18 August 2014, 19.00h
Lecture Christian Bök

DNA Fragments from "The Xenotext"

The Xenotext is the current project in progress by Christian Bök. He is hoping to encode a poem as a sequence of DNA so that, when implanted into the genome of a microbe, this text gets “expressed” by the organism, which in reponse to the grafted, genetic sequence, begins to manufacture a viable, benign protein—one that, according to his original, chemical alphabet, is itself another text. He is striving, in effect, to engineer a bacterium 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 outlast our own extinction. He has already succeeded in creating a gene called XP13-4a (a poetic cipher that, when implanted into the genome of E. coli, can cause this germ to write, in response, its own poem, as a sequence of amino acids). He is now the first person in history to have ever designed a microorganism that can write a meaningful text in response to an enciphered gene.