James Beckett
Transcriptions 1-6

Transcriptions 1-6 is an installation for the six landings of the staircase of the Nederlands Kanker Instituut’s new research building. James Beckett translated the genetic code of six species of fish into six different historical languages - past and sometimes obsolete systems of information storage and communication.

Beckett thought up different ways of rendering this information into a new language. The pieces of genetic information he used were contained in the common combinations A, C, G and T combinations. So as to accommodate the differences between the two methods of describing, he used small tables to convert the combinations. The tables themselves served as a model for understanding the manner in which Messenger-RNA expresses genetic information in proteins. The protein positions in the table were replaced with the new content, each corresponding to a property of the given destination language.

The whole process of translating is a laborious one: strict, yet ultimately pointless. The languages that Beckett has employed are semaphore (the optical telegraph code), Laban (a notation for dance and movement), Zulu woven beads (with coded love messages, from Kwakulu/Natal), Warazan (an ancient Japanese counting and bookkeeping method), the slate (old means of keeping a tally or updating credit) and an ‘arrow language’ invented by Beckett himself. The destination ‘languages’ themselves hold little or no information and could also be described as quite cumbersome. In this sense the exercise is entered into as an enactment of language, by no means attempting to mirror contemporary genetic research advances!

The project is an homage to the people working on cancer research at the NKI. Much of their work involves the abstraction of complex biological situations, each time necessitating the invention of new and quite unlikely techniques. The technology and procedures they work with change at such a swift rate, resulting in a constant offloading and updating of approach.
This was the reason why Beckett looked backwards. Transcriptions 1-6 is the result of an absurd practice recalling past systems of reading and writing and with it a small meditation on methods of renewal.

James Beckett is making a booklet about the project with information about all the languages, fish and methods used, a text by Robbert Dijkgraaf and an article by Will Holder (design: Salome Schmuki). The booklet costs € 2,0 and can be ordered from ad@skor.nl