1. Introduction

Exhibited for the first time in 1999 at Ars Electronica, Genesis is a work by Eduardo Kac that “explores the intricate relationship between biology, belief systems, information technology, dialogical interaction, ethics and the Internet” (Kac, 1999, para. 1). The central piece consists of a Petri dish with two kinds of genetically modified bacteria, one of them incorporating a synthetic gene that was created by translating a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis (“Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon earth”) into Morse Code, and subsequently converting the Morse Code into DNA base pairs. Mutations occur in the synthetic gene as the result of natural bacterial multiplication processes, interactions between the two different kinds of bacteria, and human-activated UV radiation (Kac, 1999). Live music, based on the DNA sequences of the bacteria, was produced using an algorithm designed by Peter Gena in collaboration with Dr. Charles Strom.¹ Live video and audio recordings of the work were streamed on the web, and the online spectators were allowed to control the UV light, turning it on or off, and thus accelerating or slowing down the mutation rate of the bacteria. At the end of the show, the DNA sequence of the synthetic gene was decoded and translated back into plain English revealing the mutations that the text has suffered (Kac, 1999).

Rather than trying to explain the work as a stable object, or to place it in the context of Eduardo Kac’s art practice, the present paper focuses on analyzing a specific instance of specta(c)torship afforded by this work, and on unpacking its consequences.

We have to start with a short clarification of the terminology. I use the term specta(c)torship, inspired by Augusto Boal’s spect-actor (Boal, 2008), in order to point towards an interplay of activity and passivity that is inherent in the encounter with the artwork, an interplay that in the last instance bears upon the being and becoming of the embodied subjectivity of the spectator.² In other words, the underlying methodological claim that grounds this paper is that the critical exercise is not a means of stabilizing the meaning of the artwork by passing judgements regarding a clearly defined object, but rather a way of further complexifying the work of art by problematizing its consequences upon the embodied spectator. As Jacques Rancière’s theory of the partition of the sensible (Rancière, 2006) suggests, it is one’s entire experience of the world that is at stake in the encounter with the artwork, and not merely passing a judgement (aesthetic or otherwise) upon an object (artwork) that remains exterior to the embodied subjectivity of the spectator.

Genesis proposes at least three instances of specta(c)torship: first, there are the spectators that experience the work in the gallery space during the original exhibitions, a direct encounter with an artwork that is literally alive; second, there are the spectators that visit the work online during its live exhibition and have the chance of interacting with it by turning on and off the UV light, hence having a direct influence upon the life of the bacteria and their evolution; and third, there are the spectators who access the online documentation of the Genesis in a space and time seemingly remote from the life of the work. The present paper focuses on this third instance of specta(c)torship, engaging with the theoretical issues that tend to emerge with a heightened urgency in this case.

David Hunt, in a text for the gallery brochure of the Genesis exhibition at Julia Friedman Gallery in 2001, observes that “we enter the Genesis exhibition in the same free-form, subjective manner that one might use to burrow into the core of a hypertext novel” (Hunt, 2001, para. 3). Hunt underlines two aspects of this hyper-textual nature of Genesis with respect to the processes of specta(c)torship that it affords. The first one is the freedom of the spectator to wander throughout the gallery and approach each part of the work in whatever sequence they choose, constantly zooming in and out as Genesis carries them from the micro-level of bacterial DNA to the macro narratives of language, history, and biology. The second one is the existence of multiple readings of a single overriding story structure (Hunt, 2001). The parallel that Hunt proposes, between the structure of hypertext fiction and the Genesis exhibition, already hints towards the fact that a reading of the work as it appears through its hyper-textual online documentation might be more relevant than it seems at first glance. Following this understanding, we could argue that the process of online specta(c)torship proposed by the hyper-text online documentation of Genesis is, in a sense, already foreshadowed by the structure of the live version of the work.

In other words, the online documentation, instead of being a marginal excrescence removed from the work itself, is rather at the core of the work from the very beginning through the type of specta(c)torship that the work proposes. This perspective is also confirmed by the fact that the documentation is a constitutive part of Genesis from the very beginning: while providing a powerful sensorial experience for the gallery spectator, nonetheless, the work always points backwards towards the documentation (be it online or offline) of the process through which it emerged (the transcription of the biblical phrase into the DNA, the genetic modifications of the bacteria, etc.). This is simply to say that the experience proposed by Genesis would be completely different without access to the documented history of its emergence. The inclusion of an important online component (online access to live audio-video streaming of the work, and the possibility of turning the UV light on and off) further emphasizes the complex intertwining between the online and offline processes of specta(c)torship that the work affords.

