Blog Task 2 : Christian BOK's Summary on his work with DNA, The Xenotext Works

Christian BOK’s Xenotext project is a nine-year long attempt to create “living poetry.” Christian has been trying to write a short verse about language and genetics, as a result of which he uses a “chemical alphabet” to translate his poem into a sequence of DNA in order to implant it into the genome of a bacterium, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans.

This microbe is capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile environments. Christian explains that when “chemical alphabet” is translated and implanted into a cell, it will be able to create a set of instructions, which will then create a viable benign protein. This protein, according to his original, chemical alphabet, is itself yet another text. What Christian BOK is trying to engineer is a life form that will be durable and capable of storing a poem, and also able to write poems even after human kind no longer exists.

Christian BOK has already received confirmation from the laboratory at the University of Calgary that his gene X-P13 has caused E.coli to fluoresce red in their test-runs. Therefore meaning that, when the “chemical alphabet” is implanted in the genome of the bacterium, it is able to write its own poems.Christian BOK is one step closer to creating a way to keep his work alive after human kind is gone.