malusecclesia

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  • Artist stuffs Wikipedia into apple DNA to create real trees of knowledge

    by 
    Jon Fingas
    Jon Fingas
    05.14.2014

    If DNA is code, and code can be art, then DNA can be art... right? Harvard artist in residence Joe Davis certainly thinks so. He's working on a project, Malus Ecclesia, that will insert Wikipedia entries into the non-essential genetic strands of apples. The effort will translate English Wikipedia articles to DNA's four nucleotide letters (A, C, G and T) and use bacteria to insert the resulting text into saplings. When the saplings are grafted on to apple stock and grow up, they'll bear fruit with that genetic data (and therefore the articles) intact, producing very real trees of knowledge.