This is not to collapse the differences between the three instances of specta(c)torship identified above, but to underline that there is no simple line going from the immediate presence of the live work in the gallery, to its weaker presence mediated by the technologies that subtend the internet and finally to a documentation that is merely an online trace of a past presence. Rather the understanding of immediate embodied presence and remoteness is complicated by inscribing the experience of online specta(c)torship at the very core of the immediate presence of the work.

In the last instance, this constitutes the problematic folding into one another of different archival layers present in the work. The process of online specta(c)torship with respect to the documentation of the work is a specific way of navigating a cultural³ archive (the webpages comprising the documentation) subtended by a specific technology (the internet in its materiality), while at the same time Genesis problematizes the relationship between the cultural archive (the biblical fragment), the DNA as a bio-chemical archive that drives the life of the bacteria, and the complex technological milieu that shapes this relationship. Turning our attention to the process of specta(c)torship afforded by the online documentation of Genesis, hence brings to the fore the problematic of a complex intertwining of archival layers. What does it mean to navigate an online archive of traces relating to a work that playfully problematizes the meaning of DNA as a material archive that grounds all life? And what does that do? What does it mean that this cultural archive that we navigate is subtended by a specific technological network that is already deeply embedded in my day-to-day experience, but also participates in the modifications of the bio-chemical archives that support life?

The problematic that opens up in process of specta(c)torship that Genesis affords, and that this paper attempts to explore, is predicated on the complex relationship between (1) cultural archives — the written words inscribed in the living bacteria, the online documentation of the work; (2) the DNA as an archive that grounds the possibility of life as we know it; and (3) the technological complex that makes the work and the online documentation of its traces possible, itself a very specific type of archive. The stringent questions that emerge are: How do these three types of archives function with respect to one another? What does it happen (and what does it mean) when they are folded into one another?⁴

2. The question of embodied subjectivity

Since the live exhibitions of Genesis (1999/2001) the extent to which our own experience of the world, in its assumed immediacy, is grounded by the potentialities of the technologies that underlie the internet became more and more clear. If, following Bernard Stiegler, we understand the question of technology as being inherent to what it means to be human (Stiegler, 1998), the claim that a particular technology, almost ubiquitous in our western societies today, shapes our experience of the world in its immediacy, comes as no surprise.

It is important to note though, that the influence of the internet upon the embodied experience of the world is not something that comes from the outside to modify a pristine way of being in the world, but participates, along with other technologies, in the coagulation of the experience of the world in the first place. The world comes to be through specific technologies. This is what Yuk Hui, building upon Stiegler’s philosophy of technology, names cosmotechnics an intertwining of the 'cosmic order,' the 'moral order' and 'technical activities' that subtends what the 'cosmos' for a particular culture is and how it becomes (Hui, 2016/2019). In this sense, for Hui, digital objects circulating on the internet, as an integral part of the contemporary western cosmotechnics, participate both in the coagulation of a specific cosmos, of a specific world, and in the construction of embodied subjectivities that are inherent to that world. Hui proposes that digital objects perform tertiary protentions which run the risk of automatizing transcendental imagination (Hui, 2016). It is outside of the scope of this article to delve deeper into a critical reading of Hui’s understanding of digital objects in relation to transcendental imagination, four our purpose here, is enough to note that the potentialities afforded by the internet appear in this sense as inherent to the construction of embodied subjectivities and of the specific worlds associated with them.

It would not be thus an exaggeration to say that it is our whole being-in-the-world, our being and becoming through and together with our environment, that comes to be at stake in our online performances. When these performances, rather than reinforcing inertial identities and world-views, have a critical edge and point in new directions, when technē going beyond the imperative of utility approaches what we call art, the question becomes that of new possibilities for embodied experience, and, in Hui’s vocabulary, of new cosmotechnic regimes (Hui, 2021).⁵

