MIVC503 Conclusion

Modern society has become inextricably linked with digital technology, the virtualisation of processes and ‘things’ beginning to overtake the tangible. Inspired by N. Katherine Hayles "How We Became Posthuman", my project explores the inevitable (or perhaps existing) coalesce of human and digital ‘information’. By recontextualising the human genome code within the environment of computer programming, I believe both the concept app and tutorial clearly question what this interlock will mean with regards to evolution; Being able to ‘mutate’ or rewrite one’s own genetic make-up through a widely accessible programme, would allow users to completely change their appearance at the push of a button. This is conveyed in the tutorial where I change into a young boy and carried further in the app displaying a ‘clone’, ‘delete’ and ‘send’ button, just who is God in this future? The human genome code displayed at the Wellcome Collection has been a significant influence to the project, already signifying the ‘decoding’ of human beings, I believed it to be the most successful way to illustrate human beings as a set of instructions which only await the fate of being edited within a digital environment. There has become an app for just about everything replacing many physical processes, almost epitomising the extent to which technology has spread, therefore I chose the form as the perfect platform for my genomic editing programme to sit, explicating the scope of what is plausible in the future. Youtube tutorials on how to write computer programmes are posted in abundance, perceived as the norm and common knowledge among the current generation; by adopting this form the genome editing programme or ‘Genedit’ is placed in relation to the existing tutorials, and through this contamination is normalised, creating the impact and enforcing the inevitability of the conflate of informations. The concept is portrayed clearly and appropriately through the forms it adopts, however I believe the app could have been pushed further and would have carried more of an impact if the app or programme was actually created, able to be displayed on a physical iphone, which is where my technical abilities of programming have let me down (perhaps I would be one of those to become extinct in the the future unable to mutate!).