Bioeconomics - Steve Kurtz

When you talk about Political Economy, Gene Technologies and Biotechnologies and their application, it's very difficult to separate these areas out. In fact I don't really know if you can do it completely. You can't separate them by saying, "here's the knowledge production over here and then here's the application of it and it's contextualisation in the world" - it doesn't work and leads to confusion.

So one of the things that Critical Art Ensemble has been exploring rather rigorously is the representation. What are the representations being used by those who are producing and using the applications of Biotechnology. I believe that those people have a real problem - and this is the kind of work that Critical Art Ensemble gets into. One of the projects we were in fact going to do here but weren't able to get it off the ground was a project called the Gen Terra Project which was trying to address the issue of "where does the fear component from this technology come from".

Sorry, the Genterra Research Team, we'll get to them in a minute.

We started thinking about this as "why is there typically a knee jerk reaction against various kinds of genetic modification, GM food or any other uses of the technology. Where does this fear come from? Because there is a very non rational side to it.

I'm not saying there aren't a lot of justifiable reasons why people should be nervous about it but just for a minute look over to this other side of, that there is something that is just internal that makes one think twice if someone comes up and says here's something that's genetically modified would you like to put this into you.

Do you want to consume it and let it loose in your digestive system and wherever it may go from there.

As we started with that consideration we thought how far back humanity has reacted to new certain technologies.

In fact we can talk about the wings example that Oron and Ionat brought up. One of our fundamental myths is the Myth of Icarus - the boy with wings. While God has been putting wings on Angels, Satan has been putting them on Demons and we don't want the Demons putting them on anything else otherwise we all have a problem. These ideas of recombination suggest that there are no more boundaries and that there's a sense of transversality and this is something that is completely out of our realm. We don't want it - we don't want to be playing God. These themes have been with us since the Bible, Roman Myth and if we move to the Medieval period it becomes even crazier with an almost categorised definition of the beasts. It then gets more legitimised.

What the Natural is, that there's a natural chain of things, that these boundaries should not be crossed under any circumstances and if there is there will be immediate punishment. Similarly, if we go to nineteenth century Gothic novels and talk about Vampires or into the contaminated and polluted twentieth century - cinema provides us with The Fly or Mimic - recombinant monstrous creatures. But the constant is that the monstrous and the recombinant are inseparable.

Living in today's world, you are enveloped in the inescapable bombardment of spectacular images during our waking hours. It is almost impossible to not internalise this. I can have all the rational thoughts I want about GM products, but I still get a little nervous about it all.

No matter how much I work with it in the lab it's always in the back of my mind.

Now why is it continuously reinforced. Well if you take the 'natural argument', this construction of nature as having very clear boundaries (whether we want to call it God's domain or Species domain to use the more secular system) we get to that same conclusion - don't mess with it - because if you do, the punishment's coming. Hence this strange endless fear.

These natural categories are easily imported into social and cultural contexts. This is what the Capitalist Ideology is founded on - separation and alienation. Even though it's irrational - for example miscegenation and immigration it works.

Even these simple but feared issues have a recombinant flavour to them and Capitalism has a real investment in maintaining these fears if it wants to maintain its' imperial qualities in global economy, in the same way it had during the imperialist economy of the nineteenth century.

But now we have genetics for profit. All of a sudden the recombinant is not a fairy tale, of God's domain. Transversality of DNA is real, it's profitable and it's a major revolution. The contradiction strikes by the need to maintain the Colonial attitudes while at the same time convincing people to think that this transversality is acceptable.

In the US, the main strategy has been the acknowledgement that three thousand years of a certain mythology is not going to be overturned. So they deploy all the technology they want and tell the public later - simple as that. If you've been to the US in the last ten years, you've eaten GM food.

What we wanted to do was to almost share with the Capitalist concern viz. "how do we neutralise these irrational fears.

How do get some type of rational discourse and tools out there to think about this problem in another way. And that's where the Gen Terra Project began.

I am of the view that there are well engineered products and then there are pollutants for profit. There are various kinds of Gene Technology that are going down a dangerous ramp or that are just on a contested rap and in the case of that which is contested I am on the side of proceeding with caution. There's lots of well engineered creatures that are actually useful - that could function in the public interest.

Food production could be great because if we added GM processes we can up the rate of production and the "great model of this of course is enough food to feed the hungry world".

