Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
The xenotext
A Featured Researcher piece by Christian Bök, exploring 'living poetry'.
The Xenotext is an artistic exercise currently being undertaken by the poet Christian Bök, who has created an example of ‘living poetry.’Â
Bök has generated a short verse (entitled ‘Orpheus,’ whereupon he uses a ‘chemical alphabet’ to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans — an extremophile, capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer space).
Bök has composed this poem in such a way that, when translated into the gene and then integrated into the cell, the text nevertheless gets ‘expressed’ by the organism, which, in response to the inserted, genetic material, begins to manufacture a viable, benign protein—a protein that, according to the original, chemical alphabet, is itself yet another text (entitled ‘Eurydice’).
Bök has, in effect, engineered a life-form so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also an operant machine for writing a poem — a poem that might conceivably survive forever, outlasting our civilization, persisting upon the planet Earth until the death of the Sun itself.
To find out more please contact Christian below.
