Concept Artist Uses Yeast to Clone Lady Gaga, President Obama

Want a big response for your art opening? It might not be a bad idea to put President Obama and Lady Gaga on display.

Concept artist Jonathon Keats’ latest exhibit is an experiment in open source cloning — using brewer’s yeast cells to model the epigenetic, or environmentally influenced, makeups of the president and Mother Monster.

Keats’ Cloning Celebrity exhibit, which opens Sept. 13 at New York’s AC Institute, attempts to duplicate President Obama, Lady Gaga and three other culture dominators by mashing their dietary intakes and other external inputs together with chemicals that can obtained by “anyone with a Walgreens or CVS in their neighborhood,” Keats explained to Wired.

“Cloning is going to become a part of our lives whether we like it or not, so we might as well take control of it,” he added.

Like all of Keats’ low-budget, brain-tickling artistic experiments — the “experimental philosopher” has also created antimatter currency, opened a photosynthetic restaurant, and investigated God porn — his epigenetic science is quite simple.

Cloning as we know it is mostly based upon inherited genes, but epigenetics is more concerned with how environment encourages gene expression. What we eat, breathe and the toxins we’re exposed to determine who we become. So, extrapolating backwards, Keats posits that by culturing yeast and exposing it to Obama and Gaga’s “biochemical intake” it is theoretically possible to make their epigenetic clones. The cells won’t be human, of course, but they are interesting versions nonetheless.

And because brewer’s yeast is involved, it’s now theoretically possible to create a piece of toast with Jesus in it.

“Actually you could carry the concept even further,” the author of the forthcoming Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age said. “Saccharomyces cerevisiae is an ingredient in both bread and wine, the two components of the Eucharist. If you were to epigenetically clone Jesus in the yeast used to leaven your bread and ferment your wine, you wouldn’t require transubstantiation for them to become the body and blood of Christ. That could be highly convenient, and if the Vatican is interested, I’d be happy to discuss it with them.”

And you, as well. Keats’ epigenetic experiment heads to San Francisco’s Modernism Gallery on Oct. 11 and he’ll be in attendance handing out human-to-human home cloning kits for Christ, George Washington and even the artist himself. (Click through the gallery above for a closer look at Keats’ weird science and its clone complexes.)

While Obama and Gaga’s yeasty clones may not physically resemble their real-time models, it’s the thought experiment that counts. Keats figures that by exposing humans to the same diet, pollutants and even “electrical stimulation of emotional crises,” they can achieve a scientific merge with the icons that have moved history — without even asking their permission.

“Cloning humans in yeast is limited by the fact that yeast is a single-cell organism and people are multicellular,” the experimental philosopher said. “So the obvious next step is to epigenetically clone humans in other human beings. But I don’t see this as an invasion of privacy, but rather a distribution of identity.”

That cheaply available distribution is what’s missing from the current cloning industry, which is why Keats is determined to open-source it beyond the reach of the whitecoats and their technocratic overlords. Respect is due, however, to the old-school crew.

“All living organisms are open source,” he told Wired. “Given that bacteria were freely cloning themselves in the Precambrian era, I don’t want to take undue credit for open sourcing cloning. But it’s true that ever since humans got into this business, they’ve been keen to patent it, or to keep their procedures secret. I’m seeking to bring it back out into the open by developing and sharing processes that anyone can take up.”

Not that things couldn’t go horribly wrong.

“I would hate to see how the prison system might use this technology to ‘reform’ inmates by force-feeding them whatever Mr. Rogers ate,” Keats said.