Fundamentally though this is an absolute fabrication. The problem of how do we feed the world was solved decades ago with industrial farming. We can feed the world now.

Any place where there is famine and starvation - it's a political not a production issue. Look at Somalia, why are people starving there? Because there wasn't enough food, the food was sitting on the docks rotting. A Communist Government that was trying to legitimise itself and at the same time burn off some excess population it didn't need, wasn't going to let the food move from where it was to the people that needed it. Look at Afghanistan - again political. "You know there won't be enough here in Australia if we feed the Afghanis". So here you get the rhetoric that is an absolute fabrication - a problem that doesn't exist.

In terms of the knowledge idea, swapping DNA could be quite a boom in certain ways. This was one of the issues that Gen Terra was grappling with - first to deliver risk assessment tools and second to try and do it in a way where we could play on irrational fears as a means to create dramatic theatre. And the way that we did this was first through informational cites which is where people would start. For those of you who are making this style of installation/performance work, it's very hard to get people to read material. When people go to see an art show or the theatre, they don't want to read a lot of material, so you realise very quickly that if you want to get this information across you have to create some participatory urgency in some way.

And so what we told them,

We posed in this case as a kind of pseudo green corporation, the model where supposedly you do have public interest at heart but you won't sacrifice profit at the same time. We then took a number of products we found interesting for either good or bad reasons and made them our own. It should be noted that as a principle, we don't recognise IP.

Let me introduce you to your first live transgenic creature that's already deployed in the field - so if anyone hates it too late. It's a bacteria that's designed to eat oil and it's used in oil slick containers. It's quite a handy creature to have about and to deploy and the nice thing about it is that it's engineered well. Its engineered with full kill switches so that once the oil - it's food source - is gone the bacteria can't live. It's particularly useful in ocean environments because as soon as it hits saline liquid it's dead, so it's not going to go out and form yet another odd type of bacteria that's going to lead to contamination of the oceanic ecosystem.

On the negative side, its still unknown whether BT Corn is killing the Green Lace Wing or Monarchs. There are studies on both sides neither of which have achieved conclusive results. Both the USDA and the FDA are in bed with the Biotech corporations. They will grant licences for products under any definition that would not fit in the frame of scientific rigour. They don't demand sufficient replications and they don't seek checks from independent sources. The corporation applying for the licence can come up with all its own data. You don't need to have a PHD in science to understand that there's a problem with scientific methodology and an obvious conflict of interest.

At the other end of the spectrum, those that are trying to show that BT may be a problem either as a super weed or soil toxin or in terms of non target species kill, find it very difficult to undertake meaningful studies that will produce conclusive results. So here's an example where its best to err on the side of caution.

So we had all of this going and we would chat with people about these various options.

But then you finally got to your first one and this was our Transgenic Bacteria Release Machine and we used the standard bacteria that is used for DNA cloning in general Genomic research. It's E Coli. For those who are familiar with E Coli you know that it is a very friendly bacteria. It's in us, its on us and we couldn't live with out it.

This is another example of a really well designed transgenic - scientists knew they would be using it all the time. They took an incredible amount of care in designing this particular bacteria. Probably its best feature is its digestive system - its been designed so that it can't make all the protein it needs because it can't absorb all twenty amino acids that go into protein. If its one amino acid short, it has to have special food that is in its petrii dish. So if it goes hopping out of its petri dish, it wouldn't be able to sustain itself. Additionally, this bacteria is so crammed with human DNA that whenever it reproduces, it has to reproduce the extra chromosome of DNA. This slows its reproduction rate dramatically and ultimately wouldn't be able to complete with wild bacteria.

It's a very safe, well engineered creature and useful creature that you can't complain about too much. However when you tell people that this a recombinant creature, the recombinant fears are set off in people. This is heightened with the normal response to a bacteria which is to kill it. Whole industries are based on the extermination of germs, but in reality it's a tiny percentage that are in any way harmful.

The question is then "are you willing to release it into the public space?" Some people are and some aren't. If we do our job well actually they will press the roulette wheel of bacteria and find out what happens. We'll say, "what you should do, what you really need is your own pet colony to take home". We'll actually we let the people do it - streak out your own genetic bacteria into a petri dish and watch the colony grow a full human geno in it. Under regular circumstances this is an uncontrolled release.

