Erika Biddle (artist, writer) currently lives in New York and works with radical book publisher Autonomedia, online editorial collectives Arcade Project, Siyahi Interlocal and on independent writing and editing projects. She is founding member of the collective Artists in Dialogue (A.I.D.), artists, writers, theorists, activists and other cultural workers committed to the co-articulation of art and politics. She is a performer for the Surveillance Camera Players and has provided video content for a diverse group of artists and performers, including Negativland, Michael Rakowitz, Mariam Ghani, HR Britton, Butch Morris, Kristin Jones and Vinay Chowdry.
Her video and installation-based works have shown at venues including: White Box, Capsule Gallery, Artists Space, 16 Beaver, DTX, Diorama Arts Center, Rooftop Films, Lincoln Center, Ocularis, Collective Unconscious, The Kitchen, Cinema Nouvelle Generation Film Festival, Guestroom and the DUMBO Short Film & Video Festival.
links:
kloone4000 presentation: FROM NONE, TAKE ONE, ADD ONE, MAKE NONE
An installation in which tiny plastic babies in 3,500 test tubes on wall-mounted
shelves, auto-destruct in a secret solution that is the molecular metaphor
for test-tube derived gene cultures. This project investigates the praxis
of genetics and identity under the conditions of taxonomic inversion --
as if to say, “and this is what we call progress.”
Originally developed for an exhibition at White Box gallery (NYC) in 2002, FROM NONE, TAKE ONE, ADD ONE, MAKE NONE was shown in conjunction with ZUFALL, a 3-channel video installation, and a wall text which stated the following: “Aside from dying there’s this bureaucratic bullshit that insults my every living moment. Short of capital? I am short on time. ‘Life savings,’ What exactly do you mean by that? I have some valuable insights that I’d gladly trade with you, if I stand to gain something by it. Not some material thing, but rather, your companionship, our togetherness, which should at some point drive me to say, ‘You are killing me,’ and that will make it all worthwhile.”
Are we cyborgs yet? The ‘artificial’ (i.e., a prosthetic device that mediates a virtual world, but also anything that reprograms our bodies, such as a vaccination) and the ‘real’ are no longer demarcated by neat boundaries such as human/machine or nature/culture. Very soon, we will with horrifying precision be able to control what lives and dies -- and what constitutes life and death -- in our virtual-real surroundings.
In the meantime, our capacity to experience our own bodily feelings and sensations has become ever more profoundly impaired. We cannot continue to treat the body as if it is routinely going out of fashion, because then we are only perpetuating the mind/body split that has plagued Western culture since the time of Descartes.
Now, when the entire world of images and humans is always ready to collapse into a heap at the click of a mouse or a touch of the screen, do we begin to embrace our mortality, our human incompleteness and imperfection, to perhaps see a glimmer of a possibility of how they may become the raw material of personal and social change? Of course not.
More than just a critique of cloning exact replicas of human beings, abuses in bioengineering, virtual bodies and post-biological life, FROM NONE, TAKE ONE, ADD ONE, MAKE NONE is a critique of so-called breakthrough technology and its always companion, the “engineering of the public sphere” – otherwise known as “eu-genetics,” as a kind of techno-voodoo transmitted through the mass media or late capitalist techno-science. A culture that places so much value on its objects will inevitably have a condition of “gene fetishism” at its biological roots.
FROM NONE, TAKE ONE, ADD ONE, MAKE NONE investigates the widely criticized “designer babies” aspect of human cloning, by asking: Is it the same vanity that makes people augment their breasts, reduce their noses, micro-sandblast their skin and otherwise amputate their imperfections, that makes people want to pre-program their genetic offspring?
You
pays your money and you takes your choice… Millions of identical
twins.
The principle of mass production at last applied to biology… --
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
FROM NONE, TAKE ONE, ADD ONE, MAKE NONE is the homemade version of the Human Genome Project, for which Gustav Metzger’s theories on Auto-destructive Art have provided a source of organizational thematics. So has John’s Hopkins’ “OMIM (Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man) Morbid Map,” a catalog of 2,041 genetic diseases. The only difference is, the diseases represented by the 3,500 embryonic cultures in FROM NONE, TAKE ONE, ADD ONE, MAKE NONE are “desirable” anomalies, created for the genetically fetishistic parent as discerning consumer. Each test tube is labeled with a barcode that correlates to the embryonic culture’s IQ, physical dimensions, and special features.
