“My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind.”
(Ovid, Metamorphoses)
The conventional uses of biotechnology have been focused at the scale of the miniature: uniform multiples of the pill, the seed and the computer chip designed and coded for industrial application. Recently however a new utilization of this technology has emerged. In Malaysia, there is now a biotech facility that engineers new hybrids of orchids.The science here is used to create objects of sensorial desire. One of the first new orchids introduced is the chocolate orchid, an orchid engineered to literally smell like chocolate. A bioengineered osmic organism designed to trigger the emotion and memory of love.
The possibility indeed exists to begin literally to conceive and design new methods of aesthetic invention and to explore and redefine ideas of beauty. Individual plants, groupings of species, and even entire ecosystems, can be biologically crafted with the precision and control of production methods within creative traditions.
These advances in genetic science and the confluence of computer, bio, and nano technologies have opened up the possibility of a completely mutable universe, providing metamorphoses that extend from those in Ovid: While his beings transformed themselves from one known form into another known form, we are poised to transform known forms into unknown forms.
These possibilities of forms dictated by the imagination introduce aesthetics as a fundamental organizational component to biology.
“(…) Nature’s malleability demonstrates an invitation to the “artificial”. Nature is a blind bricoleur , an elementary logic of combinations, yielding an infinity of potential differences. (…) If the word “nature” is to retain a meaning, it must signify an uninhibited polyphenomenality of display. Once understood in this way, the only natural thing for man to do would be to facilitate, encourage and accelerate its unfurling - thematic variation, not rigor mortis.”
(Paul Rabinow, “Artificiality and Enlightenment”)
The methods and practice of biotechnology can transform the role of the artist in relation to the creation and production of cultural objects. A new “genetic” artist can develop unique organisms by manipulating strands of DNA and then watching the organism grow itself. Moreover, by utilizing the methods derived from biochemistry and microbiology, this process would never become static or complete, but through direct intervention and redefinition continue to grow, adapt and respond to creative desire.
The primary creative role is at the level of DNA. Composition becomes the invention of the colour, forms, responses, growth speeds and other physical qualities of the new plant species. In genetic creative production, the project would not be conventionally drawn and complete. The “drawing” would exist within the immediate landscape, constantly and continuously metamorphosing in form, colour and typography. The process is more akin to an orchestration of the materials that comprise life. The instruments transform throughout the performance; the violin becoming an oboe that is stroked.
By working with the composition of DNA characteristics, the artist is allowed not only to engage the forms generated by the process, but to design the responses and behaviors of the living and interactive organisms, taking a very deliberate involvement in the principles of embodiment. One can now compose the auras of the substances themselves.
What are the implications of metamorphic objects and metamorphic perceptions?
My work is the virtual and material exploration of biotechnology in terms of its effects upon psychotechnology and aesthetics. It continually investigates the potentials of resultant emerging cultural technologies and their impact upon the cultural ground of perception. The research specifically focuses upon the five senses and how they are transformed through this new aesthetization of biology. The work redefines biotechnology as a cultural device as opposed to exclusively utilitarian. Moreover it engenders sensorial desire within biological functionality.
These explorations consider the design and composition of organisms at a range of scales -from cellular infrastructures to physically immersive environments.
Early hand drawings reference early biological illustration of cellular structure. This grouping is derived specifically from the species of mimosa plants, or sensitivity plants such as the Venus flytrap. New combinations developed into organisms with behaviors that could be responsive to human occupation comprising a living surface that pulls towards or retreat away from a presence. Phosphorescent algeas combine with stiff root and branching filaments to trigger light which could trace movements beneath its surface. Functionalities were then given a more tangible dimensionality and viscosity within the composition of larger infrastructures.
In anticipation of the possibility of the evolution of the plant “anima”, behaviors are designed with the potential to express a consciousness. Like human hands, objects originally designed for nutrition and protection evolve into the devices to communicate language and thought.
This process is also considered over time. As ruptures in the surface are created by occupation, ingestion, and the processes of decomposition and decay, how does the design respond?
The development of this reflexive environment makes us imagine a new way of living. Could cities and their architecture eventually exist in an entirely organic state without renouncing the technological infrastructure that sustains the workings of human society and culture?
This technological weaving of digital and biological functionality could continue to modify the living organism but additionally it could conduct other kinds of information and communications within a new “networked” ecosystem. By conducting electronic or ultra violet stimulation to organisms pre-programmed with phosphorescent characteristics, these light emissions could be reconfigured and controlled to generate legible visual information. It could become a kind of organic screen functioning at a variety of scales. Imagine current forms of communication evolving into the reading of flickers of light in the leaves of grass, or the branches of a tree.
In terms of traditional forms of architectural construction and enclosure, new species could be engineered to create a community of interconnected plants that create a totally living and growing dwelling that could respond to the movements of its occupant. The notion of an architectural construction existing in a static form upon completion would end. Not only could the production of food and the modulation of light be controlled, but also the very forms of the construction could change over time.
If a new wall is desired or a cantilever becomes structurally necessary, it could be rapidly grown by stimulating the embedded infrastructure. The Plant Anima Project, like the new environment it proposes, is an ongoing project. Investigations continue into the implications of this new cultural technology upon social, economic, and artistic evolution.
The Organs (from a series of 40 evolutions)
With human intervention evolution is no longer blind, and what follows is the aesthetization of biology that is then linked to art and its original fetishistic quality. Perhaps some of these transformed beings will have recaptured the aura that Walter Benjamin deemed lost, and become objects of desire and veneration such as the idols described by Roberto Calasso:
“Behind what the Greeks called eídolon, which is at once the idol, the statue, the simulacrum, the phantom, lies the mental image. This fanciful and insubstantial creature imitates the world and at the same time subjects it to a frenzy of different combinations, confounding its forms in inexhaustible proliferation. It emanates a prodigious strength, our awe of what we see in the invisible. It has all the features of the arbitrary, of what is born in the dark, from formlessness, the way our world was perhaps once born.”
The primary function and nature of this work is the study and creation of culturally meaningful aesthetic perception. This goal lends poignancy, for while the Plant Anima project proposes a creative methodology involving processes derived from technologically positivist ideals, the engineering remains ultimately at the service of beauty.
Aniko Meszaros’ research and practice involves the design of complex environments comprised of responsive and metamorphosing elements, both natural and artificial. Research into ingredients of natural organic and inorganic phenomena combine everything from insects and plants to rainstorms with the technologies of immersive digital interface, artificial intelligence and biotechnological engineering to form the basis of her unique investigation towards practical implementation.
Aniko’s formative education is in architecture, having received degrees in Environmental Studies and Architecture from the University of Waterloo in Canada and her Masters with distinction from the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, UK. While living in London, she began to develop a methodology for the Plant Anima project in collaboration with the Microbiology department of the University College of London. She is currently a research fellow at the McLuhan Progam in Culture and Technology.
