World Premiere
Collaborating Scientist: Dr Jimmy Breen
Medium: Single channel video
Duration: 10:20

Human DNA exhaled in our outbreaths, and inhaled by others in their inbreaths, is a little-known form of DNA shedding and exchange, although viral shedding from human outbreaths has become intensely scrutinised during the current pandemic.

In ’93% Human’ Helen Pynor and collaborating scientist Jimmy Breen use a scientific glassware condenser device, which converts gaseous breath into liquid, to capture a shared breath sample which pools as liquid at the base of the device, rendering what is normally imperceptible into visible form.

At a time when the sharing of air with another has become deeply fraught, their performative actions explore the intimacy of our unnoticed exchanges with others, and ‘contamination’ as a necessary condition of being, as they labour to sustain breathing into the device for 10 minutes.

DNA in Pynor and Breen’s combined exhaled breath sample is later extracted, sequenced and the genomic data analysed in Breen’s laboratory. This reveals 93% human DNA, alongside DNA from a range of respiratory tract microbiome species, highlighting the multispecies nature of being ‘human’ and the respiratory tract as site for material exchange between self, human and non-human others, and world.

More broadly, DNA’s propensity to move beyond the cell as an imagined boundary and move into other bodies, the world, and sometimes other genomes, offers a critique of Western understandings of the bounded self and the categorical classification of species.

Research informing 93% Human was undertaken during an artist residency in the laboratory of Genomics Scientist and Bioinformatician Dr Jimmy Breen at SAHMRI (South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute), Adelaide. 93% Human will form part of a larger body of work exploring the materiality of breath, and the genomic data generated from Pynor and Breen’s research.

SAHMRI Artist Residency was support by
ANAT (Australian Network for Art and Technology)
SAHMRI (South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute)

93% Human was commissioned by World Science Festival Brisbane for Curiocity Brisbane 2022.

Video Production
Artist and Performer: Helen Pynor
Scientist and Performer: Jimmy Breen
Cinematography: Jules Wurm / Mira Soulio
Sound Recordist: Will Sheridan
Editor: Bianca Willoughby
Colourist: Yanni Kronenberg
Sound Design: James Brown
Shot at Cog Creative Space, Adelaide

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