Metagenomic Field KitThe Metagenomic Field Kit offers a series of democratic communication potentials opening up new channels of resistance meant to facilitate biologically encrypted information exchange within a near future landscape that is monitored and manipulated by increasingly pervasive digital surveillance dominated by various corporate and governmental interests.
Within molecular biology we find an astonishingly complex language medium, embodying a highly flexible, contextual and efficient multi-scalar system enabling communication through the deposition, encryption, replication, accumulation, persistence and distribution of large amounts of information utilizing nucleotide coding, regulatory genomic processes, and biotic/abiotic interactions. We propose intercepting the mechanisms of genetic communication through environmental metagenomics, by which DNA sequencing can be deployed to identify specific loci, patterns, and concentrations of multiple genetic communities in relation to each other and their environment, allowing encrypted communications through the alteration of the biome by methods including insertion of edited DNA and amplification of microbial populations. Using the density and perspective of metagenomics as a communication channel harnesses the ubiquity and complexity of genetic information, providing mechanisms for message encoding, cloaking and dissemination, offering a strategy of stealth through visibility, one in which the incredible complexity and diversity of biomes are used as a highly effective camouflage strategy to embed signals within an incredibly noisy field. Project Lead: Nicole Koltick Project team: Alyssa Klein, Uk Jong, Elise Krespan, Greg Sieber |