GenTerra, 2001, performance at St. Norbert Art and Culture Center, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada [Enlarge in New Window]

Critical Art Ensemble: GenTerra

In the mid to late 1990s, the notion of tactical media was practically synonymous with the Critical Art Ensemble, self-described as "an anarchist study group with a name that sounds like an improvisational jazz band." Founded in 1987, the small collective (membership has fluctuated over the years between two and seven) was initially devoted to exploring the ways in which media might be used to subvert various structures of power. Now the group is at the center of another movement, namely the critical appraisal of biotechnology currently being led by artists.

CAE's central status in the tactical media movement was due in part to the 1994 publication of their influential manifesto The Electronic Disturbance, which succinctly outlines the state of things in a new global information society and offers ideas for resistance. The book was followed in 1995 by a companion text, Electronic Civil Disobedience, which further outlines potential opportunities for political resistance among networked tacticians. The following year, the collective's interests and focus evolved, moving into biotechnology. Steve Kurtz, one of the current five members, says that for him, a specific incident helped spark the shift: he recalls attending a conference and a colleague asked if he wanted to see a photograph of his son--at eight cells! "It was immediately clear that we'd entered a new age of representation," notes Kurtz.

Thus, the group decided to continue exploring ways in which the body was being technologized, but to move from a focus on representation into the realm of biology. "It became apparent to us that there was only so much technology the body could handle," continues Kurtz. "So the body would have to be fully rationalized, every bit would have to be designed, every cell, every molecule would have to be figured out in terms of what would be optimum." The idea of such extensive somatic design led the group to reproductive technologies, and their first project was Flesh Machine (1997-98), which looked at eugenics as central to a capitalist enterprise dedicated to "the total rationalization of culture." Like most of CAE's current work, the project created settings for participants to explore issues firsthand, in this case by answering questionnaires designed by the industry of reproductive medicine to assess the quality of their own genetic material.

CAE's latest project is GenTerra, a work-in-progress that addresses the creation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Collaborating with them is Beatriz da Costa, who describes herself as "a machine artist and tactical media practitioner." "The original idea was to try to do a participatory theater project that would get people hands-on involved in the production of these transgenic organisms," explains Kurtz. "Our feeling was that people seemed to have an unreasonable fear of GMOs and this is counterproductive in terms of resistance. There are some GMOs that are actually good, and others that are pollutants for profit. For us, the question was, 'How can we set up a sphere where people can sort through their feelings?' So GenTerra was all about creating those dialogues around policies that deal with transgenics."

In an early version, GenTerra brought together performers dressed in lab coats, a bank of computers, and groups of participants. They were led through various stages in which they learned about transgenics, seeing examples of positive and negative results; at each stage, participants were able to make a series of decisions, with the final decision being whether or not to release a transgenic organism into the environment. "As you take people through the different stations, the stakes get higher," explains Kurtz. "There are more questions. People begin to have a very different level of speaking about things; it's lived, it's not abstract."

The project's latest manifestation is the publication of the group's fifth book, The Molecular Invasion, and an exhibition by the same name. The show embodies the possibility of what Kurtz calls biological civil disobedience, in this case via the modification of food biotechnology company Monsanto's insidious RoundUP Ready farm crops. The group is reverse-engineering them, with the hope of taking the plants' traits for adaptability and making them ones for susceptibility. When asked how artists are able to fiddle around with genetics, Kurtz says, "We're not scientists, but what we can do is conduct investigations that take advantage of scientific knowledge and scientific process."

[ About this article ]

THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Emerging Fields > Performance Art / Theater / Spoken Word | Labor | Politics | New York | 2002