Mutant Media

Animation and gaming design studios aren’t just for entertainment, claims Jamie Sutcliffe, they’re a geneticist’s lab for producing our spliced bio- cybernetic future

In his farsighted 2003 essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction’, US academic W.J.T. Mitchell donned a critical hazmat suit to dissect a newly intrusive dynamic of capitalist extraction. Like Walter Benjamin’s 1935 essay, upon which its title fondly riffed, Mitchell’s text questioned ideas of ‘aura’ and ‘reproducibility’ but crucially redirected them towards a moment in which the codes of biological matter had been cracked, replicated and financialised. Here, reproduction was no longer tethered to representation but corporeally entwined with the reconstitution of living matter through techniques of genome sequencing, tissue cloning and gene editing. Given the lab-bound, cellular scale of these innovations, Mitchell wondered, how might the molecular evolutions of genomic capital be communicated in the public domain? What’s more, how could a work of art find discursive purchase in an age characterised by the very mutability of life, where each modified cell might itself be considered a living work of art?

Despite his spirited prognoses, Mitchell’s proposed examples were deader than dodos: cloyingly humanist works by Damien Hirst and Antony Gormley provided inert symbols of the human as an environmentally conditioned subject, but they did little to capture the vertiginous spirit of recombinant genetic data. Beyond the remit of studio-art practice however, Mitchell did sense the stirrings of a vital correlate for the biocybernetic era within the animated fantasies of popular culture. It’s one that we might, with hindsight, suggest illustrated a more fundamentally (and perhaps unsettlingly) productive relationship between life and image than any static assemblage of vitrines, pills or generously endowed body casts.