ASCII_DNA is a collaborative project between molecular biology and computer science. Its central concept is the notion of "biomolecular writing." ASCII stands for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, and it is commonly used for representing text on computers. DNA, of course, stands for Deoxyribonucleic Acid, and is one of the primary biomolecules involved in the functioning of the body at the molecular level.
For a number
of years molecular biologists have used metaphors from information theory and
cybernetics to talk about DNA as a "code" or as a "program."
ASCII_DNA is a project which attempts to utilize bioinformatics tools to fully
investigate this relationship between the body and information, DNA and computer
code, and the ways in which new techniques for "writing" can generate
new ways of understanding this relationship.In the project, special Code Conversion Models (CCMs) will be devised to enable the translation between code types: DNA, protein, and text. The ASCII_DNA project will exist both as a website and as an installation. Users of the website will be able to convert any text into a novel 3D protein structure. Likewise, users of the website will also be able to take any DNA sequences from a database and converted it into novel texts. The text files (ASCII) which are the result of this process will hover between readability and unreadability, information and noise, poetry and data. In the installation version of the project, the novel proteins from the code conversions can be synthesized using standard lab techniques, and DNA can be sequenced from volunteers in order to generate novel texts, a situation in which the molecular bodies of volunteers will directly "write" novel texts. The overall goal of the project is to raise questions regarding the ways in which our notions of the body (such as DNA) and technologies (such as the computer) are being transformed by field such as bioinformatics.
Some of the ASCII_DNA projects were included in Creative Biotechnology: A User's Manual, a Biotech Hobbyist project commissioned by the Wellcome Trust UK and Locus+.