Here is a video in which he explains his project:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyCQfBZwRPA&feature=relmfu
I'm still trying to wrap my head around the whole process: Christian Bok's project involves encoding poetry in DNA of bacteria. The thought of it makes me feel a little queasy because mutations in organism may be unpredictable when a foreign genetic code is introduced. I'm sure that it's just paranoia on my part exacerbated by the fact that I'm reading Margaret Atwood's 'Oryx and Crake' at the moment. The scientists who are working on the project with Christian Bok surely know what they are doing and would destory any life forms that can infect other organisms with viruses.
The dangers are there of course, but I can understand why conducting such an experiment is incredibly tantilizing. For a long time, poetry has been largely the domain of mystics, romantics, sentimentalists. None of these are necessarily negative worldviews to express through poetry, but there is a negative byproduct that is also partially a result of how we conceptualize science as unemotional and dispassionate. The by-product is that our emotional world is tied up in myth and an almost obsessive involvement with the subjective self.
Most people don't think of science as having anything to do with poetry, and it's a shame. While reading Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth, I was struck by how poetic some of the paragraphs appeared to me, especially ones pertaining to slow time. Science can be poetic, and poetry can be scientific. A poetry anthology discovered in the school library confirmed my sentiments - the volume contained a selection of poetry inspired by the scientific discoveries of the past years.
I appear to be contradicting myself now, but I am not -- most people, from my experience, do not even know that such things exist. To them, poetry is still largely associated with Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson. Again, this is not a bad thing to be unaware of new poetry. It does not reflect purely on a person's character because everyone has different interests, but it does unfortunately mean that this growing trend of seeing the poetry within scientific processes is largely left unnoticed and not many people experience the benefits of seeing the beauty and mystery contained in something that they probably wanted to forget about after passing grade 11 science.
Christian Bok takes this new poetic interest in science a step further by using incredibly profound and beautiful processes of DNA encoding to create a container for poems that may even outlive our civilizations. That is what he is hoping for and he also talks about extraterrestrial communication using this method of encoding linguistic messages.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about experiment is that his hope for mutation and spontaneous generation of poetry has been realized last year. His poem caused the bacterium to write its own poem in response to the original piece. This means that we can not only store poetry for indefinite periods of time (using this process) but also use it to generate new poetry.
I am, however, a little skeptical about that last part. Such poetry generation is coded to be constructed much like the poetry generated by computers, and the bulk of that turned out to be gramatically correct but meaningless, because meaning is more than the sum of obeying syntax and grammar rules. Sometimes meaning is more profound when these rules are disobeyed (as in concrete poetry), so it's not sufficient and not necessary for creating meaning.
It appears that the beauty of Bok's poetry is in the process itself; in the integration of something that is often overlooked as a subject of admiration lies the poetry of the possible implications.
I'd have to see more than a line or two from this project and I am going to remain open minded about the content of the poetry resulting from this experiment. It's refreshing to see people trying to bridge the gap between the world of science and the world of emotions. Christian Bok talks about his project as an attempt to extend poetry beyond the confines of a book and thus prolong its life and infect the universe with its explicit and implicit meanings.
If this possibility is not as poetic, I don't know what is.
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