Veggie Tales

Note to Hayley and Amit: I hope you guys don’t mind me using your pictures. You guys are the only ones who posted them in your profiles. :) thanks!

Earlier in class this week, I presented Laura Stein’s genomic art piece titled Smile Tomato. What she did to come up with this smiley imprint was to put a mold on a baby vegetable to limit and manipulate its growth. But what I found interesting about this piece of art, other than the fact that it was done on a very different medium, was that it carried a message, a message about nature vs. culture. In class, I tried to make a connection between this Smile Tomato and GATTACA, but I’m not sure if I got the point across clearly for lack of time.

What I wanted to say was that sometimes culture can have a more influential effect on us than nature alone. Yes, Vincent as a faith baby was genetically predisposed to heart failure and an early death while Gerome was engineered to be the ‘perfect’ man, but throughout the movie, we see that culture changes their natural destinies. Gerome was expected to be number one; getting silver was not an option. However, because everyone put so much pressure on him to be everything that nature said he was supposed to be, Gerome cracked and became a victim to society’s pressures. Vincent on the other hand had had every excuse to fail. Nature told him his many limits, but his willpower to prove people wrong conquered this societal suffocation. In his case, I think there was a strong combination of both natural and societal pressures. Vincent was the tomato that outgrew its mold while Gerome was the plant stifled by our world. (note 2: not trying to say anything by putting your pictures up there.)