Notes on Genetic Art

Abstract

In Kurt Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan, extraterrestrial named Salo is marooned on a moon of Saturn. As he waits for help to arrive from his distant home planet, he whiles away the time sculpting lifelike statues and breeding daisies. When Salo arrived on Titan in 203,117 B.C., the blooms of Titanic daisies were tiny, star-like, yellow flowers barely a quarter of inch across. [Now] ... the typical Titanic daisy had a stalk four feet in diameter, and a lavender bloom shot with pink and having a mass in excess of a ton [1]. The Titanic daisy is example of imaginary genetic art, or art involving dioxyribonucleic acid (DNA). A more fantastical example occurs in The Garden of Time. In this short story, J. G. Ballard describes a kind of flower that can temporarily stop time. A small group of these flowers grow in the garden of a count and countess who have devoted themselves to a purely esthetic existence. The time flowers both support this existence and seem to require it for their own survival. The Garden of Time and The Sirens of Titan were written before the biological revolution of the 1970s and 1980s. That revolution has brought new speculation about the genetic art to come. Vilem Flusser, writing in Art Forum in 1988, predicted that biotechnics will become instrument of artists and that biotechnical artists may someday create an enormous color symphony ... in which the color of every living will complement the colors of every other organism [2]. The new artists will lay the foundations of mental processes that have never before existed [3].

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 20 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.