Belle Shafir - Eugenics
Installation, Multimedia, Sculpture
Eugenics, Cloning human beings has fascinated artists for dozens of years. Already in 1932 Aldous Huxley published his classical novel Brave New World which deals with this issue. In Benjamin W. Bova’s The Multiple Man, published in 1976, several completely identical bodies of ….. the president of the United States are found. In that same year, Ira Levin’s famous novel The Boys from Brazil, on which the famous film was based, was published too, comprising of scenes that depict the reduplication of Adolph Hitler by neo-Nazies. Years later, in 1993, Stephen Spielberg’s film Jurassic Park portrayed the revival of dinosaurs which was made possible by implanting their genetic material into frogs’ ova.
In literary fantasies, such as The Boys from Brazil and Jurassic Park, the cloning technique was based on the notion that one can take an ovum, destroy the information in it, and replace it with genetic information taken from a cell belonging to a different animal or a grown person.