Beyond the Future: Papers from the Third Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

material power of deploying mutable and transferable images, texts and spectacles as means of levelling priggish ethnocentric and geopolitical isolation ism. What I am claiming is that today's artist - is that term even useful any more - whether l iving in Sydney, Mumbai, Los Angeles or Taipei is, and will continue to be, impacted upon by the relentlessly marching armies of biotechies who, as U .S. science watchdog Jeremy Rifkin suggests, will control all modes of production and means of conceptual flow. Paranoid? Sure. Curious? You bet. Either way, the 'bliss/hell' scenario demands a paradigmatic shift of our collective and personally intu itive understanding toward the axiom that everyth ing, yes, everyth ing is, in its fundamental formation, information . Consider too how sci-fi writers Philip K. Dick and William Gibson have been proven right in that now mundane fact that cinema and cyberspace do, and will continue to define the epistemological frame of reference and spatio­ temporal means of information flow, elevating the picturesque and the decorative (meaning here the attention to encrypted surface) as the sure signs of cosmic intelligence, defragmentation and replication as the means to organising the semblance of that intelligence into an android embodiment of a un ified field of subjective consciousness . Everything is information. Indeed th is shiny totalising assertion, if one scratches slightly at its sparkling propositional surface, is transparently idealist, now morphed into a fancy shmancy futurist rhetoric. Gussied up to meet the new age, ancient idealism, whether we're talking Platon ism, Vedanta or H inayana Buddhism, does reintroduce into the camp of the world wide art community and market, questions that concern the rhetorics of existential and collective determination , the qualifications of moral agency and to follow, the semiotics of how we go about perceiving, conceiving, and commenting upon our passions, our great sorrows and the inevitably variable lives we collectively and individually will lead . Today, I am not asking you to forcibly squeeze yourself through the rhetorical sieves of philosophic analysis, but rather I request that you consider for a moment the mind-bend ing ramifications of some form of transcendental idealism when thinking about the work of biodesigners Tran T. Kim-Trang and Karl Mihail who, in their creation of Gene Genies World Wide, are on the pulse of rethinking a new epoch of world art production and consumption. Gene Genies World Wide was an ephemeral installation lasting six weeks in downtown Pasadena , one of the many nodes on the map of megalopol is Los Angeles, the great city of the angels. Nomadically appropriating a gone out of business Maschino Jeans store, GGWW proceeded to work the 'body as clothing' pun beyond the personal stakes set by performance artists Orlan or Stelarc. Using the min imalist moxie of late twentieth century advertising, the two bio designers delimited the province of a designer gene boutique, with signs read ing 'soon to open' with a 'look but you can't touch' window gazing poli � y. Marketing to the vain eschatological hopes and fears of the mall shopping Los Angeles public, GGWW claimed to bring the consumer, 'One step closer to God' with its special dream tools designed for 'transgenic morphing, that is, human to animal genetic transfiguration by means of either transgenic mutation , bioabsorption, bioleeching, gene-splicing or germplasm' - all addressed , I should add, in the books you see in the display case to you r right. Reminiscent of 1 Sth century Italian grottesche and n ineteenth century British grotesque, Gene Genies biodesigns, which come packaged and wrapped within the handsome silver gift boxes, are marketed as a customising method (like department store cosmetics) to manipulate personality by mixing one or more of the following transgenic and human traits: Quoting from the Gene Genies' gift brochure: