The A(llo)temporal Postgenomic Image

The mapping of the human genome in 2003 revealed many unforeseen things about the gene. First, it disclosed that humans carry between 20,000 and 25,000 genes, far fewer than the 100,000 genes scientists had predicted. Second, it showed that only 1% - 1.5% of this total number of genes codes for proteins, which is to say, that it only this small portion that is cause for direct phenotypic expression. Third, far from fortifying the idea of “junk DNA,” this small proportion of coding DNA means that the other activities of the gene are necessary and functional in other ways. Fourth, the gene properly understood is imbedded and a product of its cellular and ecological environment. It is always already epigenetic.All of this concretizes what biophysicist Evelyn Fox Keller has been saying for years, which is that the word “gene” must be redefined according to multi-vectored non-coding properties. The gene understood in the postgenomic era is, far from atemporal, “allo-temporal” – literally a bearer of manifold “other” timings and temporalities. In a similar vein, genetics in the postgenomic era loops back to other past ideas of biofunctionalism in allotemporal fashion, shedding fresh light on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s soft inheritance, E.E. Just’s theories of the cortical cytoplasm, and Conrad Waddington’s epigenetic landscape. [Image 1-3 below] This allotemporal zone of postgenomics grants greater importance to epigenetics both in the cellular and ecological sense, making bioart not simply a practice of the fine arts but an expression of a completely new way of thinking in the postgenomic era. I argue in this essay that the “A(llo)temporal Postgenomic Image” is the image of temporal otherness at work in contemporary postgenomic age. It is “allotemporal” in two ways: in the complex biofunctionalism of the actual gene and across time in its looping back to past epigenetic concepts. The contemporary postgenomic era opens a space of visualization – a new platform for practicing beyond singly the fine arts or biology – that is shared by genetics, evolutionary development, and bioart.