The Xenotext (original) (raw)

The Xenotext is an ongoing work of BioArt by experimental Canadian poet Christian Bök. The primary goal of the project is twofold: first, a poem, encoded as a strand of DNA, is implanted into the bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans; second, the bacterium reads this strand of DNA and produces a protein which is also an intelligible poem. Bök himself describes the project as “a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of genetics in the modern milieu.” By using the extremophile D. radiodurans as a host for this work, the ambition is that the two poems may even outlive human civilization.