HELEN PYNOR ‘Renaissance 3.0 – A Base Camp for New Alliances of Art and Science in the 21st Century’ at ZKM | Center for Art and Media

February 14, 2024

Helen Pynor’s work ‘93% Human’ is showing at ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe in the exhibition Renaissance 3.0 – A Base Camp for New Alliances of Art and Science in the 21st Century, conceived by Peter Weibel and curated by Dr Anett Holzheid, from 25.03.23 – 25.02.24.

‘93% Human’ is a media art installation exploring the multi-species nature of being ‘human’, the promiscuity of DNA, and DNA data as a generative tool, through an investigation of DNA we exhale in our breath and inhale from others.

A collaboration between Helen, geneticist and bioinformatician Dr Jimmy Breen, and composer Amanda Cole, in consultation with legal scholar and bioethicist Dr Carolyn Johnston (University of Tasmania), ‘93% Human’ was developed in Jimmy’s laboratory during an ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology) residency at SAHMRI (South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute).

The starting point for ‘93% Human’ was an act of sharing breath – in a performance video Jimmy and I breathe into a condenser device for 10 minutes to create a small, liquid breath sample. DNA in our shared breath sample was extracted and sequenced in Jimmy’s laboratory, and found to comprise 93% human DNA, with the remaining 7% belonging to around 6700 identified microbial species. At a time when the sharing of air with another had become deeply fraught, ‘93% Human’ highlights the intimacy of our unnoticed exchanges with human and non-human others, and ‘contamination’ as a necessary condition of being.

Composer Amanda Cole created a microtonal, polyphonic choral score for 4 classically-trained singers, who use their own respiratory tracts to sing and whisper the taxonomic names of the human and hundreds of the 6,700 microbial species whose DNA was present in our breath sample. This multi-species community is brought into the gallery space sonically as an 8-channel sound work.

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