This is the problematic space that Genesis opens up: the being and becoming of the embodied experience of the world. To focus on probably the most conspicuous aspect of this problematic as it appears in Genesis: influencing the rate at which the DNA of the bacteria is modified, the spectator acts online upon the very basis that grounds being — the simple living cell and its genetic code. The work thus hints at the impact of the online performance upon the basic structures that ground embodied being and thinking. Upon critical consideration, this quickly becomes more than a metaphor. If we consider the actual environmental impact of the technologies that subtend the internet (Cubitt, 2017), ironically, one of the things that is always at stake in our unassuming clicks is exactly the quantity of UV light that will eventually reach us, with all the potential consequences on the DNA of our cells.⁶ At the same time that the clicks of the online spectator influence the mutation of the genetic code of the successive generations of bacteria by remotely turning on and off the UV light, the cells of our bodies are subjected to a very similar experiment, albeit through a much more complex process that the same clicks participate in (by being part of the global digital network and consequently participating, even if infinitesimally, in its environmental consequences).

By using E. Coli bacteria, that are commonly found in our bodies as normal microbiota, Genesis forces us to think one step further down this path. The internet spectator accelerating the modification of the bacterial DNA does not act upon a non-human outsideness, but rather upon micro-organisms that are (or could be) constitutive of its own embodiment. As Donna Haraway insists, our bodies rather than simple unities are rather a 'mundane space' of interacting microorganisms (Haraway, 2008, pp. 3-4), a meeting space of a diversity of species, and the bacteria used in Genesis are a good example of such (micro-)otherness that is inherent to who we ourselves are. Once again, the online gesture that Genesis proposes has for the online spectator a critical self-referential direction.

This all adds up to emphasize the importance of addressing the embodied subjectivity that emerges at the intersection of cultural archives, bio-chemical archives (such as the DNA in this case) and technology.

3. Archives, bodies and the nature/culture divide

According to the description of the work on Kac’s website the specific biblical fragment 'inscribed' in the bacteria was chosen “for its implications regarding the dubious notion of (divinely sanctioned) humanity’s supremacy over nature” (Kac, 1999, para. 1). Thus, Genesis invites us to rethink the relationship between human and nature — which is to say between nature and culture, between on the one hand the cultural archive and the specific ways in which it is instantiated, embodied, performed and transformed, and on the other hand nature as the background and origin against which the cultural archive happens and evolves. But, as Jacques Derrida argues, the difference between nature (physis) and its others, between nature and writing, between nature and technics, between nature and the law, is inherent to the problematic of the archive (Derrida, 1996, p. 1). It is upon the cultural archive subtended by its technological supports that this distinction develops in the first place, and its negotiation is inherent to what the archive is. In other words, the problematic of the archive is, at its most basic, the problematic of the (lack of) origin –physical, historical, ontological commencement (Derrida, 1996, pp. 1-5)– that grounds the archive, an origin nonetheless performed only upon the archival plane.

Genesis goes one step further and performs a mise-en-abîme of this problematic by folding the cultural archive, subtended by a specific technological milieu, back into its origin — that is, by inscribing the biblical fragment into the DNA of the living cell, but also by provoking critical reflection upon the online process of specta(c)torship and its influence upon the living ground (living organism) that supports it. But the question of the origin, the question of the beginning, revolves, as Derrida astutely observes, around the problem of the 'name of man' (Derrida, 1997, pp. 81-93).⁷ That is, specifically with respect to Genesis, what comes to be questioned together with the relationship between nature and culture is the identity of the embodied spectator and the possibility of arresting it under the limits of the human — the limits of the human are in the last instance exactly the necessity of a divide between nature and culture.

Gerfried Stocker, in the catalogue of Genesis, published by O.K. Center for Contemporary Art, Linz, in 1999, speaks about the nature/culture divide and its questioning, more generally, in the practice of Eduardo Kac:

Artists such as Eduardo Kac are working on proposals for our immediate future, in which the traditional differentiation between natural and artificial, which has been constructed along the lines of the concepts organic and self-organized for living beings and externally determined for machines, will no longer be valid. This is a development that challenges us to a new self-comprehension as human beings not only at a philosophical level, but also and at least as much at the level of so-called ordinary common sense. (Stocker, 1999, para. 10)

In resonance with Derrida’s position regarding the interdependency between the 'name of man' and the nature/culture divide (physis and its others), Stocker underlines that Kac’s work, by problematizing the differentiation between natural and artificial, challenges us to rethink the meaning of the human.

In line with Stocker’s insight, this paper proposes that Genesis, inasmuch as it performs a renegotiation of the natural/artificial (nature/culture) relationship through a mise-en-abîme of the archival interplay that subtends the (re-)emergence of this duality, opens up a crisis of identity which provides the tensile background for redrawing the contours of our own bodies as spectators, rethinking their limits, their being, becoming and meaning.

