Stutterer. Thomson & Craighead

THOMSON & CRAIGHEAD

STUTTERER

Stutterer 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 thirteen years it took the Human Genome Project to complete the first documented human DNA sequence. The four nucleotide bases of a DNA strand are represented by the letters T, A, G and C and Stutterer plays (or will play – if it were to run continuously for more than sixty years) all 3.2 billion letters representing the human genome, where each letter becomes a word plucked by the artists from an English language television broadcast made sometime between 1990 and 2003

Stutterer was started on Wednesday October 1st 2014 with approximately 500 video clips in its library, but this will be extended by the artists in the coming years, so that each time the work is exhibited there will be an increasing number of video elements to draw upon, offering an ever richer glimpse into a period in human history that begins in 1990 with the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in South Africa and concludes with the fall of Baghdad to a US and British military coalition in 2003.

Stutterer is a human monument of sorts, which seeks to connect our biological fabric with our unique linguistic abilities – the very abilities, which have arguably enabled us to apprehend our own DNA in the first place

Programming by Matt Jarvis. Stutterer was commissioned by LifeSpace Science Art Research Gallery at the University of Dundee for their new Discovery Centre for Translational and Interdisciplinary Research in the College of Life Sciences, which opened October 1 2014 and was supported by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award. Photographs of the work seen here by Ruth Clark.