HELEN PYNOR ‘Renaissance 3.0’ at ZKM | Center for Art and Media

October 11, 2023

Helen Pynor’s project ‘93% Human’ is being exhibited in the survey exhibition ‘Renaissance 3.0: A Base Camp for New Alliances of Art and Science in the 21st Century’ at the internationally acclaimed ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, from 25.03.23 – 07.01.24.

Pynor works with living and ‘semi-living’ cells, organs and biomolecules such as DNA, and in this recent work highlights the exchange of DNA through breath. In collaboration, there is an intimacy to this video with a focus on what normally is unnoticeable. Living through a global pandemic has highlighted this invisible force and consequentially scrutinised breath with the idea of contamination. Here, the breath is both natural and laboured for 10 minutes during which one breath becomes two. This breath then is extracted and analysed by Dr. Jimmy Breen who reports “93% human DNA, alongside DNA from a range of respiratory tract microbiome species, highlighting the multispecies nature of being ‘human’ and the respiratory tract as site for material exchange between self, human and non-human others, and world.”

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Image Caption: Helen Pynor, ‘93% Human’, (installation view), Helen Pynor, 2023. Panoramic video with sound, 10:20 min, 8-channel sound, 20:09 min, scientific glassware objects. Lead Collaborators: Amanda Cole, Composer; Associate Professor Jimmy Breen, Bioinformatician and Geneticist, Chief Data Scientist, Black Ochre Data Labs at Telethon Kids and The Australian National University.