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

Badger shrewdness Lion Virility Fel ine Intu ition Shrew or Badger Fierceness Otter Playfulness Internal Firefly Glow The Gen ius Gene The Attention Deficit Gene Transgenic Traits Human Traits The Unknowingly Offending Other's gene The Novelty Seeking Gene The Difficulty Following Commands Unless Carefully Worded Gene . . . [to name a few] As a dead-on parody of late twentieth century art sales and cross-cultural, cross-national , racist policies, Gene Gen ie Worldwide satirically builds on the prospect of the completion and mass marketing of the human genome project, foregrounding the necessity of predetermining our human notions of subjectivity and moral agency in relation to each other and to the entities that co-inhabit the reality program in which we presently live. DNA, say Trang and Mihail, is the icon of the future. It is the sign ifying monkey, so to speak, of a financially mighty, microbiolog ical industry aided by the economy of computer technology that forcibly shifts lumpen proles out of the discourse and economy of the industrial age and into ones coded for readability and operability in a biotech un iverse. The biotech apparatus of power is empiric and new, the chronicle of power, as Gene Genies Worldwide shows us, is mythic and old. Artists, visual workers, image producers and designers like Trang and Mihail are preparing to find their place in this new economic, social and indeed pol itical order. Where my colleague Niranjan is concerned with institutional read iness for the Fast Wired World, I'm deeply curious about the magnificent psycho-moral and perceptual impact speedy Bladerunner biotechnology will make on artists who now in their primary school years, are busy creating Avatars in virtual space. Consequently the work I've shown you this morning is an inkling of an artistic frontier. It is a vast terrain of indeterminate possibil ity that waits to be exploited by those with frivolous imagination like Trang and Mihail who, with transgenic tongue planted firmly in cheek, expose the lunacy and pathos of the Frankenstein ian will to power. Just as Sony Corp. will soon release its new canine consciousness onto the e-commerce market, Tran T. Kim-Trang and Karl Mihail are a collaborative team that has - chosen to lead us out of the Duchampian school of plumbing and into a world where human consciousness rather than toilets will be the new readymade and where an attitude toward fantasy, hyperbole and a desire for pursing the marvellous will be, in the next century, fully embraced . M . A. Greenstein 1 6 1 magreenst@hotmail .corn