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Rachel Mayeri: Stories from the Genome: An Animated History of Reproduction

"I have always been curious about how science creates stories out of facts, conjecture, and the imagination in a way that is very similar to art practice," says video and installation artist Rachel Mayeri while discussing her latest work, Stories from the Genome: An Animated History of Reproduction. The 33-year-old mediamaker's fascination with the process of scientific discovery and its likeness to artistic exploration has informed her work in engaging ways. Employing imagery ranging from baroque opera sets to vintage medical illustrations and three-dimensional models, Mayeri has fashioned avant-garde, computer-generated animation pieces that probe the intersections of visual art, science, and cultural beliefs.

It was during Mayeri's student days at Brown University, where she majored in modern culture and media, that she first began studying the evolution of diverse scientific theories. "My father is a neuroscientist, and growing up within a science environment I found that a lot of scientists spoke authoritatively about human nature without considering the social or political implications of their ideas," she explains. "I wanted to show that often times science is culturally constructed." Her research led to the creation of Electropathic Sanitarium (1992), an experimental documentary about neurasthenia, a nervous disorder that 19th century scientists attributed to the trappings of modern civilization, such as trains and electricity. Mayeri says she was drawn to the topic "because it seemed to be a sickness caused by culture." Combining an array of forms, including black-and-white 16mm images of power lines shot to resemble nerve ganglia, video interviews in period settings, stills from historical medical manuals, and found footage of epileptic women, Electropathic Sanitarium playfully looks at the hazards of modernity while suggesting the importance of art and technology in scientific thinking and representation.

In 1995, Mayeri traveled west to attend the graduate visual arts program at the University of California at San Diego, where she met David Wilson, the director of the Los Angeles-based Museum of Jurassic Technology. It was Wilson's opera performance of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas that inspired Mayeri's research of 17th century culture and opera, which she later applied with striking effect in her animated short The Anatomical Theater of Peter the Great (1999). The work's stage-like depth of field, kaleidoscope of baroque cutout figures, and scrolling text presents a scientific theater of the absurd while simultaneously parsing the rhetoric of scientists. Her collages, Mayeri says, are attempts to find the "poetic space between documentary and fiction while highlighting the hopes and foibles, rather than the certainties, of science."

Stories from the Genome is Mayeri's most complex work to date. The 30-minute experimental video weaves together a compendium of narratives from the history of the science of reproduction, starting with the philosophy of the 17th century up to the publication of the human genome in February 2001. "By animating the visual artifacts of different centuries, I can offer viewers a glimpse of how people have grappled with explaining reproduction and heredity," she says, adding that "my intent is to show how science has historically worked to support--rather than unseat--religious and cultural myths." Utilizing several motion-graphics applications, such as Adobe After Effects, Flash, Final Cut Pro, and Photoshop, Mayeri manipulates woodcuts, engravings, photography, painting, sculpture, X-ray crystallography, websites imagery, video, electron microscopy, and music to produce an illuminated essay on the theories of reproduction.

"Historical fears of miscegenation, hybridity, and sexual ambiguity are becoming realities again as genetic modification and cloning continue in the laboratory," observes Mayeri, who teaches media studies and digital media at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. "I'm hoping that Stories from the Genome will be able to cross the divide between art and science, and encourage a dialogue on new concepts of identity."

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THIS PROJECT'S CATEGORIES: Film / Video > Film / Video | Science & Technology | California | 2001