biopoetry

I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison.

William S. Burroughs, Electronic Revolution

As with bacteriophages – viruses that parasitize a bacterium by infecting it and reproducing inside it –, literature is permeated by a series of centripetal and centrifugal movements of rarefaction, in which a sequence of virulent “wordlyphagic” language processes chew, devour, swallow, digest, and regurgitate words (just to swallow them again). Moving away from the printed page, or being even more deeply impregnated in its textures, these viral processes can either offer a truly literal meaning to Burroughs' often-quoted words, “Language is a virus”, or simply emphasize its metaphoric sense, just as they can be simultaneously analyzed in vivo by means of laboratorial practices and/or scrutinized by digital algorithms.

By exposing the ways in which literature gains new possible readings by means of its disruptive interconnections with different fields of knowledge, namely in the use of digital technology, we argue that such a disruption is far from being exclusively digital. Nonetheless, as digital technologies permeate almost every aspect of our lives, there is also evidence of a boom in inter, trans, and, even, antidisciplinary practices that may as well be a result of this ubiquity.

From Eduardo Kac’s innovative biopoems in the 1980s [http://www.ekac.org/biopoetry.html] to the more recent Cesar & Lois’s bioart installations with microbiological A.I.s [http://cesarandlois.org/], this paper proposal aims to reflect on the poetics and aesthetics of text-organisms capable of breaking boundaries between nature and culture while merging social, technological and biological systems. In addition, an autophagic practice will also be included in the menu. Made by Portuguese collective wr3ad1ng d1g1t5 [https://wreading-digits.com], the Palavrofagia series [http://www.wreading-digits.com/site/uk/projects/palavrofagia] consists of a literary installation combining poetry and cromatography, a digital kinetic poem evincing the contours of a textual spiral and an entirely edible book devoured by its own algorithm.

Biopoetry is a new poetic form invented by Eduardo Kac in 1999 through “Genesis,” in which Kac created an “artist’s gene,” a synthetic gene that he translating a sentence from the biblical book of his artwork produced by and then Biopoetry Eduardo Kac Biopoetry is a new poetic form invented by Eduardo Kac in 1999 through “Genesis,” in which Kac created an “artist’s gene,” a synthetic gene that he translating a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis into Morse code converting the Morse code into DNA base pairs according to a conversion principle specially developed by the artist for this work. The sentence reads, “Let man have dominion over the fish fi of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” It was chosen for what it implies about the dubious notion of divinely sanctioned humanity’s supremacy over nature. The Genesis gene was incorporated into bacteria, which were shown in the gallery. Participants on the web could turn on an ultraviolet light in the gallery, causing real, biological mutations in the bacteria. This changed the biblical sentence in the bacteria. The ability to change the sentence is a symbolic gesture: it means that we do not accept its meaning in the form we inherited it, and that new meanings emerge as we seek to change it. “Genesis” explores the notion that biological processes are now writerly and programmable, as well as capable of storing and processing data in ways not unlike digital computers. Further investigating this notion, at the end of the show the altered biblical sentence was decoded and read back in plain English. The artist wishes to reveal that the boundaries between carbon-based life and digital data are becoming as fragile as a cell membrane. “Genesis” is in the permanent collection of the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM; Valencian Museum of Modern Art), Valencia, Spain.

(Johns Hopkins University Press)

The book includes essays, manifestoes, articles, and several documents in art, literature, and communication published by the artist throughout the 1980s.In Portuguese.Includes artist's biographical note.

A version of this article was republished as chapter 1, "Digital Literature," in Simanowski's Digital Art and Meaning (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

Since the 1980s poetry has effectively moved away from the printed page. From the early days of the minitel to the personal computer as a writing and reading environment, we have witnessed the development of new poetic languages. Video, holography, programming and the web have further expanded the possibilities and the reach of this new poetry. Now, in a world of clones, chimeras, and transgenic creatures, it is time to consider new directions for poetry in vivo. In this article I propose the use of biotechnology and living organisms in poetry as a new realm of verbal, paraverbal and nonverbal.