4. The human master

It is clear from the first encounter with Genesis that it challenges the tradition which postulates the human as being above nature and in charge of it: the modification of the biblical sentence ('Let man have dominion …') amounts to a critique of the anthropocentric paradigm that it grounds. It should be noted though that the idea of human supremacy over nature is deeply embedded in our social, political, and economic practices, well beyond the boundaries of the Christian tradition that the biblical quote points towards. In fact, maybe not so surprisingly, it seems that the more we dismiss the human supremacy over nature in public discourse, the stronger it grows as an unconscious force linking together apparently discrepant and confronting positions.

It is no surprise that the capitalist discourse predicated on progress attained by exploiting natural resources is inherently postulating the human supremacy. What is more counter-intuitive though is that, as Jane Bennett observes, various positions concerned with protecting nature are predicated on a similar anthropocentric paradigm — inasmuch as the idea of caring for an environment defines the environment as a substrate of human culture, as a passive and sometimes recalcitrant context for human action (Bennett, 2010, pp. 111-112). According to Bennett, an important part of the recent comeback of environmentalism can be criticized for being “motivated in large part by self-interest, by fear of the environmental ‘blowback’ of human actions” (Bennett, 2010, p. 110). We can add to this the problematic commodification of nature produced at the intersection of capitalism and certain environmentalist discourse, where the human master conspicuously resurfaces as consumer, a consumer of nature: botanical gardens, zoos, nature documentaries, a wide range of touristic practices and so on, all participate in this culture of mastery, even while dismissing it in their discourse. Which is not to say that there is no value in ecological practices that aim at protecting nature or in documentaries that seek to bring awareness to ecological problems or to educate, and even in the simple enjoyment of nature from the position of a consumer (as a tourist or in front of the screen). I would like to make my position clear in this respect, these practices are valuable and, more than that, stringently necessary, but at the same time we should be critically conscious of their limits.

Such a critical position is formulated for example by Jean-Baptiste Gouyon with respect to wildlife documentaries. Gouyon provides a historical account of documentary practices in the United Kingdom, placing these practices in between two imperatives, generating knowledge and the necessity of spectacle, and warning that the production of knowledge in wildlife documentaries can often hide the naturalization of specific cultural values. As such, for Gouyon, critically addressing documentary practices is essential in the context of current environmental crisis (Gouyon, 2019). From another angle, in more general terms, Ursula K. Heise’s article “From the Blue Planet to Google Earth” (2013) provides a convincing review of debates regarding the 'local' versus the 'global' in the context of environmentalist discourse, and highlights the dangers of utopian positions formulated on both sides of this spectrum. The relevant point for us here, in both cases, is that discourses concerned with the protection of the environment cannot be assumed to be unproblematically 'good,' on the contrary it is essential to be able to critically scrutinize these discourses and their limits.

This critique does not deny the stringent necessity for action in the context of the ongoing environmental crisis. It is also not a claim that all positions gathered under the umbrella term of environmentalism are mistaken. Rather it is a self-reflexive exercise that aims at uncovering the extent to which a core premise of the process that resulted in the current environmental crisis (and that continues to deepen it) might be also covertly present as an unacknowledged premise in the discourses and practices concerned with tackling this very crisis. To put it in simple terms: as long as 'protecting the nature' means protecting it for the human, nature remains defined as a subset of human culture that exists maybe not anymore to be exploited, but to be enjoyed, studied, explored, etc. And this remains painfully inadequate in its anthropocentrism — inadequate, that is, if we agree that anthropocentrism itself is one of the problems at the core of the environmental crisis.

Thus, what Genesis brings into discussion is not only a specific (and maybe obsolete) religious tradition but rather an ideology (in a very large sense of the word) that encompasses a very large part of contemporary society. Namely, an ideology that subsumes physis to logos, nature to the word — to the word of order 'human!'.

5. Vibrant Matter

There is of course a rapidly growing body of theoretical work that aims at going beyond this divide between nature and culture. I propose to follow one particularly intriguing example, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), in order to ask what could the human still mean when nature and culture stop being opposed.

