Title: Transposon Painting

This paper is founded on an important emergent conceptual premise within contemporary painting discourses. This is the idea that painting is not a fixed or traditionally circumscribed form of visual philosophy but rather is an incessantly transposable genre. What is significant about this paper is that it presents a unique critique on the contemporary transposable position of painting through an innovative interdisciplinary frame of reference known as ‘Bio-art’. This involves a novel interpretation of Bio-art and painting as Bio-art, specifically mediated in practice through new biotechnologies as agency of extended painting. 

This paper develops this argument using a specific new example from Bio-art called Transposon painting. This novel idea of extended painting first proposed in September 2011 is currently being realised as painting as extended practice by the author and Bio-artist. Brodyk argues how and why he considers particular ambulant biological properties as extended painting, using an actual living transposal molecule called a ‘transposon’ currently being engaged with by the artist.

So this interpretation develops innovative new thinking and methodological approaches to painting at a molecular biological level as a transposable discipline by considering biotechnology as integral to extended ideas of painting.

In advancing new notions of painting away from media specificity towards the ‘idea’ of painting in this case through the agency of Bio-art using the example of   Transposon painting, such an interpretation is ostensibly divergent to any extant notion of painting. What this translates into in terms of altered (biological) painting, is a transposable effect, one aesthetically, conceptually and practically determined rather than being autonomously itinerant.