Stutterer.
Stutterer is a two-screen video installation deploying sequences from the human genome to experiment with documentary form and big data management. This is an instructional artwork – a poetry machine that uses the human genome like a music score to play back a self-assembling video montage spanning the 13 years it took to complete the Human Genome Project. The work is presented on two synchronised screens, one of which displays the four letters of the genome sequence – A, C, G, T, representing the four nucleotide bases of a DNA strand – and the other displays a historical video fragment. As letters emerge one by one from the 3.2-billion-letter genome sequence, a corresponding video fragment says a word at random beginning with that letter. See Portfolio Booklet for documentation of research dimensions.
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- qv41v
- Type
- L - Artefact
- Location
- Stutterer was initially exhibited in the group show Scales of Life in the LifeSpace Science Art Research Gallery, University of Dundee, October 6, 2014 – January 11, 2015. Further details in portfolio.
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of production
- October
- Year of production
- 2014
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Stutterer considers models of documentary-making and the human relationship with big data. Made collaboratively by Craighead and Jon Thompson, it was originally commissioned by the LifeSpace Science Art Research Gallery, University of Dundee, and funded by the Wellcome Trust. The name Stutterer signals that the work is itself a method or process for sequencing large batches of media information. By allowing events to be broken down and laid out it addresses the problem of managing cultures of big data, which currently occupies commercial and scientific enterprises. In its combining of science, art and language, Stutterer also raises the possibility that it is primarily human linguistic abilities that have allowed us to apprehend our genetic code in the first place. The research sets out to humanise this large data set by using it as the basis for generating an experimental documentary about the years spanning the turn of the millennium in which concerns over systemic or structural biases concerning data and scientific research emerged.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
