Kaliningrad's luminous cacti.

From projects to transform the ecosystems of a continent, to orbiting mirrors capable of turning night into day, playing God with nature has always been the realm of the state in Russia.

But with his plan to create a genetically engineered glow-in-the-dark cactus, Russian artist Dmitry Bulatov aims to take up where the Soviet ideologues left off, twisting nature to prove a point,

Working as part of the international art movement known as Ars Chimera, Dmitry Bulatov of Russia's National Centre for Contemporary Arts has employed biologists to alter a living organism's genetic make-up to create an art object that is literally animate.

Under Bulatov's supervision, in a project titled "Consciousness of the Alert," genetic material from a naturally glowing sea amoeba is to be combined with a Mexican cactus, giving it luminous properties. A hallucinogenic substance revered by certain North-American First Nations, Bulatov hopes to harness the Lophophora williamsii Coult. cactus for both its mythic and dreamlike resonances. The experiment will improve on nature by transforming the cactus into an aesthetic object, infusing it with the luminous colour associated with hallucinogenic experience and Western artistic value,

The resulting transgenic entity will be called GM-L01, with fifteen to twenty specimens to be produced and signed by the artist. Currently stalled while additional funds are secured, Bulatov hopes the project will be completed within five to six months.

Explaining his motives in the endeavour, Bulatov focuses on the trivial. Speaking on the phone from his home in the Russian province of Kaliningrad, he cites interior design as a rationale for the project.

"A housewife might come to us and say that she has a particular colour of blinds in her kitchen," he suggests, "and she wants a plant of some kind to match, say blue or yellow. We would say, 'yes, we can do it.'"

He is being ironic, he explains, but the idea appeals to him: to force nature to imitate pop art with its bright and gaudy colours; to turn nature into a design element, a decorative attribute in a 1970s kitchen.

His chief interest in the project, he clarifies, is to draw attention to the moral implications of genetic experimentation, "This type of art engineering has a clearly expressed precautionary character," he recently told Russia's St. Petersburg Times, "it shows us that the world was once one thing, but could become something completely different."

Bulatov also acknowledges parallels between his project and the Soviet Union's attempts to reengineer nature to fit its particular worldview, which he characterises as state-authored artistic statements on a colossal scale. "In Soviet times the state took on the function [of the artistic avant-garde]," he said, "It was able to undertake huge projects ... to do the impossible."

In one such act of hubris, the Central Committee drew up a plan to overrule nature and transform the ecosystem of central Asia by rerouting two of Siberia's rivers southward, making vast swathes of land arable. Earlier in the 1930s, Soviet scientists had tried to adapt seed grain to allow it to grow in cold temperatures, trans. forming Siberian wastelands into vast farms. Nature, however, won out in the end and both projects were abandoned.

A more recent undertaking proposed the placing of 200 metre circular mirrors in orbit around the earth to reflect light from the sun onto cities at night. It was estimated that three such mirrors could light up a city the size of Moscow, giving the state the power to turn night into day. The initiative was cancelled, however, due to lack of funds.

In comparison, the relative scale of Bulatov's experiment reflects the difference in resources available today to a Russian with a god complex, but also the degree of power wielded by the totalitarian state. "I do not agree with total regimes by any means" Bulatov notes, "but they allow impossible, fantastical projects."

He also sees Russian art as being diminished with the end of its struggle with communism--artists having lost their biggest patron and antagonist when the Soviet colossus collapsed. "As a rule, in any country, the more democracy there is, the smaller the role that artists play in society," he said.

In exploiting cutting-edge technologies for the sake of art, Bulatov sees his latest project as having much in common with the Russian avant-garde of the early part of the century, in particular, the Constructivists. Focused on the future, Constructivist monumental sculptures such as Tatlin's Monument to the 3rd International incorporated technologies such as radio, projectors and moving rotating platforms. Later works, such as Rodchenko's design for a "Cinema Car" and Klucis' "propaganda kiosks" were also intended to promote the importance of technology.

The use of modern technologies, however, leads inevitably to technical problems for the artists involved and entails huge costs. It is for this reason that Ars Chimera has remained an elite endeavour, with only a few having the resources to indulge such ambitions. Bulatov believes, however, that this form of art will eventually find its way into the mainstream through a process of "socialization," whereby, as with photography, a complex technology becomes accessible to the masses. He thus predicts a future where one will be able to commission a genetically modified entity with little knowledge of the under lying technology that creates it.

Despite its history of challenging nature, highly skilled scientists, and costs that are a fraction of those in the West, Bulatov does not believe that Russia will be the place where transgenic technology is cheaply provided to the artists of the world. The same stifling bureaucracy that weighed on many of the Soviet Union's grander projects still lives today and could yet deprive Kaliningrad of its chance to watch a cactus glow.

"At any moment my project could be closed," says Bulatov. "You might print this article and then someone from, say, the Ministry of Culture might read it, not like it, and that will be that."

Conor Humphries is an Irish freelance news and feature writer with a particular interest in Russian art and film, His work has been published in The Irish Times and The Moscow Times. He is currently based in Moscow.