Temporada 1 · Rizomas en Combustión · JVV-T1-30

Post-human poetry: verses written by bacteria and GPT

I The alphabet breathing in the Petri dish

Imagine a poem that blooms —literally— on agar gel.
In the darkness of an incubator, E. coli modified with fluorescent genes lights up green syllables; each colony expresses one line and, on dividing, recomposes the verse.
At the same time, a multimodal GPT model watches the plate, describes the bacterial dance in sensory prose and suggests chromatic mutations for the next stanza.

Biology writes, the machine answers; the human watches the poem turn outside their own throat.

Welcome to post-human poetry, where authorship evaporates among enzymes, GPUs and a hand that barely curates.

II Three matrices of writing beyond-the-human

Living bio-verse
- CRISPR paints codons that yield chromatic proteins: ACG → blue, TTA → red.
- The genetic sequence = the metre; a random mutation makes an unpredictable internal rhyme.
- The poem lives until the antibiotic arrives: expiry as an aesthetic resource.
Transcreating AI
- GPT-o3 ingests lyric databases, but also ECG readings and spectra of burnt forests.
- Output: verses that change with your pulse or the local air quality — poems as emotional and ecological dashboards .
Calligraphic robotics
- Delta arms print conductive ink onto mycelium parchment; humidity sensors alter the conductivity and, with it, the legibility.
- Reading becomes a performative act: you need an IR torch to reveal the living ink.

III Ontological questions: who signs the poem?

Approach	Answer	Ethical tension
Human-centred	The human is the author; the others are exotic pencils.	It makes microbial / algorithmic agency invisible.
Co-authorial	A joint signature (H. sapiens + E. coli + GPT).	How does a bacterium split its royalties?
Post-authorial	Nobody signs; the work is an autonomous process.	The art market collapses or co-opts it as an “experience”.

Authentic post-humanism demands giving up the ego of ink, accepting that the verse can survive —or mutate— with no human witness.

IV DIY tools and protocols

01
Plasmid-Poetry Kit (open-source)
- Plasmids with fluorescent genes, a safe electroporation protocol.
- A Python script that turns text → codons → colours.
02
Heartbeat-to-Lyric API
- A PPG wristband + a GPT endpoint: every beat > a variation in the line.
- Code under GPL v3 to prevent proprietary capture.
03
Mushroom Scrolls
- Mycelium cultured on cellulose: hydrate it with a spray of words (edible ink).
- A vision AI counts the sporulation patterns and returns them as haikus.

V Paradoxes in an oscillating verse

Anthropocentric curation — You end up picking “pretty mutations”; the symbiosis is still domesticated.
Bio-biohazard — Is a bacterial poem an open GMO? It needs laboratory ethics and environmental consent.
Input overload — A saturated GPT produces aesthetic over-fitting; a risk of synthetic cliché.
Differential time — The bacterium beats in hours, the AI in milliseconds, the reader in minutes: a fascinating and chaotic synchoreography.

VI A short manifesto for a multi-species verse

Textual ecology — Every poem must declare its biological and energy footprint.
Micro-author rights — Protocols of reciprocal bio-copyright: if you use a living organism, reinvest in its habitat or in a biobank.
Lyric compost — Expired works are composted (physically or digitally) and make the substrate for new creations.
Reading-ritual — Exhibitions that include microscope observation, AI debugging and a symbiotic tasting (kombucha-verse, for instance).

VII Coda: what does the cell hear when we read?

Perhaps the verse needs no human ears; perhaps the vibration of one cell membrane is enough to say poetry is alive.

Poetic post-humanity does not annihilate sensibility; it redistributes it among silicon, DNA and fingers that barely guide.
And there, in the UV half-light of a laboratory-gallery, the bacterial colony blinks: a green hendecasyllable beating at 37 °C.
The GPT suggests a title —“Photosynthesis of a farewell”— and the work closes, knowing it will mutate again tomorrow.