Our new artwork Stutterer was started on Wednesday 1st October and is part of Scales of Life exhibition in Dundee's new Life Space gallery, which opens tonight at 6pm.
Stutterer is an instructional artwork –a poetry machine that uses the human genome like a music score to play back a self-assembling video montage spanning the thirteen years it took the Human Genome Project to complete the first documented human DNA sequence. The four nucleotide bases of a DNA strand are represented by the letters T, A, G and C and Stutterer ‘plays’ all 3.2 billion letters representing the human genome, where each letter becomes a word plucked by the artists from an English language television broadcast made sometime between 1990 and 2003.
Stutterer was started with around 500 video clips in its library, but this will be extended in the coming years, so that each time the work is exhibited there will be more and more video elements to draw upon offering an ever richer glimpse into a period in history that begins in 1990 with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa and concludes with the fall of Baghdad to a US and British military coalition in 2003.
Stutterer is a human monument of sorts, which seeks to connect our biological fabric with our unique linguistic abilities –the very abilities, which have arguably enabled us to apprehend our own DNA in the first place.
Stutterer is made possible with generous support from The Wellcome Trust
http://blog.wellcome.ac.uk/2014/10/02/public-engagement-round-up-october-2014/
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