In the late 1980s, Davis collaborated with molecular geneticist Dana Boyd on what is probably the world's first artwork created with recombinant-DNA technology. Davis and Boyd took a graphical icon they called Microvenus—which looks like an outline of the female genitalia and is also an ancient Germanic rune—and encoded it as a sequence of DNA. (This means they interpreted the icon as a grid of light and dark pixels, or zeros and ones, and assigned these a series of DNA bases, as described here.) Once the new DNA was synthesized, Davis and Boyd inserted it into the genome of the bacterium E. coli and grew a colony of transformed bacteria in the lab. It wasn't much to look at. But conceptually, the project broke artistic ground by exploiting the power of DNA to carry poetic and purely whimsical information.

Davis has joked about sending the recombinant E. coli into outer space, as a kind of biological messenger. That won't happen any time soon. Still, his drive to announce humanity to the great beyond animates much of his early work. He has also recorded the vaginal contractions of ballet dancers and broadcast them into space, in collaboration with engineers at MIT and astronomers and biologists at Harvard. Davis says the project was shut down by the Air Force. (The Air Force says it cannot find a record of this.)