Tuesday, 16 October 2012

What's that Crazy Sound? Oh it's just the Xenotext!

© avenuecalgary.com
Upon your first listen to Canadian poet Christian Bök’s poetry,you would think that he’s just another creative beat-boxer with really cool sounds. No way could this be audible words, and if the words weren't audible then certainly this could not be poetry. Canadian poet Christian Bök wrote “The Xenotext: Christian Bök DNA poetry”. With Bök’s project, “The Xenotext", he plans to encode a poem into bacterial DNA. Lost yet? OK stick with me and I’ll explain the scientific terms as plainly as I can. Böks will insert the poem,"The Xenotext", into the DNA of a particularly resilient form of bacteria known as Deinococcus radiodurans.

But in order to write these poems, Bök created a computer program which, when given one of the eight trillion-or-so possible ciphers, would produce a list of words that were mutually close according to this scheme.This is unknown as the "chemical alphabet."

Using a "chemical alphabet", Bök is translates his short verse about language and genetics into a sequence of DNA, which will be implanted into the genome of the bacteria.

Then, in response the protein that the cell produces will form a second comprehensible poem.This is not a joke so far Bök’s opening lines of these poems have been published — “any style of life / is prim…” for the first; and “the faery is rosy / of glow…” for the second.

My first thought after I managed to pick up my lower jaw to close my mouth,is this really cool.There are some critics that says why would someone do this? But I raise this question to them “Why not?” Now this not the first time someone has married art and microbiology.But it will be first time the DNA will respond.Some people says that Bök plans to out live human race, because the Extremophile bacterial DNA could outlast humans by many millions of years. But I extend this thought to you:
Is getting bacteria to write poetry a pointless exercise?
I’ll leave you to comment on that. Let me know what you think.

Related links:
Posted by at
Labels: , , ,

2 comments:

  1. SaritaNovember 11, 2012 11:23 am

    I was equally impressed by Bök's undertaking ... and I wondered the same thing. Will information contained in a micro-organism be of any use if there is no one around to acknowledge the storage container?

    If the human species as we know it becomes extinct. And millions of years later the earth sees fit to nurture a new breed of homo sapiens how will they know of the existence of these Deinococcus radiodurans hard drives?

    It will almost be like a forgotten language.

    This idea is definitely an interesting one. Bök is not its originator. But I think it will needs some finessing to become something that is recognizably practical with an application that is as lasting as its own shelf life.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownNovember 30, 2012 10:36 pm

    Thanks for taking the time to reply to the question I posed. I appreciated reading your comments.

    It will be interesting to see what develops out of this poetic venture.

    ReplyDelete

Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)