Vibrant Matter is an argument for the vitality of all matter, for recognizing the capacity of all non-human bodies to act as quasi agents, as “forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own”, which exist alongside and inside humans (Bennett, 2010, p. viii). Bennett considers that parsing the world into inanimate things (dull matter) and living beings (vibrant life) is nothing more than a partition of the sensible, in Jacques Ranciere’s terms,⁸ and thus implies that the duality between the living and the nonliving is just a consequence of specific political projects, and not a natural given (Bennett, 2010, p. vii). Hence, there is an inherent political dimension to the attempt of thinking vibrant matter, that is to say, to the attempt of grasping the world from a perspective that does not operate with a definite boundary between inanimate matter and living beings. What I would like to question is the relationship between the figure of the human and the political project under critique, the relationship between the human and the partition of the sensible that operates with a distinction between inanimate things and living beings.

First, let us draw an outline of what the human body would mean in the perspective opened up by vibrant matter. Considering non-human bodies as actants (in the sense given to the term by Bruno Latour⁹) rather than objects, means that there is a need to rethink as well the status of human actants and consider their constitution as vital materiality. In other words, from this perspective, the materials that compose our bodies are lively and self-organizing rather than passive means under the direction of a mind or soul (Bennett, 2010, p. 10). Bennett contends that the body (including the human body) is a heterogeneous assemblage,¹⁰ and that agency is distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field rather than being simply localized in a human body or a human collective. Assemblages are here understood to be ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials, open-ended collectives not governed by any central head (Bennett, 2010, pp. 23-24). Distributive agency, instead of positing a subject as the root cause of an effect, recognizes that there is always a swarm of vitalities at play, the question being how the contours of the swarm can be defined (Bennett, 2010, pp. 31-32).

The human body, in this view, is both an assemblage of other bodies and a member of other more complex assemblages. In consequence, any one of its actions should be seen a composite result: it is determined by the agencies of simpler bodies; it is a component of a more widespread agency; and supposedly there is also an agency specific to the human body as such (as an assemblage). Here is how Bennett understands this in one of their examples:

The sentences of this book also emerged from the confederate agency of many striving macro- and microactants: from ‘my’ memories, intentions, contentions, intestinal bacteria, eyeglasses, and blood sugar, as well as from the plastic computer keyboard, the bird song from the open window, or the air or particulates in the room, to name only a few of the participants. (Bennett, 2010, p. 23)

The question that I would like to raise is: since the agency responsible for producing the writing is complex enough to impede its classification as human, then where is the human agency that would define a human body to be found? Is the human body a pertinent concept that can still be used in this context? Are we not introducing under the name of the human a set of untenable limits to our understanding of embodiment?

In Bennett’s own words: “In a world of vibrant matter, it is thus not enough to say that we are ‘embodied.’ We are, rather, an array of bodies, many different kinds of them in a nested set of microbiomes” (Bennett, 2010, pp. 112-113). So, the stringent questions are: do concepts like 'human,' 'human body' and 'human subjectivity' still retain any meaning? Do they have any kind of sense outside a partition of the sensible that separates dull matter from vibrant life? Or, conversely, was the human only a consequence of a political project now (hopefully) on the point of being left behind?

The problem that the concept of human poses to a theory of vibrant matter is acknowledged by Bennett (Bennett, 2010, pp. ix, 120), and I take this to be an argument for the pertinence of the questions formulated here above, but is not pursued further because it is considered misleading. And indeed, that is the case, the question of what human means seems to always lead back to an anthropocentric paradigm, as Bennett notices. Using the term without specifically discussing its meaning, though, and simply postponing the question does not solve the problem, it merely reincorporates unacknowledged anthropocentric principles in a discourse that strives to overcome them. The try to conceptualize experience in non-anthropocentric terms correlated with the ongoing emphasis on human and humanity add up to a self-contradictory understanding of culture. On the one hand there is human culture, on the other hand culture is seen as the result of heterogeneous assemblages that while, in Bennett’s view, are not excluding the human, nonetheless are not limited to it. At its most extreme the formulation is: “culture is not of our own making, infused as it is by biological, geological, and climatic forces” (Bennett, 2010, p. 115). But, in this case, how can culture be termed human since it is not human agency that drives it?

