Genesis (1999) focuses on the creation of an “artist’s gene.” The Genesis DNA is a synthetic gene that was created by Kac by translating a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis into Morse Code and converting the Morse Code into DNA base pairs according to a conversion principle specially developed by the artist for this work. (1) The gene was then incorporated into an E. coli. bacterium. Using the Internet (and a computer station in the gallery), visitors can switch on an ultraviolet light that triggers mutations in the bacterium. Little by little, the quote from the Bible is also mutated.

Since the early 1980s, Eduardo Kac has delved into many artistic genres and practices, including performance, poetry and telecommunications art (telephone, fax, television, telematics). During the 1990s, he undertook a series of art projects that he dubbed “transgenic.” This term, adopted by Kac, designates an art form whose subject, object and methods draw on genetic engineering and whose goal is to create unique living hybrids. (2) The prefix “trans” denotes the exchange or transformation of genetic material, its transfer from one code to another and from one reality to another. Genesis demonstrates what other works concede only rarely, if at all – that they act as “shifters,” (3)   transferring between reality, technology and language (the symbolic). And it is for this reason that the use of the biblical verse is so determining; it is programmable in both the literal and figurative sense of the word and allows for a transfer from linguistic to genetic code to create a living being.

Kac was in the news in recent years with his project GFP Bunny (2000). In a laboratory in France, with the help of scientists, he created a phosphorescent green rabbit, named Alba by Kac, his wife and daughter. GFP or green fluorescent protein was expressed in the genetic code of an albino rabbit, which gave it the property of becoming fluorescent under a blue or ultraviolet light, much like certain jellyfish found in the Pacific Ocean that produce the GFP protein.

But how, exactly, do this project and Genesis differ from the genetic manipulations of scientists and industrialists who patent genetically modified seeds? Firstly, by asking this very question. These works force us to examine the ethical, political, cultural and social issues currently facing the world, as Kac has done extensively in his writings. The art practised by Kac is for him dialogic: it is based on a dialogue among many professionals across a range of disciplines (science, art, philosophy, social science, law) as well as with the general public on the cultural consequences of genetic manipulation. The creation of modified life forms brings with it a responsibility for the creature thus brought into existence. The dialogical rule requires both a social and cultural dialogic space and the recognition of otherness and intersubjectivity as the foundation of the very concept of subjectivity. Kac presents radical intersubjectivity experiments. Genesis, writes Kac, “is a transgenic artwork that explores the intricate relationship between biology, belief systems, information technology, dialogical interaction, ethics, and the Internet.” (4) Above all, it is a work that forces us to examine the creative and destructive power of humans – a power we inherited along with words and numbers.