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41 Biopoetry Eduardo Kac Biopoetry is a new poetic form invented by Eduardo Kac in 1999 through his artwork “Genesis,” in which Kac created an “artist’s gene,” a synthetic gene that he produced by translating a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis into Morse code and then 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 of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing fi 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. Kac first published his biopoetry manifesto in the fi Cybertext Yearbook 2002–03. Since 1999 Kac has created several different biopoems, including “Erratum I” (2006) and “Cy- ff ff pher” (2003/2009), and has exhibited this work worldwide in solo and group shows. In “Cypher,” the “reading” of the poem is achieved by transforming E. coli with the provided synthetic DNA. The act of reading is procedural. In following the outlined procedure, the participant creates a new kind of life—one that is at once literal and poetic. In addition to Kac, poet Christian Bök announced in 2008 his desire to create a literary exercise, which he dubbed “The Xenotext Experiment,” also based on encoding poetic information into DNA. As of 2012, this project is still in progress. ■ See also digital poetry, electronic literature, holopoetry, writing under constraint B References and Further Reading Bök, Christian. 2008. “The Xenotext Experiment.” SCRIPTed 5 (2): 227. d Kac, Eduardo. 1999. “Genesis.” In Ars Electronica 99—Life Science, edited by Gerfried Stocker and Christine Schopf, 310–312. Vienna: Springer. ———. 2003. “Biopoetry.” In Cybertext Yearbook 2002–03, edited by Markku Eskelinen and Raine Koskimaa, pp. 184–185. Finland: University of Jyvaskyla. ———. 2005. Telepresence and Bio Art—Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2007a. Hodibis Potax. Ivry-sur-Seine: Édition Action Poétique; Kibla: Maribor. ———, ed. 2007b. Media Poetry: An International Anthology. Bristol, UK: Intellect. ———, ed. 2007c. Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Blogs Ruth Page Blogs (also known as web logs) are web pages in which dated entries appear in reverse chronological order, so that the reader views the most recently written entries first. Blogs emerged as a web genre in the late 1990s, and as simple and free publish- fi ing tools became available at the turn of the twenty-first century, blogging activity has fi increased exponentially. Since anyone with an Internet connection can publish a blog, the quality of writing on blogs can vary considerably, and blogs may be written about diverse subjects and for many different purposes. Blogs can be diff ff ff erentiated according to their ff ff function, as knowledge-management tools, which filter information, or personal blogs, fi which are used to document and reflect on the blogger’s life history. Both types of blog are fl highly varied and hybrid genres. Personal blogs are influenced by online forms of com- fl munication such as e-mail and personal web pages, along with offline genres of life his- ffl tory, particularly diary writing and autobiography. Filter blogs have their antecedents in bulletin boards and Listservs. Blogs can also be categorized according to their topic or relevance to a particular interest group. Examples of the genre include blogs written about travel, health, politics, sex, legal matters...

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