But Is It Art ?

Craig Venter has moved along the artificial life curve another step reports Ron Bailey of Reason, somewhat belatedly

But thanks to Ron Bailey for reminding me of an earlier avatar of Frankenstein Lite

In the year 2000, Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac  inaugurated a  conceptual art installation  based on molecular genetics called , naturally, " Genesis", which  translates messages in  Morse code into the ACGTs of the genetic code.

You can write any plain text message by  assigning word spaces to adenine, dots to cytosine, letter spaces to guanine, and dashes to thymine, and a sequencing engine can then  string these DNA bases together for insertion  into the genome of any handy lab organism, like  E. coli or other simple bacteria .

The arty bit is that Kac , by  activating an ultraviolet light over a  petri dish of the genetically encoded messenger bacteria, can mutate them, and the message.

For a suitably large grant from the National Endowment For The Arts, I am prepared to encode  select passages from The Federalist Papers , and commence their random mutation to see how long it takes them to transform into  quotations from The Discovery Institute or recognizable excerpts from Bill Kristol's New York Times Column .