The Xenotext Eksperiment

Christian Böks 'Xenotext Eksperiment', som lyder vildt indviklet og rimeligt vildt og helt fantastisk!:


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. (...)I propose to encode a short verse into a sequence of DNA in order to implant it into a bacterium, after which I plan to document the progress of this experiment for publication. I also plan to make related artwork for subsequent exhibition.
I plan to compose my own text in such a way that, when translated into a gene and then integrated into the cell, the text nevertheless gets “expressed” by the organism, which, in response to this grafted, genetic sequence, begins to manufacture a viable, benign protein – a protein that, according to the original, chemical alphabet, is itself another text. I hope, in effect, to engineer a primitive bacterium so that it becomes not only a durable archive for storing a poem, but also a useable machine for writing a poem.(...) such a poem, stored inside the genome of a bacterium, might conceivably outlast terrestrial civilization itself, persisting like a secret message in a bottle flung at random into a giant ocean.


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hvad der kommer efter L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

Den canadiske systemdigter / eksperimentalpoet (hvad betyder det overhovedet?) Christian Bök taler om at digte for robotter, om skrift som økosystem og hvad der kommer efter L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E:


Future advances in the aesthetic formalism of poetry seem unlikely to occur unless we can experiment more audaciously with the technical apparatus of the book, disrupting the sequential temporality and stratified pagination of such a medium in order to produce the kind of text that might easily be mistaken for an interactive sculpture, a mechanized appliance, or even an artificial ecosystem. We may exalt the poets of the future, not because they can write great poems, but because they can program devices that can write great poems for us, doing so automatically within a digital economy of unrestricted expenditure. We may also want to keep in mind too that we are probably the first generation of poets who can reasonably expect to write poetry for inhuman readers, be they aliens, robots, or clones.


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