Kac Reading
After going through all my posts, I realized I never posted this so sorry for messing up the order of the blog!
In the articles of the Eduardo Kac reading, he talks about biotechnology. One of the ideas he mentions is “the possibility that a private company can legally own the international right to genetic sequences with the reader was born.” This confused me because, from my point of view, it sounds like they would be able to actually own people. Right after this human cloning was brought up. So, if possible, a company could own one person, then in theory they could clone that person, and thus own all of their workers. That means not having to pay them anything and in the long run saving a large amount of money because of not having to pay salaries. Another way this could be taken is that a company could build their own army, if they were powerful enough to do so. I know that this is far fetched, but that is what I thought of.
When La Mettrie was mentioned Kac brought up that La Mettrie was the first person to suggest that primates could acquire a human language and proposed how to achieve it. The example that Kac showed was Koko, the gorilla that talks to others through Sign Language. This was significant because Koko expressed a whole range of emotions, human emotions. Kac also stated that this was a novel event because gorillas do not communicate to each other like this in the wild. We get new insight on what gorillas think and get more information about gorillas as a result of this endeavor. However, will this grow into a pet market, a new pet available that communicates with you? I mean there are markets out there for doggy furniture, clothes, and transportation. It would just be a new market in which you can talk to your pets. This could also be brought up with Alba, the GFP bunny, the bunny that glows underneath a black light. At first it was very new and very controversial. However, now there actually is a market for animals that glow underneath a black light. Along with the GFP bunny, there are now fish, pigs, dogs, and mice. The GFP fish even sold in Wal-Marts around the country. The fish are called Glofish and the pigs are called Noels. The fact that this originally started out as an art project; just as Koko started out as a science project, and is now a worldwide market is puzzling because it is so controversial. Even though talking pets do not have a market, largely I believe on the fact that only apes have been able to communicate back and for the most part parents don’t want apes in the house, with time it can become a booming market just like the pets that glow under a black light.
With Eduardo Kac’s project titled Move 36, I was very moved. I thought that it was interesting to mark the event in which the machine beat the man, in the way that he did. The chessboard was made of sand and of dark dirt. The piece that made the final move is a plant. All of the materials used are completely natural and they are describing an event when machine conquered a natural object, man. The plant’s genome was incorporated with a new gene that translates into “I think therefore I am.” I think that this implies that because the machine beat the man, that the machine has proven its worth to everyone. In addition, because the plant was mutated for the installation, it represents the machine’s ability to overcome nature in a different way. This way is changing the plant’s core foundations, like how the machine beat the human’s core foundation, his intellect.
Questions:
1. Will having pets that communicate you people become a market?
2. In the beginning of the second article Kac mentions that art changes the way you look at things, does it?
3. Does making a bunny glow under a black light count as art?