How can artists possibly confront the excruciating complexity of the human genome — or any genome for that matter? There are just too many of the letters C, G, A and T. It is possible, however, to make some general artistic statements about the human genome project and its implications, and about genetic engineering as a whole. But it is all too easy to sink to the level of the 'Frankenstein food' headline that appeared in the British newspaper the Daily Mail on 13 February 1999.

Sarah Jacobs shows that the complexity can be tackled head on. She has a record of working with the blank poetics of modern scientific discourse, with its studied eschewing of personal expression. Her 92-page e-book Deciphering Human Chromosome 16: We Report Here is studded throughout with phrases from the original article, 'The sequence and analysis of duplication-rich human chromosome 16' (Nature 432, 988–994; 2004). “We report here” is one of these, together with “We observed” (of course), “Here we describe”, “We constructed”, “We adopted a strategy”, “We then eliminated”, “Finally we identified”, and so on. Isolated, phrases that are so much part of scientific normality assume the quality of an incantation.

Credit: S. JACOBS

After the Nature article was published, Jacobs googled such terms as “human chromosome 16”, “chromosome 16 book” and “chromosome 16 expression”. She even searched for odd combinations, such as “chromosome 16” + “Saddam Hussein”. She sifted out around 250 website links on the basis of what appeared intellectually or intuitively interesting and “looked good”. The e-book proceeds through simple pages of the incantatory phrases interspersed with coloured lower-case overprinting of the website links with fragments of their text and numbers from the original article in large capitals (see the page shown above).

The result is a doggedly accumulated 'report' on the incredibly rapid Internet diffusion of the knowledge in standard and bizarre forms. The contents are subject to constant mutation, so every six months Jacobs takes screen shots to document the changes.

To accompany the report, Jacobs has now issued an 'index' as a print-on-demand book, with a fixed form of 552 pages (http://www.informationasmaterial.com). Against the background of the CGAT permutations, the accumulated number of characters is remorselessly spelt out, up to “Sixteen million five hundred and forty-one thousand and nine hundred” — still some way short of the roughly 80 million base pairs noted in the original article. They are accompanied by enigmatic fragments from the websites.

Given the vagaries of the production process, each index assumes an individual character. The letters C, G, A and T on every left-hand page are bled to the page borders, and their visible expression on the unbound edge of the closed book varies unpredictably as the result of minute variations in the trimming process.

The report and the index are odd, difficult, perplexing, suggestive and strangely beautiful — and awesome in their numerical persistence. Jacobs has created something drawn directly from the science and its diffusion, using the tools of a bibliographer. Yet the result subverts the science in the direction of chaos and cacophony. The effect is analogous to the way that the particularity of each individual person seems to confound the overwhelming similarity of our genetic constitutions.

At least, this is one possible interpretation. There are others. Jacobs is, I suspect, resisting any closed or dominant reading. And therein lies the difference between the original Nature article and Jacobs' visual play. The scientific exposition provides as little latitude for alternative readings as possible, whereas Jacobs provides a field for interpretative flexibility that triggers thoughts and insights of an unexpected nature — unexpected, perhaps, even to the author herself.