| Bioinformatic Bodies is an in-depth critical analysis of the ways in which biotechnology is currently transforming the relationships between the body and technology for the future of medicine and scientific theories of life. Combining the approaches of science and media studies, this project examines how the relationships between the body and technology have been reconfigured by molecular biotechnology and genetics research. The analysis focuses on a hybrid figure that is referred to as “the bioinformatic body,” a flexible articulation of genetic “codes” and computer “codes” which underwrites such recent phenomena as: genomics databases, DNA chips, and biological computers. This project argues that current research in biotechnology privileges an informatic approach to the body, while at the same time evincing a deep investment in the ways that biological materiality can be technically optimized. Biotechnology is predicated upon the foundational assumption that “the body” and “information” manifest a reciprocal relation of “total translatability.” In fields such as bioinformatics and genomics, this assumption creates the conditions for a nearly exclusive concentration on the “programming” and “reprogramming” of the genetic body; conversely, in fields such as tissue engineering, it foregrounds instances where information can be translated back into biological materiality.; At stake in this conflation of the genetic and the informatic is a radically transformed notion of the “human.” Building upon the work of Katherine Hayles, Donna Haraway, and Critical Art Ensemble, biotechnology represents a unique type of “posthumanism,” based on a technical logic of encoding, programming, and regeneration, a condition referred to as the use of “biomedia.” Through a consideration of the processes whereby biotechnology reconfigures the body as biomedia, this project highlights the contradictory desires in these future-visions of the posthuman, which claim to effect a radical transformation of the human body, while at the same time expressing a will to maintain the integrity of “the human” through these technological transformations. |
