Max Weber relates John Calvin to the emergence of a Protestant ethic that permits—and even values—economic activities such as lending money with interest, something that had been prohibited or morally condemned in medieval Catholic tradition. This connection appears mainly in his work «The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism», first published between 1904 and 1905.

Breaking with the traditional condemnation of interest
In the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church condemned usury (charging interest on loans), based on biblical interpretations. Profit in itself was viewed negatively. However, John Calvin reinterpreted Scripture and argued that charging interest was not intrinsically immoral, as long as it was done in moderation and without exploiting those in need. This was a key shift in the moral view of money and its use.
Rationalization of work and profit
Weber explains that Calvinism promoted a worldview in which hard work, discipline, and the accumulation of wealth were signs of being «chosen» by God. Within the framework of predestination (a core Calvinist doctrine), believers could not know whether they were saved, so they looked for external signs—such as economic success and morally austere living—as confirmation of their «election.»
Moral validation of lending and capital
In this new context, lending money with interest becomes a rational and legitimate activity, even virtuous when done responsibly. It is part of the ethos of emerging capitalism: not only permitted, but seen as an ordered, planned act useful for economic development.

Weber shows that Calvinist thought profoundly changed the view of money, interest, and labor. What was once a sin became a virtue, provided it was embedded in a framework of rationality, self-discipline, and ascetic morality. Thus, the economy ceased to be in conflict with religion and began to merge with ethics, preparing the cultural and ideological ground for modern capitalism.

Movement II: Botanical Intervention / DNA Extraction

Location: Hotel Room, Geneva
Within a sterile setting—a generic hotel room, echoing the impersonal logic of global capitalism—I conducted a basic DNA extraction from the Ligustrum specimen. This laboratory-like act evoked both Calvinist precision and the mechanization of life processes. Here, Calvin’s reformative spirituality meets post-genomic materiality.

Movement III: Transmutation / Chromatic Alchemy

Location: Cologne, Germany
Back in my studio in Köln, I initiated a chromatic transmutation. The extracted DNA was blended with Sambucus nigra (elderberry) dye, a historically potent pigment and medicinal agent, and traditional oil paint. This hybrid preparation—organic, symbolic, and technological—became the material substrate for the pictorial phase. It was both painting medium and biosemiotic archive.

Movement IV: Marxist Re-Inscription / Portraits of the Unrecorded

Drawing on Karl Marx’s account of the Vulcan Street fire (Chapter 25, Capital, Volume I), where tragedy becomes surplus, I imagined two anonymous victims of that fire—lives erased by both bureaucracy and economic abstraction. Their absent presences were re-embodied through two paintings of heads, rendered with the DNA-oil-elderberry mixture. The brushwork recalled the gestural instability of memory under erasure.

Marcello Mercado

Unknown I

42cm x 59,4cm, mixed media on paper

2005

Marcello Mercado

Unknown II

42cm x 59,4cm, mixed media on paper

2005

Movement V: Flames / Asphalt Syntax

With the remaining hybrid material, I painted four tongues of flame—abstract yet evocative—superimposing layers of asphalt paint. The black industrial texture referenced both the ruins of capital and the corporeality of urban collapse. These paintings functioned as devotional icons to entropy: combustion as symbol, system, and soul.