Join Christian Bök at Studio Bar (824 Dundas Street West, Toronto) at 7pm tomorrow night for the launch of his eagerly awaited The Xenotext: Book 1.
"Enciphered in a bacterium, The Xenotext is the world’s first living poem. Internationally bestselling poet Christian Bök (Eunoia), has spent more than ten years writing what promises to be the first example of ‘living poetry.’ After successfully demonstrating his concept in a colony of E. coli, Bök is on the verge of enciphering a beautiful, anomalous poem into the genome of an unkillable bacterium (Deinococcus radiodurans), which can, in turn, ‘read’ his text, responding to it by manufacturing a viable, benign protein, whose sequence of amino acids enciphers yet another poem. The engineered organism might conceivably serve as a post-apocalyptic archive, capable of outlasting our civilization.
Book 1 of The Xenotext constitutes a kind of ‘demonic grimoire,’ providing a scientific framework for the project with a series of poems, texts and illustrations.
‘Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian Bök has realized, it all comes down to the durability of your materials.’
– The Guardian"
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