Best of Technology Writing 2007 (2 of 5 free samples)

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Best of Technology Writing 2007 by Steven Levy (Ed.). Copyright 2007 by the University of Michigan.
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KEVIN BERGER: THE ARTIST AS MAD SCIENTIST (CONT'D)

She set her artistic course in 1994 as a consultant research scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, the famed Silicon Valley lab where artists and computer scientists are paid to let their minds wander. There, she created Live Wire, a vibrating cable that symbolized the energy consumed by the Internet. Just as the Web was being celebrated as a virtual reality where egalitarian dreams came true, Jeremijenko was saying the electricity required to run it and the people being used to build it were creating environmental and labor conditions that were far from utopian.

Her next project, Suicide Box, was also a grim twist on cultural infatuation. As people seemed obsessed with NASDAQ and Dow Jones numbers, Jeremijenko created a numerical calculation for suicide. Using a motion-sensitive camera to track vertical movement off the Golden Gate Bridge for three months, she recorded 17 people who appeared to have leaped to their deaths. In 2004, she aired out her politics. During the Republican convention in New York, she fashioned medical face masks for bicyclists to wear around the city. The grime the riders inhaled was displayed in a sooty bar beneath the words Clear Skies, an ironic echo of the Bush administration's air pollution policy. On the lighter side, her proposed project for parking lots, in which cars are assigned spaces by color to create artistic patterns in the lots, is a quite lovely idea.

While public spaces are her main stages, her works have been exhibited in art museums from Sydney to Amsterdam to San Francisco. Earlier this year, along with her drawing, her outdoor installation For the Birds, a wry comment on avian flu, was featured in the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the always controversial assembly of contemporary art at the New York museum. She has held academic positions at NYU and Yale and currently is an assistant professor in visual arts at the University of California at San Diego. True to her frenetic life, she commutes to San Diego two days a week from her home in New York.

Art critics at major newspapers seldom pay attention to Jeremijenko, busy as they are with reviews of the latest Monet exhibit or Henry Moore retrospective. "The art world is a very prissy little thing over in the corner, while the major cultural forces are being determined by techno-science," Jeremijenko said in 2000. She said that in the New York Times Magazine, so, yes, she's gotten her fair share of feature coverage. Accolades for her work are easily found in avant-garde art magazines and Web sites, science and design journals. In 1999, MIT's Technology Review named her one of the country's top young innovators, and in 2005, I.D. (International Design) magazine named her one of the 40 her one of the 40 biggest "influencers" in architecture and design, listing her alongside Steve Jobs, Frank Gehry, and Rem Koolhaas.

"Oh, yes, Natalie is a star in the alternative art world," says Stephen Wilson with a laugh. Wilson is a multimedia artist and art professor at San Francisco State University and the author of Information Arts, the definitive tome of contemporary artists at work in the fields of science and technology, which includes numerous references to Jeremijenko. Philippe Vergne, who cocurated the 2006 Whitney Biennial, also chuckles when he mentions Jeremijenko, recalling the first time he met her, six years ago. Then, Jeremijenko had just finished hanging six maple trees upside down at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. She wanted to upend the view of city trees as pretty little rows on streets. "Honestly," says Vergne, "I thought she was totally mad." Which only kept him coming back to her work. "From science to politics to genetics, she's really putting her finger on controversial questions that are framing our culture right now."

To be sure, she's not alone. As Wilson's book (900 pages!) makes clear, Jeremijenko is only one player sounding the noisy times with notes from biology, engineering, zoology, genetics, and physics. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau illuminate the harmonies between real and artificial life, and the human impact on ecosystems, in wondrous interactive 3-D exhibits that simulate plants and animals. With wit and strange beauty, Alexis Rockman unearths urban wildlife--seagulls, rats, cockroaches--in fantastical paintings that the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould has praised for splintering calcified scientific views. And the ways technology alters our view of ourselves and the environment, seen through ingenious robotic installations, inform the work of Ken Goldberg and, more apocalyptically, that of Eduardo Kac.

Kac is the movement's most notorious star. In 2000, he made headlines when he injected a jellyfish gene into an albino rabbit, causing it to glow green when illuminated. The idea was to stimulate discussion about the ethics of transgenics, although Jeremijenko calls it "a stupid piece that is exactly not what bioart is." The grandstanding exhibit skirted the issue that sparks Jeremijenko and her comrades in political troublemaking, the Critical Art Ensemble, whose radical adventures in public art have earned international renown. To them, the burning issue in science is how government scientists and biotech companies are shaping how we think about genetics, and how gene mixing is employed in the manufacture of food and medicine, despite questions about its ecological effects.