During our visit at the Whitney, the only piece to truly capture my attention, so much so that I watched it loop twice, was Anicka Yi’s The Flavor Genome. The short 3D film seemed to have for objective to set up dichotomies, between organic and artificial for example, and then to violently challenge those both through juxtaposing sets of subjects and through a rather monotone narrating talking of genetic mutations and the creation of hybrid creatures for the entertainment of those creating them. Yi would then take her argument further by pinning molecules up against language by discussing Frankenstein-like words created out of a desire for mental shortcuts and which smash together two terms like “sex” and “text” at the risk of losing both original meanings in the process. By doing so she is of course attempting to help move our discussing further by removing the fixed, respectively positive and negative, connotations attached to nature and science. What she’s also effectively doing though is suggesting that pollution is not just something up in the clouds making our cities hotter. There is also an equally real, although more subtle and therefore perhaps more poisonous, kind of pollution which can affect our minds if we are not weary of what ungodly hybrids we birth in our language, and more broadly speaking in our culture. If culture is nature than it is harder to change but it poses the question of who is the apex animal meant to thrive in this environment. If culture is artificial then not only can it be altered at our will but some people amongst can also be held accountable for the atrocities created in the name of culture. In a style reminiscent of body-horror cinema, Yi then shows up glimpses of human hands glossing over skin, wood or metal as if positing the idea that, just like we can break down our language to genes, our selves can be broken down to limbs which, when shown from this point of view, seem to have a will of their own, to be autonomeous. Furthermore she connects living yet seemingly different things through metaphor such as the juxtaposition of a vagina with an octopus and pearls. It seems to suggest that our metaphors can, or do, become our realities. That everytime we compare one thing to another what we are in fact making is a new hybrid. And when we do end up creating that hybrid we henceforth have brought on a new subjectivity to the world. Somehow the film is therefore about creating consciousness for entertainment or subjectivity for consumption. The Liger might’ve been born to please our sight but it is now through his eyes that we wish to see the world and no such eyes had previously existed. Similarly we assembled computers only to slowly, if only through glitch art in the present, birth a new form of consciousness with its own perspective on the reality in which it was born. To return to these hands gliding over surfaces though: I can’t quite explain what I mean by it but if there was to be a message within The Flavor Genome it would seem to be that everything is divisible and that therefore, when shrunken to a sympathetic enough, or weird enough if we’re talking molecular or god forbid quantum level, size then everything is alive.