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One Trees (Jeremijenko, Natalie), 2000
 
 
 

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whether to release into the environment transgenic bacteria. The «set» is a biotech company tradeshow with CAE members dressed as scientists, who explain to the public why what they are doing is safe. «By setting itself up as a corporation that is driven by profit, but also by a sense of social responsibility, ‹GenTerra› highlights the complex relationship between for-profit ventures and the ethical considerations involved in transgenics research and product development. The project aims to make the public more aware of transgenics and the facts and fictions that surround it.» [20]

Similarly, Natalie Jeremijenko’s ambitious «OneTrees» (2000) project cloned 1,000 trees as a way to express genetics’ complex interaction with environmental influences, which is often oversimplified in public discourse about cloning. These clones are planted in public sites around the San Francisco Bay Area and because they are genetically identical, as they grow, they will express the social and environmental differences to which they are exposed. In an offshoot of this project, so to speak, «Tree Balance,» (2005) Jeremijenko balances two cloned

 

trees, which «means that the people seeing the clones in the gallery can resolve the small dynamic differences that the clones are accruing. . . . rendering something that would otherwise not be visible to a nonscientific audience.» [21]

Community Art

One of the variants of public art has been so-called «community art,» such as the murals created by Judy Baca with community participation or projects by Tim Rollins and K.O.S. [22] Increasingly, artists such as the collectives Superflex, Mongrel and PDPal are creating platforms for local audiences to utilize without getting very involved in the actual creation of content. The Danish group Superflex’s «Superchannel» is a tool that offers the capability to simply create live Internet TV using off-the-shelf technology. Local groups are able to broadcast local content and host topical chats. In Liverpool, for instance, Superflex was invited by FACT in Liverpool to work with the residents of a local high-rise housing, Coronation Court, to use self-programming as a way to maintain their community while the tower block was being renovated. The

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