iam : Sarah Jacobs

SARAH JACOBS

Deciphering Human Chromosome 16: We Report Here

Deciphering Human Chromosome 16 bookworks use text in a visual way to document the ethical, economic, political and philosophical polemics associated with mapping the human genome.

We Report Here is an ebook which contains links to over 250 websites collected in the months following publication in the journal Nature of "The sequence and analysis of duplication-rich human chromosome 16"( Vol. 432. December 2004). Its contents change over time as the websites change, migrate or disappear.

Elisabeth Long’s book review originally appeared in JAB23: The Journal of Artists' Books, Spring 2008, p. 45.
http://www.journalofartistsbooks.org

Deciphering Human Chromosome 16 by Sarah Jacobs
Reviewed by Elisabeth Long

The human chromosome with its tens of millions of base pairs may seem practically impenetrable in its size and complexity; matched only, perhaps, by the human activity that surrounded its sequencing. Sarah Jacobs takes on both—the science of the sequencing and the human reaction to it—in her multi-part work, Deciphering Human Chromosome 16.

In many ways HC 16 is a conceptual piece, not so much a book to be read as a piece to be understood through the ideas that underlie its component parts. Yet still, look too closely and snippets of text will start to draw you in, undermining the stark, cerebral presentation of the science with the occasionally colorful, unexpectedness of human reactions.

The central work of the piece is an e-book, subtitled We Report Here, which uses the Nature article that announced the completion of the sequencing of human chromosome 16 as a point of departure to explore the content of over 250 web sites that referred in one way or another to chromosome 16. “Its contents change over time as the websites change, migrate or disappear,” Jacobs claims—a book constructed to reflect the mutability of human activity. In order to convey the chaos of references and reactions—spanning scientific, religious, economic, ethical, and political spheres—Jacobs overlays text upon text, web site snippets upon URLs in a colorful cacophony of activity. Hinting at the connection that unites these phrases and references, each occurrence of the letter A T G and C is styled bold and red, thus concocting a sort of DNA sequence of the book’s contents. In stark contrast to this jumble of human activity, large letters throughout the work declare the mantras of scientific writing—We REPORT, WE COMPARED, WE WERE ABLE TO ACCOUNT FOR—careful, contained language, asserting only what it knows it can. So unlike the web site snippet claiming that “the Y chromosome is like a movie preview and the X chromosome is like a movie.”

The e-book is accompanied by a hefty, printed tome, the Index to the Report, which uses for the background of its 500+ pages a portion a portion of the entire sequence of chromosome 16. On each page, snippets of text from the e-book overlay the genetic sequence and are, in turn, overlaid with one of the URLs from the ebook’s web sites. The increasing numbers of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs are counted as the viewer pages through the book. What exactly is being indexed here? The very makeup of our cells (selves), or our human activities? Can they even be differentiated? This is the kind of question Deciphering Human Chromosome 16 urges us to contemplate.

The very physicality of the Index, the number of pages, the mind-numbing density of the genetic sequences which cannot give room even to margins, produce a book that confounds the mind to imagine that something equal to those 500 pages of letters fits inside each one of our cells. This is not an idea that can be apprehended—only comprehended. And yet this book, which is fundamentally such a mental exercise in comprehension, has also successfully used all of its material elements, to help us more fully apprehend its story.