The Xenotext: A Progress Report

Thursday 5th May, 6 - 6.50pm

Birkbeck Centre for Poetics welcomes Christian Bök.

The Xenotext is my nine-year long attempt to create an example of 'living poetry'. I have been striving to write a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon I use 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). When translated into a gene and then integrated into the cell, my poem is going to constitute a set of instructions, all of which cause the organism to manufacture a viable, benign protein in response - a protein that, according to my original, chemical alphabet, is itself yet another text. I am, in effect, engineering 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 - one that can persist on the planet until the sun itself explodes...

Birkbeck University, London (venue TBC)

Admission is free, all welcome.

Read an Observer article about the project.

Comments

[Suzanne @ Genome Engineering]

As a writer and scientist, I love the crossovers between science and art. We've written about this on Genome Engineering http://www.genome-engineering.com/found-in-translation.html