27th April

On the first day I have a meeting with Steve Hughes (biologist and co-director of the centre). First, we go into a seminar room where, with the use of a white board, Steve explains the structure of the genome and how it is mapped. Initial anxiety (stemming from the experience of school science and miserable failure) is soon replaced by enjoyment. Steve, with the aid of diagrams, gets information across in an interesting manner. At his suggestion I make a note to visit the Egenis site and use learning links.

We enter briefly into a discussion of the links between art and science.

Steve remarks that science is currently biased toward predictive models as opposed to explanatory frameworks. I wonder what role might artistic processes and methods effectively play within the Egenis project, these would not necessarily explain or convey information (as Steve's diagrams did so effectively), but rather raise the spectre of the inexplicable .

In the afternoon Steve takes me to visit the laboratory where the sequencing of the genome is carried out.

Here are a few words taken from a notebook in which I have recorded first impressions of the environment in which the genome is sequenced.

                 classification                                                                                               observation
                                                                   categorisation     
                                        purity        
                 ambient noise                                   grids                                                 rational response
                                                                                                  whitish light  

In the laboratory I am overwhelmed by the quality of light which is reflected by numerous surfaces, each pure and white. This light is not transparent; it is textured and a little powdery, it sometimes appears to cut across the edges of the clean-cut geometric forms that dominate the space. This is a light associated with churches, the spiritual (maybe transcendence).

Can specific quality of light embody enlightenment values? If so, then light, as an ideologically constituted medium might influence the experience of looking that takes place within the laboratory. This train of thought seems to keep leading back to the idea of working with photographic processes - these offer the possibility of working directly and sensitively with light.

I notice a row of lab coats hung on hooks. The soft folded material bears the imprint of human form and has a poignant beauty generated out of absence and loss. I think about the artist Rachel Whiteread and her work Ghost (1990). She cast the interior of a North London terraced house in plaster. This was a formidable technical achievement in which a space of human habitation was given form as an impenetrable object bearing the traces of nostalgia, memory and experience.

Non contamination

The laboratory, I could not help but notice, is remarkably clean. Non-contamination is crucial to the processes (intimately related to the 'messy' body) that are carried out here. I am intrigued to know what 'stuff' might gather in the corners of this pristine space. Can dirt of any kind be found in the lab? And could I perhaps go back at some point and collect some? And, if so, what method would be used for its collection?

Should I find dirt of any kind would this, in some sense a transgressive substance that by rights should be filtered out of the scientific environment, provide a view into the 'underside' (dark, inexplicable, potent and suffused with irrational fear) against which genomic information is constructed. The anthropologist Mary Douglas defined "dirt as matter that is out of place" ( Purity and Danger, 1975, pp.210-20). Her valuable insight points to how we focus on parts of the world to the exclusion (or editing out) of others, in order to establish boundaries.

Steve and I stand in front of the genome sequencer; the object at the heart of the process is somewhat banal - rectangular and fridge-like. It has a visual aesthetic that can be related to the minimalist objects made by artists such as Donald Judd and Carl Andre during the early 1960s. Stripped of detail and individuality, the abstracted form of the genome sequencer is near perfect - a kind of template for existence? (Perfect form - a trajectory back to Plato - perhaps look into this?)

Need to look up more on minimalism especially the idea put forward by Hal Foster ( The Return of the Real) that the minimalist object acts as a catalyst to the repressed (the 'real') and exists on an axis between present and past.

Momentarily, I experience a heightened awareness of the body I inhabit - an uncanny sensation generated out of the fairly extreme difference between a body / self (fragmented and impossible to know in any complete sense) and technology (compact, intact, complete, an abstracted form that can be held within the field of vision). The sensations described are amplified through the spatial conditions of the laboratory and specific qualities of light. The light is set up to mediate a clear subject/object division.

I wonder about the space inside the sequencer. It is like a massive eye turned in on itself and, as such, sole witness to events played out within its interior. (To explore this idea further I need to think about links with photographic theory and think it would also be worth a visit to see the Camera Obscura at Bristol ).