The Greek philosopher Pythagoras believed that the sun, the moon, and other planets in the sky rotated around the earth, each one producing a hum. The pitch of each hum was determined by the celestial body’s distance from our own planet and corresponded perfectly to a note on the musical scale. This heavenly harmony, commonly called the music of the spheres, represented to Pythagoras something like a key to the secret ordering of the world.To artist Charlotte Jarvis, this mystical music is an apt metaphor for DNA, what she calls the "ultimate language of life." For the past year or so, Jarvis has been working with Dr. Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute in Cambridge, England to develop an art project using Dr. Goldman's recently developed technology that encodes information onto DNA much like a computer encodes information to a hard drive. For the appropriately named Music of the Spheres project, Jarvis and Dr. Goldman have encoded a piece of real, audible music to synthetic DNA.The name also playfully refers to the way that Jarvis has decided to share this piece of music with the public. For her presentationof the project at Ars Electronica 2013, the DNA strands holding a 12-second sample of the piece of music were suspended in soap solution and given to audience members in bubble-blowing kits. After Jarvis delivered a short lecture, audience members were asked to blow bubbles enough to fill the room so that all present would be "bathed in the music and carry it away on their skin."To Jarvis, asking visitors to carry these music-encoded DNA strands away with them is a romantic idea (the music will stay with them long after they've left), but it is also a call for the visitors to show that they are not frightened of technology using DNA, to make a symbolic gesture “by quite literally covering themselves in the stuff.” This recalls Jarvis' earlier project, Blighted by Kenning, for which she encoded the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into bacteria, and used that bacteria to "contaminate" apples grown near The Hague and the International Court of Justice. She then sent these apples to genomics laboratories around the world and asked them to sequence the DNA, decode the declaration and, finally, eat the apples. The knowledge of DNA, Jarvis' projects argue, is not forbidden fruit.Blighted by Kenning, Charlotte Jarvis. Image courtesy of James Read. Blighted by Kenning, Charlotte Jarvis. Image courtesy of James Read. The final performance version of the Music of the Spheres project will go one step further by encouraging the audience to get their hands dirty and do some sequencing of their own. It works like this: Mira Calix, pioneering sound artist and composer of the three-part musical piece encoded to the DNA, will perform the piece live accompanied by a string quartet and a projected film. When the musicians reach the second part, they will all fall silent and the film will show the musicians soundlessly performing. Just then, industrial-sized bubble machines will fill the air of the installation space with the music-encoded DNA bubbles. Since Jarvis commissioned the music from Calix with the strict caveat that it "be preserved in the DNA only,” there will be no other complete version of the music. Audience members will not be able to hear the cleverly hidden second part unless they bring home some of the soap solution, sequence the DNA, and follow the directionson Jarvis and Dr. Goldman's website to extract an audio file.
Or, they could pay friendly local scientists to decode the music for them. "Right now," Jarvis says, "it would take about a day. In a year or two we think that will be down to a few hours." Due to the increasingly high demand for sequencing technology, she tells me that "in five years you may be able to do it at home in a matter of minutes."This is why Jarvis' project stands as a statement of optimism for the future of DNA technology rather than a cruel joke. Though the ability to sequence DNA and decode the music may not be widely available now, she presents her work to us with the genuine belief that it will be soon. But the most optimistic part of the project is what she has hidden for people to find. If we decode the strands of DNA, what we discover isn’t a terrifying genetically modified organism, an inhuman monster, but something that is as human and beautiful as anything can be: a thoughtful work of art.Jarvis, Dr. Goldman, and Calix will be presenting the project at GV Art London on Thursday, November 28th from 7-9pm. See here for more information,
Advertisement
Advertisement