Clot Magazine

Joe Davies is one of the seminal figures in Biomedia. His work has shocked and polarised the artistic community while at the same time laying the foundations for a new artistic discipline. The artist is a research affiliate in the Department of Biology at MIT and his research and art include work in the fields of molecular biology, bioinformatics, and sculpture. With his practice, he was one of the first to blur the lines between art and modern biology, In the late 1980s, Davis collaborated with molecular biologist Dana Boyd to insert for the first time a non-biological DNA message into a coding sequence. The recipient was the bacterial strain E. coli, one of the basic tools in molecular biology labs. The work, named Microvenus, encoded a binary representation of the Germanic rune for the female goddess of earth and life. The piece was a response to the Pioneer plaques designed by astronomers Frank Drake and Carl Sagan that were sent aboard Pioneer spacecraft with the intention of being intercepted by ext