Spit, Anonymizing: America Project

This chapter further explores ideas of sameness and difference in the context of DNA, particularly our sense of individual identity and group identity. These distinctions have been the basis of centuries of racism, slavery and eugenics, as well as sexism, classism, nationalism and xenophobia. These issues are probed through the America Project, the most recent DNA-focused artwork in this volume. The artwork is centered around a massive spittoon into which audience members donate saliva, from which DNA is extracted during the opening and used to generate gel electrophoresis images in the exhibition space. In the America Project, I articulate the idea of radical sameness, proposing a reorientation of our understanding of DNA and the individual.