Ghost Genes

Sister Sylvester / Kathryn Hamilton / Türkiye, Netherlands & United States

Ghost Genes is a science-seance, an audio AR experience which uses the audience’s own bodily matter – their bones – as the site of a performance about the intimate reaches of contemporary genetics.

This project is part of a wider body of work called ‘Good Genes’ which looks at the emergent fields of bio-tech and synthetic biology, and creates ‘embodied performances’, where the performances take place literally within the biological matter of the audience – in their intestines, their stomachs or their bones, – in order to make visceral the stakes and implications of these new technologies for our identities, bodies, communities.

This work aims to critique the tendency in genetics to reduce the complexities of heredity to dominant and recessive characteristics, and to draw out the parallels between contemporary bio-tech and the history of genetics and fascist ideologies.

Each of the works is based on research I’ve done into a costume hat that hasn’t been washed since the 1930s, and the genetic materials that I have found on it. One is a magic show/ cocktail party, where the audience ingest the DNA of a long-dead actor, so that the ‘performance’ takes place in their intestines. Another models a biohacker lab, and local performers teach the audience bio-hacker techniques while an unseen narrator recounts the archival and forensic research that went into finding the DNA of those who wore the hat.

‘Ghost Genes’, which I have been developing at CPH, is a science-seance, using bone conduction technology so that the performance travels through their bones and takes place inside the resonant cavity of the audience’s skull, placing them in a strange, intimate dialogue with the genes of one of the hat wearers, and with model organisms – drosophila, or fruit flies – from a genetics lab. The piece moves forward and back in time, drawing parallels with the use of genetics in the 1930s, and the ways that model organisms in the lab have become ‘future generating machines’.

It’s a little ironic that the humble fruit fly has become a model organism in the lab, representing order, rationality, the genome as a code that can be translated, understood. In early history, the fly represented something else: the christians mocked the pagan god Baal – which means Lord – by calling him Baal Ze Bub – lord of the flies – meaning lord of disorder, of chaos, of shit. Flies were thought to be a lesser organism, created not by God, but arising spontaneously from dirt and rot. And now these symbols of collective chaos have become the workhorses of a new order, where everything has a meaning, and everything can be known.

The history of drosophila, the history of the hat, what is divisible and what is elemental, all come together in an investigative narrative that holds court with the ghosts in our genes, the ghosts inside our heads, and the ghosts in the history of genetics.