{"id":752,"date":"2011-10-26T11:58:02","date_gmt":"2011-10-26T15:58:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glia.ca\/conu\/digitalPoetics\/prehistoric-blog\/?p=752"},"modified":"2011-10-26T11:58:02","modified_gmt":"2011-10-26T15:58:02","slug":"genetic-initiatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glia.ca\/conu\/digitalPoetics\/prehistoric-blog\/2011\/10\/26\/genetic-initiatives\/","title":{"rendered":"Genetic Initiatives"},"content":{"rendered":"

As far as I know, there have been 4 primary interventions that involve directly writing poetry into genes.<\/p>\n

The first was renegade bio-artist Joe Davis’ Microvenus<\/a><\/em> project. He wrote an an ancient fertility glyph into an e coli<\/em> in 1996 and exhibited it at Ars Electronica 2000<\/a>. For this he invented his own coding structure.<\/p>\n

The second was Eduardo Kac’s\u00a0insertion\u00a0of a biblical verse (“Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”)\u00a0into a strand of DNA for his 1998 Genesis<\/em> <\/a>exhibit. In this exhibit networked viewers control a UV light which effects the rate of bacterial propogation (in other words, alters its publishing).<\/p>\n

The third was Craig Venter who on May 20th 2010 announced that his team had\u00a0created and watermarked the first self-replicating\u00a0artificial\u00a0organism<\/a> with a codified puzzle, the names of the organism’s authors, and 3 citations, including one from James Joyce: “TO LIVE, TO ERR, TO FALL, TO TRUIMPH, TO RECREATE LIFE OUT OF LIFE”. Ominous? Perhaps. Trivial? Not at all. This shifts the definition of self-publishing.<\/p>\n

The fourth poetic-genetic intervention, Christian B\u00f6k’s\u00a0Xenotext Experiment<\/a>,<\/em> was proposed<\/a> in 2007 and implemented<\/a> in 2011; it apparently releases poetic responses (proteins encrypted in readable ways).<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Each of these processes is far from creating a living language that will persist without complicated life support or function as viable technology for reading that will challenge the book or screen. Though Venter’s organism replicates; and B\u00f6k intends to splice his next verse into a very durable critter and potentially outlive humanity, there is the problem of user interface developments: how exactly do we read these texts except as interventions which challenge our conception of memory substrates?<\/p>\n

Each project is more akin to a microbe making a tattoo on an elephant than a sustained treatise on molecular poetry. Yet these tiny revolutionary incremental splices interject imagination onto molecular substrates, intertwine the context of text with molecular biology, and anticipate a radical shift in the materiality of reading.<\/p>\n

How does this connect to digital poetry? Rapid sequencing and subsequent manipulation of the genome emerge in parallel with computation. The genome for the first self-replicating synthetic cell was “designed in the computer”<\/a>. Binary encoding processes convey the word into flesh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As far as I know, there have been 4 primary interventions that involve directly writing poetry into genes. The first was renegade bio-artist Joe Davis’ Microvenus project. He wrote an an ancient fertility glyph into an e coli in 1996 and exhibited it at Ars Electronica 2000. For this he invented his own coding structure. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animism","category-conceptual","category-genetic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glia.ca\/conu\/digitalPoetics\/prehistoric-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glia.ca\/conu\/digitalPoetics\/prehistoric-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glia.ca\/conu\/digitalPoetics\/prehistoric-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glia.ca\/conu\/digitalPoetics\/prehistoric-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glia.ca\/conu\/digitalPoetics\/prehistoric-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glia.ca\/conu\/digitalPoetics\/prehistoric-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glia.ca\/conu\/digitalPoetics\/prehistoric-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glia.ca\/conu\/digitalPoetics\/prehistoric-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glia.ca\/conu\/digitalPoetics\/prehistoric-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}