The incompatibility of human and culture, in a view informed by a non-anthropocentric concept of agency, has far-reaching consequences, since at least from the middle of the 19th century and the rise of modern anthropology onward culture is what defines humanity, it is the concept that gathers in itself that which characterizes the human. From Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species (Darwin, 1859) onwards, the human is not anymore opposed to the animal but rather understood as a specific kind of animal: the animal that develops a culture.¹¹ L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn’s 1952 book Culture: A Critical Review Of Concepts And Definitions, a work listing more than 150 definitions of culture offering a comprehensive survey of the meanings of the term as formulated in the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, makes this interlink between culture and the definitions of the human patently obvious. While the text lists a wide range of definitions of culture, all of them are constructed around the centrality of the human and of the question of the identity (that is the definition) of the human. This problematic of culture as identity emerges at several distinct levels, from that of the individual defining itself in relation to other individuals, to that of a human collective defining itself in relation to other collectives, and finally, to that of the human distinguishing itself from nature. In other words, in a more general formulation, with respect to the human, culture is the concept for that which distinguishes and contours (individual among individuals, groups among other groups, the human in nature): with respect to the human, culture is that which defines. Human nature, that which defines the human, is culture: the movement of nature distinguishing itself (nature, animality, body) from itself (producing culture). To cite a definition that clearly states this position (there are many others in which it is implied without being specifically stated):

Culture is a phenomenon of nature. Language, manners, morals, and social organization grow up within the ongoing activity in the effort of a group to maintain itself, to secure food, and to rear children (Faris E. as cited in Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952, p. 99)

What this means, is that culture develops on the background offered by nature and abiding by natural laws (which, as it appears from the fragment quoted, are the Darwinian laws of evolution), as a set of specific characteristics that come to define a group, and in the last instance the human. As Ostwald’s 1907 succinct definition puts it: “That which distinguishes men from animals we call culture” (Ostwald W. as cited in Kroeber and Kluckhohn, 1952, p. 70).

My point is not that these definitions are correct, in fact it is clear today that they are not (as the work of Bennett, among many others, points out), but rather that the definition of the human is strictly interlinked with that of culture. A concept of culture only partially human is self-contradictory, since culture is the name of those aspects of experience which define the human (as an individual, as a group, as a species). If the agency that drives culture reveals itself to be otherwise than human –and I take the arguments of Jane Bennett, among those of many other scholars (including Latour, Deleuze or Derrida, mentioned above), to cogently show this–, then the bodies and consciousnesses contoured by this agency, are themselves other-than-human. The only other option would be to accept an unquestioned definition of the human that simply exists by default. Recent theoretical anthropological discourses, such as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Cannibal Metaphysics (2014), resonating with this insight, are already well aware that rethinking culture means at the very same time rethinking embodied identity beyond the figure of the human and in the last instance rethinking nature towards 'multinaturalism'.

In this case, the whole anthropological project and the human that it defined remain valid only as elements of a specific episteme (in the sense that Yuk Hui gives to this concept),¹² elements of a specific experience of the world dependent upon a political project (in a very large sense of the term 'political,' a distinct partition of the sensible). There is a human as long as there is a culture that is in some way a trace of human agency. If, as it follows from Bennett argument, culture should be understood as a form of non-human or at least not-only-human agency (the example given for the action of writing a book can be extended to any other action), then this culture defines other-than-human bodies and subjectivities.

In other words, a concept of culture that springs from non-human agencies, as the one that can be inferred from Vibrant Matter, renders any kind of nature/culture distinction preposterous. When this distinction stops making sense, the whole argument for a human culture fails too, and with it the very figure of the human. Consequently, the argument here is that the concept of the human stops being relevant when the distinction between nature and culture, that grounds it, ceases to exist. The human can exist only as the telos that is inscribed in the beginning, as the Word (of order) that orients the origin. Yet, as works such as Vibrant Matter argue (and works such as Genesis point towards) such an anthropocentric paradigm cannot account for the other-than-human agencies at play in any type of culture, or, in the terms that I prefer here, it cannot account for the complex archival folding that we perform and are performed by.

What comes to be at stake in the attempt to rethink the nature/culture duality is the identity of the embodied thinking subjects that we, the spectators, (never quite) are. For as long as this identity is collapsed under the frame of the human, the duality is simply reinstated. The human is an order, an imperative that dictates a separation between nature and culture, whatever form that might take.

