Christian Bök – The Xenotext Experiment [Encoded Protein Poetics & Literary Genetics]
Friday, 6 May 2011
Protein 13 – The sculptural embodiment of The Xenotext
Christian Bök’s Xenotext Experiment attempts to encode a short poem [constrained by biochemical necessity] into a sequence of DNA so that it can be implanted into a bacterium – the Deinococcus radiodurans. It’s a literal [no pun intended] attempt to bring prose to life, and to release it into a biological ecosystem. Furthermore Christian’s encoding process attempts to create a reaction from the bacteria – the manufacture of a benign protein. This, in essence, allows the bacterium to ‘write’ a new version of the poem in response to the implant. If this sounds like science-fiction, or more like something out of William S Burroughs stranger fictions, its by no means a coincidence. The Xenotext, as explained by Christian, is an attempt to bring to life Burroughs’ famous maxim that ‘language is a virus’.
Recent reports of the possible wireless communication between bacteria poses some intriguing futurist speculations. We can imagine a wireless network of ‘bacterial devices’ collaborating on encoded literature through dense nanoscopic parallel computations – the biological equivalent of a Connection Machine. The future of poetry? Envision a Petri-dish of ‘bacterial computers’ programming self-generating, and evolving, combinatorial Oulipo verse encoded via DNAML [DNA markup-language].
New Scientist recently interview Christian Bök on the Xenotext – it can be found here.