In creating the performative aspects of this idea, we ran into a spectacle problem. Whether developing shows in Australia or the US, scientists will say off the record it would be fine if you did this, but the public reaction would be insane and they are not prepared to take responsibility for this. Risk assessment issues come up. Now we know this is safe but (this is especially true in litigious US) but we are not willing to challenge these issues in the courts.

The end result is that our little dramatic performance is a little too intense for many. The institutionalised public fear rises again, amplified back in an even grander form.

Everyone protect your domain. And so through this piece we tried our best to try and figure through this things. Someone with their own particular plate there at the end. So that was one of the places that we really started thinking to how did these representations come to be in such a way.

Now I am going to come back to that cause one of the things we do in addition to Pedigatual work? cause we do Direct Action work as well and it also goes back to the question of access which the panel before was trying to examine a little bit. And my motto is that you have to have a complete rove model, a complete parasitic model to really get these things done, but anyway.

I want now to touch briefly on another of our performance works - Cult of the New Eve. Picture us all in our outfits - a combination of the Heaven's Gate Suicide Cult and the Unibomber. Cult of the New Eve was trying to address the rhetoric that was being used (particularly by scientists) to calm the publics' fears. As I said previously, in the US the usual strategy is to say nothing and go ahead and develop/release anyway but some sectors have been quite aggressive developing a type of Utopian Rhetoric that promises a better future in some way. We saw it with ICT, every time you see a Bill Gates commercial, a Xerox commercial or an AT&T commercial - its always the same promise - one is optimisation another convenience. "Things are going to be so much easier." The implication is "you're going do less work when this happens - so get yourself a computer, it's going make your life easier". We know now, all that does is increase labour intensity. You're not going to be getting less work, you're are probably going be getting more work and not only that, because you have a machine you're going to be expected to do twice as much as you did before.

Much of this rhetoric was developed in the Enlightenment - we are going to be one world - the global village. Technology is an extension of the body, the McLauenist Thesis. When you start talking about BioTech, that we are going to have some extensions of the body, that we are going to re-engineer the body, not only do the old fears click in, but then you have the good old first round of we're going to engineer the body in a biological sense.

Its Eugenics all over again and that makes people very nervous. Cultural memory isn't that strong but there's enough of it for us to know that the set of promises that come from the Enlightenment are not going to work.

However if you are in Western society, there's only one other public rhetoric left - the Christian rhetoric - the promise of miracles. Technology will deliver medical miracles - we're going to heal the sick, the lame shall walk, the Alzheimer's shall think.

It was listening to an Entrepreneurial Scientist called Lee Hood that got us thinking about this project. He is a very significant person in the human genome project and I went to hear one of his pitch sessions and he opened his lecture with (and I quote) "I am going to make you all immortal". We have all of these tools that promise to create a New Eden. The fact that the Genome Project is described as the Holy Grail or (my favourite) the words echoed by President Bill Clinton that the Genome Project is God's Blueprint.

The problem with all this is that thing is that it is believable when a scientist says it - up there in a white coat, the stamp of authority - all those positive symbols. It makes it all sound so possible.

So we decided it was time to rethink this rhetoric - and the best way to do that was to take the same messages from the most believable place and send it from the least believable place. In other words take it from the mouth of the scientist and put it into the mouth of a cult figure. No one believes a word they say. So this was our starting point.

We performed it on the street - we hassled people with leaflets - we tried to get people to take communion with us.

The term New Eve came from the first donor of DNA in the beginning in the Human Genome Project. This single DNA sample was taken from a woman in Buffalo US. We decided to take her Geno and splice it into some yeast and we took the yeast and made beer and cookies with it.

So there it is - Eugenically pure. This was our communion - instead of wine and a cracker with us when you say your getting Eve, your getting Eve!

This is where we learned how deep the fear runs - as you would expect not many people were enthusiastic about this particular proposition.

An example of our Direct Action projects is the case against "round up ready canola" which has become a super weed. We performed Gen Terra in the Winnipeg Farmers Market and all the farmers were complaining about it - they didn't know how to kill it. The beautiful thing about GM species is that any trait of adaptability can also become its ultimate trait of susceptibility. And so we are working on the enzyme that is in "round up ready" plants to develop an inhibiter that stops aromatic amino acid creation. We believe we have found a good compound - at least it works in the lab. So we are trying to make that into a 'defence kit' for the farmers. Next step is field testing.

© Steve Kurtz 2002