Yet, there is another facet to this problem. For as long as a discourse accepting the fluidity of embodied thinking (a fluidity that cannot be captured without rest under the name human) does not account for the emergence of our experience of the world, an experience of the world in terms of individuals relating with each other, an experience which revolves around the figure of one’s body as identical with itself (as the hinge of the possibility of identity, or alternatively as its ultimate result), it remains self-contradictory.¹³ The possibility of seeing, the possibility of naming, the possibility of perceiving individuals in the world and of acting upon them, relies upon the emergence of a form of identity, and that form of identity ultimately hinges upon the identity of the embodied thinking subject. Nonetheless, inasmuch as embodied thinking is historical –inasmuch as 'I think' in a specific socio-cultural, technological, and material context, in a specific cosmotechnic regime– the dynamics of intensive difference¹⁴ that result in the identity that grounds the possibility of the world as a system of individuals and of myself ('my body') as a specific region of this world, are dependent upon the background context upon which they happen.

Which is to say, inasmuch as the human figure (one specific form of the individual equal with itself) is at the core not only of the contemporary socio-political and economic context but also of the tradition of thinking that grounds the possibility of this debate around the duality of nature and culture, there is no escape from the biases that it instates. That is, there is no absolute outside of the human that a discourse might ground itself into; the very language, logical system, experience of the world etc. that subtend our discourses are impregnated by this figure at the very moment when they strive to go against it. The alternative that remains is to deconstruct the system from within, to play its premisses against one another.

In the beginning was the word, the command human –which is to say the collapse of the movements of intensive difference around a specific form of identity, that results in a specific thinking body, a specific world, and a specific set of possible relations between them–, and our task is to deconstruct this command from within the history that it grounds and that in turn grounds it. If we are to go beyond treating nature as a resource, we have to rethink the centrality of the human. Rather than protecting nature for the human the problem is how to construct practices of care that would allow for the differentiation of embodied subjectivities and natures. Such practices of care would involve the pluralization of models of embodied subjectivity, a pluralization of technological systems, and a pluralization of natures (see the below next section). I take Genesis and other similar artistic practices, usually discussed under the umbrella term of bio-art, to constitute valuable steps in this direction. From the perspective that I propose here experiments at the border of art/science/technology/philosophy, as well as the spectatorial experiences that they provide, are integral to the attempt of finding valid solutions for the environmental crisis. And these solutions necessarily imply rethinking who we are and the potential directions for our embodied becomings.

6. Living as Misspelling the Law

I read here 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 it grounds: by folding into one another the cultural archive of the written biblical fragment (an instance of an overarching contemporary ideology), the technological archive that makes the work (and ourselves) possible and the DNA as an archive of chemical sequences that subtend the very possibility of life. What do the living bacteria tell us when retranslating the literary fragment back into plain English at the end of the exhibition? “LET AAN HAVE DOMINION OVER THE FISH OF THE SEA AND OVER THE FOWLOF THE AIR AND OVER EVERY LIVING THING THAT IOVES UA EON THE EARTH”¹⁵ –it seems to be something along the lines: in the beginning was the word, and to live is to misspell it.

The possibility of a translation between the literary fragment and the DNA through the technological milieu suggests that the cultural archive is somehow there from the beginning. Conceptualizing the basic possibilities of life (as we know it) as a 'code,' deciphering the hinge between matter (be it vibrant matter) and biological life in a formal language represents such a positing of a specific cultural archive and of its dynamics as origin. A very real origin, to be sure, but an origin that is formulated and makes sense (matters) in a specific cultural code, a cultural code that permeates our whole experience of the world. Yet becoming, life, appears in light of Genesis as the recursive misspelling of the code that subtends it, an erring that opens the archive towards its improbable potentialities. This functions at a metaphorical level: the biblical fragment is 'corrupted' in the living bacteria; but also at the very basic biological level: the impossible to calculate repercussions of recursive genetic mutations, and consequently the equally unpredictable (long time) results of directly manipulating the genetic code. At the same time, the origin 'itself' –the human embodied thinking subject that is coextensive with the possibility of something like culture– is and makes sense only through this misspelling –the human is itself living, and in doing so its genetic code is modified. To be alive is to err away from the event of the primordial origin which is always yet to come. It is this identity with itself of the human that comes to be at stake in the cultural gesture that this work performs: a culture of living cells that, inasmuch as they are living, are misspelling the word of order inscribed as their origin, namely misspelling the proclamation of the human as master of nature.

