l’m Humanity

Description:

The project l’m Humanity is based on the concept of “post-humanity music” and explores how new music will be transmitted, recorded, mutated, and diffused whether sung or played via word of mouth, as scores, through radio, records and CDs, or cloud computing. Music travels through space and time, undergoing mutations on its way. The close connection between music and media is like that between transmission and recording, and can be thought of as genes and DNA. As a musician, Yakushimaru has worked in a variety of genres from pop to experimental music and has created various types of artwork such as drawings, installations, pieces that make use of satellite and biometric data, a song-generating robot, original instruments, and more.

In l’m Humanity, Yakushimaru makes pop music with the use of the nucleic acid sequence of Synechococcus, which is a type of cyanobacteria. The musical information is converted into a genetic code, which was used to create a long DNA sequence comprising three connected nucleic acid sequences. The DNA was artificially composited and incorporated into the chromosomes of the microorganism. This genetically-modified microorganism with music in its DNA is able to continuously self-replicate. So even if humanity as we know it becomes extinct, it will live on, waiting for the music within it to be decoded and played by the species that replaces humanity.

When thinking about the lifespan of recording media, for example, CDs are said to last for decades and acid-free paper is said to last for centuries. In comparison, DNA’s lifespan as a recording media is 500 thousand years, physicochemically speaking. Because the lifespan of DNA is so long, it has great potential as a recording media.