Revisiting Genesis: Living as Misspelling

Abstract

This paper revisits the online documentation of Eduardo Kac’s work Genesis (1999) in order to address the problematic of embodiment as it emerges in the process of specta(c)torship afforded by this work. The central piece of Genesis consisted in a genetically modified bacteria which incorporated an artist-designed synthetic gene created by translating into DNA base pairs a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis. The reading that I propose problematizes the meaning of the human body in view of the complex entanglement of living and technological systems that appears in this work. Relying on elements from the archival theory formulated by Jacques Derrida, this paper reads Genesis as an attempt to playfully undo the origin (the human master of nature, and the associated duality between culture and nature) form inside the very history that this origin grounds, by folding into one another the cultural archive of the written biblical fragment, the technological archive that makes the work possible, and the DNA as an archive of chemical sequences that constitutes the fundament of life. The article also raises the question of how to address environmental crisis from a perspective that does not rely on the figure of the human and on the nature/culture divide.