Spreading and preserving poems within life forms: Christian Bok's current research project

On November 17th, 2007 Christian Bök introduced "The Xenotext Experiment" in a lecture as a part of the One Origin, One Race, One Earth Conference. With the assistance of the renowned geneticist Stuart Kauffman, Bök plans to encipher a poem as a sequence of DNA and then implant it into the genome of a bacterium called Deinococcus radiodurans, an organism highly resistant to evolutionary drift. Bök notes that, because this life form can survive a nuclear attack, his poem might even outlast human civilization itself: "I am hoping to write a poem that is still here on Earth when the sun explodes."

To Bök "The Xenotext Experiment" is a literary exercise that makes literal the renowned aphorism of William S. Burroughs, who has declared "the word is now a virus." Bök is proposing to address some of the sociological implications of biotechnology by manufacturing a "xenotext"--a beautiful, anomalous poem, whose "alien words" might subsist, like a harmless parasite, inside the cell of another life form.

"The Xenotext Experiment" is a project that could be considered an archivist's dream. It highlights DNA's potential for information processing, data storage, and cultural activity. Thinking of DNA as a living storage kit for cultural producers and information specialists is an exciting, albeit strange idea. When allowing organisms to become a living embodiment of a text, DNA itself becomes a poetic medium. Bök explains that the organism is not just a storage container, but is also, "a machine that generates text" as the organism produces a genome-encoded protein, which also enciphers another poem.

In the scientific community the ability of DNA to encode information is well known: DNA sequences encode for amino acid sequences. Combine that with the ability to construct custom DNA sequences and to clone specified DNA sequences into organisms, and you've got a super data storage system. One ripe for artistic inquiry.

Creating and preserving a poem using genetics creates the possibilities of spreading and circulating information through living systems. It expands the ways one can produce and respond to poetry. As genetics might lend a possible literary dimension to biology, every organism may have the potential to carry within it a poem.

Bök is currently in the research phase, and he has been using software that he has designed himself in order to find the perfect cipher for the poem: one that generates many words, while being both beautiful and functional. He has plans for a book, and a conceptual art show, that will document this process. The content of both will contain along with other things, DNA-fingerprints of the organism and molecular models as sculpture.