What is it about?

What happens when living beings become “new media”? This chapter examines the rise of bioart in recent decades, focusing on the prominent example of Canadian poet Christian Bök’s experiments in programming poetic texts into the DNA of living organisms. Bök’s first book-length installment of this project (The Xenotext, Book 1) adapts Virgil’s Georgics to meditate anew on human techniques of cultivating the nonhuman world. Exploring experimental poetics such as Bök’s in the context of bioart and biotechnology, this chapter examines the paradoxes that arise from emphasizing “invention” in both artistic and scientific understandings of advance. What limits can and should pertain to the manipulation of living media?

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This page is a summary of: Life as New Media, April 2022, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/9781119669760.ch27.
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