[INTERVIEW] Media artist s own DNA breathes new life into digital landscape paintings
Posted : 2021-07-14 09:09
By Park Han-sol
What exactly did media artist Lee Lee-nam need in order to give life to a 6.8-meter-high digital waterfall roaring down a wall of the Savina Museum? A high-functioning computer, projector and two strands of his own hair.
In his piece, Waterfall Turned into a Poem, what looks like a shower of water droplets is, upon closer inspection, revealed to be a stream of the letters of the alphabet, A, T, C and G. The tiny, white letters raining down in fact represent the four chemical bases that make up human DNA molecules: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C) and guanine (G). But they are not just from any human. They derive directly from the artist s own genetic code, extracted from his strands of hair at the G+FLAS Life Sciences biotech lab at Seoul National University.