In the spirit of these thinkers(Pak Wong,1 a cybernetic expert, Eduardo Kac,2 a multimedia artist, and Paul Davies,3 an astronomic expert), I have conceived of The Xenotext Experiment, a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics in the modern milieu, doing so in order to make literal the renowned aphorism of William S Burroughs, who declared “the word is now a virus.”7 In this experiment, I propose 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.
In my research about this experiment on how to store text in the bacteria's DNA, I learned that it's simply amazing for several reasons:
- It presents a storage device that might last longer than any other device currently used.
- It is a technological miniaturization accomplishment.
- it is a new way of computer programming.
- It is a very different way to make poetry.
- It can be a creative technique to produce two different poems in the same "work".
Since my readers belong to my Poetry class I would like to go deeper in the last two points. We are used to traditional ways of making poetry; for example on some sort of paper or more recently on a monitor or display. However now we are witnessing a new way to make poetry, that is making poetry in life itself!!!. For me as a technologist Dr. Christian Bök's creativity in coming up with the idea of using this technology to transmit his thoughts is amazing. As well as how he figured the right genetic code out to write a poem and then the bacteria write a different poem as a response. However the most impressive of his work is how he accomplish to mix together the two end of the same spectrum, Science and Poetry.
Related Links
http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/
http://www.newscientist.com/
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