#xenotext

[purbeyaz]

[onetwofeb]

The Most Beautiful Poem of the Century? Christian Bök and The Xenotext

[xenopoem]

[webionaire]

Poet-artists Christian Bök and Karin Bolender pose two interventions into bioart, with radically different conceptions of the nonhumans involved. In Böks Xenotext project (2002–present), a microbe becomes an archive and writing machine through DNA manipulation. Bolender’s The Unnaming of Aliass (2002–2020) documents her life with the ass Aliass and the unexpected results it yields. Both projects attempt to establish communication with nonhumans, but their approaches have drastically different consequences. Bök ultimately ends up reinscribing well-worn anthropocentric biases. In contrast, Bolender’s capacious version of animal husbandry moves away from machines and mastery over circumstances and animals, following a principle akin to Karen Barad’s “intra-action” to suggest a course correction for bioartists�� work with nonhumans.

[vasilinaorlova]

quite an entertaining talk: avant-garde poetry and the Anthropocene. apparently, poetry is considered to be a species in its own right in some poetics. Allison Carruth, Terraforms and Xenotexts. UT, 4/13/2017 #poetry #xenotext #alphabet #DNA

[librarycards]

Paper texts point backwards: they offer to deliver that which has been deposited, something buried in a vault in the past. Their value stems from the promise of this redemption, the possibility of retrieving at least in principle some original full self-affirming 'meaning'. The xenotext offers no redemption, no written promise of hidden treasure, no icon of value, no delivery of some precious, proto-signifying, specie. What was a past meaning, waiting intact and whole to be claimed, independent of the act of retrieving it, is displaced by a de-mythologised future significance, fractured, open and inherently plural. For the xenotext there is nothing to retrieve; there is only language in a state of potential and never actualised interpretation. What it signifies is its capacity to further signify. Its value is determined by its ability to bring readings of itself into being. A xenotext thus has no ultimate 'meaning', no single, canonical, definitive, or final 'interpretation': it has a signified only to the extent that it can be made to engage in the process of creating an interpretive future for itself. It 'means' what its interpreters cannot prevent it from meaning.

Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero.

[nice-round-tv]

"DNA is a metamorphic scriptorium, where life transcribes, by chance, whatever life has so far learned about immortality." -- from "The Xenotext (Book 1)" by Christian Bök

[graywyvern]

( via / via )

New Horse Rider #2.

"THE XENOTEXT resides, as a digital payload, aboard the deck of the InSight lander, which has broadcast its final image from the Elysium Planitia on the surface of Mars, just before going dark, losing all contact with Earth..." --@christianbok

Because I love when typos are trending.

"leafing through my stack-o-tanka-journals like Picasso I find many artists turning the sun into a yellow spot"

--Autumn Noelle Hall in Atlas Poetica 36

Cain's Jawbone. (via Metafilter)

[biocodepoem]

https://arts.mit.edu/artists/christian-bok/ 

https://jacket2.org/commentary/viral-endeavour-transcription https://www.skparsons.ca/every-sense-of-the-word

http://www.archivopdp.unam.mx/index.php/1055-poeticas-visuales/poeticas-visuales/2828-060-poeticas-visuales-poeticas-visuales-la-biopoesia-de-eduardo-kac

https://www.splicetoday.com/writing/the-xenotext-a-living-poem

[teaz-bakkerz]

Editorial:The Xenotext ExperimentL’esperimento di Xenotext” è un esercizio letterario che esplora le potenzialità estetiche della genetica in ambito moderno 

— al fine di rendere letterale il celebre aforisma di Burroughs, che ha dichiarato che “la parola è un virus”------------------------------------------------------

The Xenotext experiment  "is a literary exercise that explores the aesthetic potential of modern genetics - in order to make literal the famous Burroughs aphorism, which stated that" the word is a virus "

by Michelangelo Greco

[xenopoem]

The body of the cell has a new language, owning genes and organs. This feels the truth in xenotexts. Tortured by doll dolls, just chilling wave. Many scatology rightly love reptiles. Some prototypes prefer erotic ants of my own region rather than disintegrate. Protection is almost collapsing. No to humanity, functions and body, hardcore clarity, data contaminated. Always the maliciousness of semen and boundaries is chaos, and lol's survival is as elusive as it is strictly captured in humans, paralleling more than hunting novels drawn more frequently than you. The caressing community that solves this psychological one makes the deleted terrorism poets squirm, but it is cybernetic that replicants are constantly spreading on the fringes, turning my ejaculation into androids through grotesque and giving default safety, and in that human trafficking.

Kenji Siratori, Vapor Xenomorph

[latchdoorstomach-blog]

Christian Bök, Xenotext.

Encoded poem into a bacteria - bacteria then produces a poem in response

[theinnovationspace]

How to Collapse the Distinction Between Art and Biology - Facts So Romantic

blog tumbling : What Xenotext does is cause its audience to reevaluate their ideas of creation, both literary and biological.Illustration by GiroScience / Shutterstock Language,” the Beat writer William S. Burroughs supposedly once exclaimed, “is a virus from outer space.”  Burroughs was making a metaphorical extrapolation about the ways in which words, phrases, idioms, sentences, lines, and narratives can seemingly rewire our brains; how literature has the power to reprogram a mind just as a virus can alter the DNA of its host. Such a concept holds that more than just a simple means of expressing and communicating ideas, language is its own potent agent, a force that actually has the ability to shape the world, often in ways that we’re unconscious of and with an almost autonomous sense of itself.  As with something biological, language is capable of infecting, of propagating and spreading, of indelibly marking its host. In Burroughs’ characteristically experimental 1962 novel The Ticket that Exploded, he writes that “Word is an organism… a parasitic organism that invades and damages.” His concept of the viral nature of language has, appropriately enough, mutated and multiplied across culture, influencing figures from the musician and performance artist Laurie Anderson who composed a piece whose title… Read More… http://dlvr.it/R9mDWH @robinravi

[pierreism]

"The March of the Nucleotides" from The Xenotext (Book 1) by Christian Bok