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In her essay "Virus and Pearls: The Materialization of Culture," Anker quotes Beaudrillard, saying "The onslaught of viruses and their strategies have in a sense taken over the work of the unconscious." She continues: "Cryptograms and hyperfictions, cybersex and smart drugs, transpecies germlines, body-part-commodities, are Cultural buzzwords, all hovering in the media, encoding with their signature the information eruption of the cyborg and the technofix. From the metacognitive to the manic, from the substitutive to the social, codes have become our operative conductor." Later in the essay, Anker refers to Richard Dawkins, who discusses the relationship of natural evolution to cultural evolution. In The Selfish Gene (1976) Dawkins wrote, "A meme is a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. Examples of memes are units, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm and eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which in the broad sense can be called imitation." Anker's comment in her essay is, "Whereas the gene can determine species potentia (and not behavior), the meme can only take into account the concepts of cultural consciousness. Neither prediction nor market manipulation can formulate the infinite varieties of cultural forms. One consequence of this line of reasoning sets up a molecular politic in which social and cultural theories encapsulate an anthropomorphized natural world. To metaphorically separate cultural theory from the body politic is one function of the precincts of art."
According to Anker, the virus is either a simple organism or a complex molecule--a parasite-like predator wandering around in search of a home, a transitive postmodern body, incapable of its metastatus without its reliance on living cells, to be used as a translational system. The pearl, a synchronously abnormal growth-the result of an irritant or a virus-enters the establishment as a gem. Secretions giving form to entities is our reliance on culturing, on interchanging error with procreative capacity. Culturing has linked art production with other incorporations of foreign bodies-bodies of cognitive resources once thought to be outside the domain of visual art. Like a virus or a pearl, visual art is an altered mutation within this transformative epoch.
-From Technological to Virtual Art, by Frank Popper (2007)
Pages 126-127
And then:
http://karialtmann.com/work/2007/diamon
I haven't gotten my hands on Anker's essay yet.
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CARTOON VERSIONS OF OURSELVES
ICONS OF IDEALS
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