The vibrancy of matter is necessarily the proliferating instability of the trace, of differing and deferring the word, the origin, the name of the human –what Derrida calls 'program' (Derrida, 1997, p. 84). Matter in its pure immediacy is always already informed by the trace, by the erroneous movement of culture with which it is strictly intertwined. Matter, in its immediacy, is infinitely mediated. On the one hand, matter is always interlinked with the production of meaning, matter should be rather rethought as 'mattering', as Karen Barad insists (2004), as a process and not as a stable ontological given. On the other hand, matter is matter only inasmuch as it makes sense upon a specific cultural background –matter, the natural (lack of) origin, emerges as a function of the cultural archive. Inasmuch as matter is a question of individual particles relating with each other, it is interlinked with a necessary yet erroneous collapse of the movement of difference into a specific form of identity. And what this question ultimately bears upon is the kind of identity that the embodied thinking subject recursively performs as 'oneself' –there is a particle of matter inasmuch as there is a being for whom there is identity, for whom there is 'a = a,' and 'a = a,' in its turn, depends upon having (or misunderstanding 'oneself' as having) a body identical with itself.

Recognizing 'our' bodies as processes that produce and are produced by a system of identity, and thus problematizing the border between culture and nature in a deconstructive gesture that does not pretend to be placed outside of its own history, enlarges the area of our responsibility to include the production of our own bodies. Instead of natural givens, our bodies enter the sphere of that which is to be performed,¹⁶ to be created, to be produced. And this producing has to be accounted for. It is not enough to say that the body is a complex ecosystem without stable limits, one also has to account for the erroneous limits that come to bound the body, for the parerga that bring it into being as an individual (be it an erroneous individual). In producing ourselves we modify our own origin erring away from the human from inside the history of its consequences.

If, we understand our bodies by problematizing the culture/nature duality without pretending to place ourselves outside of it, then we have the responsibility to modify, remake, and even question them all together. An unquestionable and immutable body is nothing more than an unquestionable and immutable ideology. If culture and the human are to retain any meaning they can do so only as systems decomposing their own premisses towards an always improbable and unknowable event, towards erroneous individuals, erroneous embodied thinking beings that do not fit the frame imposed by their own origin, that in living err away from the command inscribed as the origin, err away from the very premise of their being.

There are stringent ethical questions regarding living understood as a necessary misspelling of the origin. Not every misspelling is as good as any other. Think for example about the catastrophic effects of increased UV radiation combined with other factors of climate change, mentioned above. The responsibility of deconstructing the human master is, at its very basis, the responsibility of deconstructing a paradigm that understands nature as a resource to be exploited, or, as Heidegger puts it, as 'standing reserve' (Heidegger, 1977). In this sense, the deconstruction of the human is strictly interlinked with Yuk Hui’s call for a plurality of cosmotechnics (Hui, 2016/2019) (which resonates with theoretical discourses in anthropology arguing for 'multinaturalism'). While the deconstruction of the human is not an innocent project leading to a utopian future, nonetheless it is a necessary move if we are to overcome the anthropocentric nature/culture distinction and be able to address its consequences.¹⁷

7. Conclusion

This paper argued that the process of specta(c)torship afforded by the online documentation of Eduardo Kac’s work Genesis is not a marginal outgrowth but a core problematic with respect to the work, a problematic which complicates our understanding of immediate presence. Critically following the problems raised by this process of online specta(c)torship allows us to understand Genesis as a complex folding of cultural archives, technological milieu, and bio-chemical archives (that compose the DNA).

I argued that the problematic of embodied subjectivity constitutes the hinge of this complex archival interplay, and that Genesis offers impulses for rethinking this embodied subjectivity beyond the figure of the human which is always already interlinked with the instantiation of a duality between culture and nature. Yet, inasmuch as our whole experience of the world (nature) is predicated upon the assumption of the human body identical with itself (one’s own body), there is no absolute outside of the human that could ground such discourse. Rather, this paper claims, going beyond the figure of the human can happen only as a deconstruction performed from within the cultural archives that the human grounds as an original lack of origin.

The origin 'itself' –the human embodied thinking subject that is coextensive with the possibility of something like culture– is and makes sense only by misspelling the law that it grounds. To be alive is to err away from the event of the primordial origin which is always yet to come. Genesis brings to the fore this problematic by proposing a culture of living cells that, inasmuch as they are living, are misspelling the word of order inscribed as their origin: the human master of nature. I propose that this deconstruction of the human figure, and the renegotiation of embodied identity, both in discourse and in practice, constitute a stringent responsibility if we are to overcome the anthropocentrism of the culture/nature duality and deal with its consequences.

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Notes