“Genomic Media” is a concept coined by Mél Hogan (2020). It is also the title of the SSHRC-funded project that supports this project. We propose “Genomic Media” as a concept that accounts for the history, legacy, and interdisciplinary nature of DNA in the context of data storage. Unlike DNA as media, Genomic Media calls on the entirety of a pre-existing industry, and the decades-long social and emotional investments in the codes of binary and molecular biology. Genomic Media are also the tools and technological advances of the last two decades that ‘make’ the gene – make it conceptual, visible, editable – and that have, in turn, spawned a billion dollar industry, the global field of genomics. So instead of asking ‘what is a gene?’ – which may, in fact, be best left to chemists and biologists – as critical media scholars, we must continue to ask: what have we made out of DNA? How can the molecular change, if not through the ways we mediate it, render it visible, market it, and deploy it? What stories does the genome narrate for us over time? How did we come to store data onto DNA?

  • Genomic Media inspired by and indebted to critical feminist Media Studies and Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars who over the course of the last three decades who have studied the power relations, discursive formations, multidimensional structure, evolutionary theories, and functions of a cell’s DNA into the informational field of genomics. Without these scholarly precursors – especially Lily E. Kay (2000) and Evelyn Fox Keller (2002), who have since the late 1990s drawn our attention to the language of DNA science – and Donna Haraway (1997), Kaushik Sunder Rajan (2006), Kim TallBear (2013), Alondra Nelson (2016), Siddhartha Mukherjee (2017), Robert M. Sapolsky (2017), Catherine Bliss (2018), Jennifer Reardon (2018), Carl Zimmer (2018), and Sheila Jasanoff (2019), among others. As researchers for this project, we wouldn’t have had the personal interest or the intellectual scaffolding required to investigate this topic in a meaningful way without them. While their work does not focus on infrastructure – in fact, arguments most often leave off on the very issue of how genomic data circulates in terms of material infrastructure, or at the prospect of an evermore automated (by algorithms) field – it’s impossible to speak of genomics without considering its funding, its material instantiations, the devices that enable scientists to parse out information, from the gels and paper, to the barcoding, interfaces, browsers, and databases through which genomics is conceived, and rendered visible. Genomics is tethered to the datafication of genes, to the tools, measures, and instruments that enable us to think of the body in codified ways. Notably, Kay (2000) and Keller (2002) warned of how such instruments – large-scale DNA sequencers, computers, and scientists rendering and interpreting data – would inevitably shape the language and concepts of genes; that is, that we would think of genes as genomics in mostly, if not purely, informational terms.

    Given our team’s decade+ long dedication to critical environmental media, we felt ready to undertake the mediatic and infrastructural questions of this project by shifting the focus of genomics from questions of health, forensics, and ancestry, to the use of DNA for data storage. In both cases – with human genomics proper and with DNA data storage – the underlying process is that we code and decode as a way of knowing. We extract, read, interpret, and represent through DNA’s language, which is represented by 4 letters: ATCG. Both the body and DNA then, can be imagined as storage devices.

    It’s important to note that by proposing the concept of “Genomic Media”, we do not intend to weigh in directly on the potentials and outputs of genomic research, as readers might expect. Instead, we’re interested almost exclusively in a ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ angle, as well as the meanings, discursive actions, processes, and conditions that generate genomics within a larger environmental media framework. Our focus is on the entanglements of genomics with infrastructure and the environment, that ultimately give rise to the idea of using DNA itself to store data.

    In order to immerse ourselves in this world of genomics, as a non-scientists, we put forward a grant proposal that will have us interview entrepreneurs, bioinformaticians, and genomics experts, at various institutions across Canada, while also tracking the tremendous headway being made globally by Big Tech – and especially by US-based cloud companies like Amazon, Alphabet/Google, and Microsoft – in order to make a critical intervention where the two meet. These companies are the biggest players in the field of genomic data sequencing, storage, marketing and infrastructure. And yet no media scholar has (of yet) dedicated their full attention to this, specifically to the intersection of internet infrastructure and genomics. Fewer still were looking at how DNA itself might become a storage medium, or why this medium had emerged when it had. These are two very different objects of inquiry, but the idea to store data onto DNA stems in part from the technological advances made in the genomics industry – the logics, algorithms, software, sequencers, and other tools that code and decode the human genome. And while we account for this trajectory, this project focuses more on the story of the gene as a mediating agent, and its significance for storage at a time of looming planetary catastrophe. What we mean by this is that DNA data storage is not purely a technological query, it is deeply embedded in settler colonial ideals of science, it reflects end-of-world anxieties, and has a decidedly religious bent to it. These are all things we explore in and through Genomic Media.

    To situate genomics within the context of internet infrastructure, we draw on existing decolonial and critical social histories of human genomics data and DNA that have been written by interdisciplinary scholars, such as those we mention above. Together, these scholars and authors complicate the discursive powers of the gene and genome and situate them – and the sociotechnical and technomedical imaginaries they’ve inspired since the Human Genome Project (HGP) drafted in the early 2000s (and again in 2022) – as a project of modernity, with both colonial and decolonial potentialities. Our contribution departs from these works in numerous ways, but mainly by focusing on the mutual reinforcement of genomics and data infrastructure – the rise of Big Data as a mindset, and its material, infrastructural support. Where genomics data is stored and how it is controlled will have tremendous impacts on the way society understands – and reworks – itself. Where genomics data is stored also has huge implications for its sequencing and processing and, in turn, for its deployments. If left in the hands of Big Tech and their profit-driven mandates, we must understand how we got here in order to resist and – ideally – find queer decolonial feminist alternatives. These alternatives are important not just to conclusions drawn from genomics science, but also from the hype, promise, and marketing of both Big Tech and the genomics industry’s ideals.

  • Madeleine Mendell, Mél Hogan and Deb Verhoeven. 2022. “Matters (and metaphors) of life and death: How DNA storage doubles back on its promise to the world”. ‘Geographies of the Digital’ The Canadian Geographer / Le Géographe canadien. Nadine Shuurman (ed)


    Mél Hogan. 2020. transmediale Marshall McLuhan Lecture 2020: Expanded Networks . Embassy of Canada in Berlin on January 29.


    Mél Hogan and Deb Verhoeven. 2020. “Sustainable DNA” in Right Research: Modelling Sustainable Research Practices in the Anthropocene. Open Book Publishers.


    Mél Hogan. 2020. “DNA” Uncertain Archives (MIT Press) Nanna Thylstrup, Daniela Agostinho, Annie Ring, Catherine D'Ignazio, and Kristin Veel (eds).


    Mél Hogan. 2018. “Data is airborne; Data is inborn: The labor of the body in technoecologies”. First Monday, 23(3).


    Mél Hogan. 2018. “Templating Life, DNA as Nature’s Hard Drive”. PUBLIC 57: Archives/Anarchives/Counter-Archives, 29(57) Volume 29, pp 145-153.