Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Joe Davis

Joe Davis' ideas involve E.coli, electron guns, DNA and beat-up pieces of satellite recovered from space.

By the sound of that toolkit, you might think we're about to talk with a biologist or maybe an astrophysicist, and yet

JD: I have no classical credentials in science whatsoever. I mean I took biology in Jr. college. I'm not a scientist, I'm an artist, very clearly, although there's a lot of argument about that too.

And when Joe Davis starts telling you about his work, it's easy to see how he causes argument - like, with one of his more ambitious projects, Poetica Vaginal...

JD: It was, project to transmit vaginal contractions into space to communicate with aliens. Wasn't really about transmitting vaginal contractions into space to communicate with aliens, was about transmitting vaginal contractions into space to communicate with ourselves...

Joe arrived at MIT one day almost 20 years ago - unannounced - and demanded that someone listen to him. MIT set him up with lab space that same day. Joe's ideas kind of like that -- they come barreling out of nowhere, with a great sense of, purpose.

Poetica Vaginal makes fun of our first, serious scientific attempt to communicate with aliens.

In the 1970's we launched the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft into outer space. We included drawings of man and woman - what NASA called -- the "average person from our civilization."

But we left something out...

JD: We removed external female genitalia, just like the classical artists of the Renaissance Age. We sent pictures of man and Barbie doll into space. We sent pictures advertently or inadvertently of our own intolerance.

Something had to be done. Joe knew he couldn't just launch another spaceship with a more accurate picture, but he could do the next best thing. So he worked out this project to transmit the sound of vaginal contractions into deep space.

(vaginal contraction sounds: wwhhhhahhhhwwaahhhwahwah. wwhhhhahhhhwwaahhhwahwah. wwhhhhahhhhwwaahhhwahwah.)

Joe inspired a team of 40 artists and scientists to help set the record straight. Medical doctors from Harvard; electrical engineers, biologists and linguists from MIT; and classically trained ballet dancers.

They recorded the vaginal contractions of the dancers and translated them into the 46 phonemes of English speech.

And what they beamed by radar to four nearby sun-like stars was, a combination of the original data in digital form, and this creative representation of the contractions as human speech? What Joe calls, poetry...

(much faster vaginal contraction sounds: wwhhhhahhhhwwaahhhwahwahwwhhhhahhhhwwaahhhwahwah)

JD: I really don't have any delusions that aliens are going to land and say, hey, we got your message.

Joe's art directs our gaze to something we either can't or won't see... it's almost always something completely absurd... and he uses the rigor of advanced science to make us look.

And in a way Joe's already made contact with an alien species. He's invented a microscopic fishing hook - to catch live, single celled, paramecium. You can feel them pull on the line like a giant marlin. Joe's made those invisible creatures, not only visible to us, but tangible, and... audible...

JD: Here's a lot of paramecia

(sound of paramecium)

And while Joe's been looking into space, he spied something so completely obvious, that --- it's amazing the rest of us missed it.

JD: But you see we've been flushing our toilet into space for 20 or 25 years. The Space Shuttle flushes its toilet in space. Apollo and Skylab all flushed their toilets in space.

Joe believes that a wide belt of this stuff surrounds the earth and that it's heading deeper and deeper into space. So it is possible that the first thing aliens find of us, will be the very thing we are most ashamed of.

JD: I'm not sure we wouldn't want to include something else a little more intelligent, with these materials

50% of human waste is E.coli bacteria. So Joe's genetically engineered a tiny image -- a vaginal icon -- into a strand of E.coli DNA --- he calls that work Micro Venus -- a little piece of art to show aliens that we're more thoughtful than all that drek might otherwise indicate.

Micro Venus is reproducing in a bio-containment freezer at MIT. It's ready to ship out into space, if we ever decide that's the right thing to do.

And to those of you who are alarmed or offended that this artist, has access and the ability to do a little genetic engineering?

JD: Now there's a lot of bad dreams out there and there are a lot of evil things to do with almost anything, including genetic engineering. See, since all of our dreams are going to come true, someone has to have some good dreams, Lu. (beat) That's the kind of thing that America, that the whole world, needs to realize.

I couldn't agree more.

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