Art as Antibody

I recently read an article on Transvergence written by Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito which they titled Art as Antibody. Transvergence is an idea in the art world of taking things that one might not normally consider to be an art medium, but adapt that medium for some kind of creative expression. Some examples may include genetically engineering a rabbit to have florescent green fur, or spreading a non-harmful computer virus that would be the digital version of graffiti.

In Blais and Ippolito's article, they make a very strong analogy between the way art exists in new media and the way organisms immune systems operate. It's a pretty high-brow article with lots of words I had to look up, but I'll give the gist of what I'm pretty sure they were saying. I'll begin like they did, in describing the basics of our immune systems and then applying those concepts to art won't be nearly as difficult.

Diseases enter our bodies in the form of antigens - little molecules that are all each slightly different in shape and size. What our body does to fight these antigens, is create their opposite - antibodies. Each antigen has one sister antibody that binds to out, allowing our white blood cells to destroy the antigen. This process trillions and trillions of times will, hopefully, eradicate the illness. And to prepare for antigens, our immune system constantly makes antibodies in a process that also randomly modifies them so as to produce small amounts of trillions of different kinds of antibodies. When an antigen enters the blood stream, the immune system eventually finds the appropriate antibody to bind to it, and then begins mass producing it to kill the disease.

Now here is where the article and I begin to disagree. In their article, they then apply this analogy to the internet - the idea that there are trillions of different thoughts and opinions online, and the most effective ones in battling opposing views or societal problems will be mass produced at an alarming rate (via chain e-mails, links, blogs, youtube, etc.) But what I think they should have done is apply this analogy to cultural meme theory in general, and acknowledge that the internet has incredibly increased the speed and effectiveness of memes.

But at the same time, antigens and antibodies should not just be seen as antigens are bad and antibodies are good. Rather, antigens are what your body decides not to include within itself, and antibodies are the means by which your body tries to eradicate them. In the same way, there may not necessarily be good cultural memes and bad cultural memes, just those that the individual chooses to include in their own ideology, and those they choose not to include in their own ideology. And in the same way, a group of people (country, culture, company, anything) may choose to include or exclude memes from their ideology. An easy example would be legislation - what laws do we choose to include or exclude, in order to survive as a country. And as we've progressed over time, our biology and our ideology have both improved in their abilities to survive.

Although they limited their argument to new media, my favorite part of the article is this last part of the analogy I will discuss - the idea that not exposing yourself to enough antigens, may lead your antibodies to turn on the host itself. There are many immune system disorders, or diseases where our own immune systems are the ones doing harm on ourselves. And what some have pointed out, is that these disorders have a strange correlation between how many infectious diseases the individual is exposed to. Many Westernized cultures have nearly eliminated many infectious disease (i.e. Malaria, Polio), but have much higher incidences of immune system disorders. And in countries that still suffer from many of these infectious diseases, immune system disorders are much less common. The argument many make, is that our immune systems are meant to be fighting, and if they don't have anything to fight, they will turn on themselves. In the article I read, they made the same argument for art and culture - if a culture becomes too closed off to allow art to challenge it, then the culture can become its own worst enemy. Biologically, ideologically, psychologically, culturally, and pretty much any giant system you can imagine needs a constant flow if ins and outs in order to retain its vitality. If our immune systems aren't challenged by disease, if our culture isn't challenged by artists and intellectuals, if our own individual brains aren't challenged by new ideas, they will die.