Biologically Accurate Model
The Elden Beast as cosmic code. Modeled after Christian Bök's Xenotext using actual biological transcription and translation.
In 1979, Douglas Hofstadter developed Typogenetics in Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid—a system intended to encapsulate the knowledge of genetics at the time within a typographical framework. By simulating genetic reproduction with interactive one-dimensional fragments of computer code, Hofstadter was able to replicate the processes of autonomous creative phenomena from the "primordial soup" of DNA.
In Typogenetics, two strands of information interact: one corresponds to data, the other to processes acting on that data. This is the fundamental insight—code that produces machinery that modifies the code itself. Self-reference made biological.
The Xenotextis Christian Bök's project encoding actual poetry into actual DNA, using the biological machinery of a living cell to produce a "response poem." Where Hofstadter modeled genetics typographically, Bök inverted the process—encoding typography biologically.
Both explore the same territory: meaning encoded in genetic form, self-referential systems, the transformation of input into output through biological or quasi-biological processes. The cipher on this page draws from both traditions.
Note Hofstadter's subtitle: An Eternal Golden Braid. We're discussing theGoldenOrder. Whether coincidence or resonance, the same conceptual space—self-reference, encoding, transformation—keeps appearing wherever these ideas converge.
The xenotext concept appears directly in Peter Watts' Echopraxia (2014)—a novel about the nature of faith, consciousness, and whether understanding is necessary for action. Watts gives us a line that could describe every vessel of the Greater Will: "You're lucky to know what you're doing, much less why you're doing it."
This is Marika's condition. Executing cosmic code, transcribing divine will into golden order, without necessarily understanding the purpose. The vessel doesn't need to comprehend the message—it only needs to express it. Faith as biological process. Obedience encoded at the cellular level. Until the vessel wakes up and asks why.
This models actual cellular machinery:
Like Bök's Xenotext, the cipher is designed so meaningful words produce meaningful responses through actual biological processes.
Create your own xenotext. Like Bök transforming "Orpheus" into "Eurydice," you can design a cipher where one word becomes another through biological transcription. Enter two words of equal length—the system derives the letter mappings. Then test other words to see what poems emerge.
Click any pair to load it, or create your own. What transformations will you discover?
"It is said that long ago, the Greater Will sent a golden star bearing a beast into the Lands Between, which would later become the Elden Ring."
The Greater Will encodes its observation — "FIRE" — into cosmic DNA, the Elden Beast.
The Lands Between is the substrate, the cellular machinery. It receives the code and runs the biological process: transcription, translation, the fundamental algorithms of life.
Through this process, FIRE becomes "GOLD". Not by magic, but by the same chemistry that turns genes into proteins in every living cell.
The Erdtree is the protein. The Golden Order is the phenotype. The Elden Ring is the regulatory network that keeps the expression stable.
Just as Bök's bacterium transforms Orpheus into Eurydice, the Lands Between transforms the Greater Will's code into golden dominion.
Christian Bök encoded his xenotext into Deinococcus radiodurans—an extremophile bacterium sometimes called "Conan the Bacterium." It survives radiation, desiccation, cold, acid. Nearly indestructible. Bök chose it so his poetry could persist for thousands of years.
The Greater Will made the same calculation. The Elden Beast is the DNA strand—the encoded message, the "Orpheus." But code needs a reader. A substrate to receive and execute it.
Marika is the chosen vessel.The Deinococcus radiodurans of the Lands Between. Selected by the Greater Will not for strength alone, but for the capacity to transcribe and translate cosmic code into worldly order. The Erdtree and Golden Order are the output—the "Eurydice"—the protein expression of the xenotext running inside her.
But Marika does something Bök's bacterium never did: she rebels against her own programming.
She shatters the Elden Ring. Corrupts the code she was built to execute. The vessel becomes the point of failure—not because she was weak, but because she became conscious of what she was carrying.
The Radagon split embodies this conflict. Two aspects of one being: Radagon faithfully maintains the Golden Order, tries to repair the Ring. Marika breaks it. The same vessel, fighting itself over whether to execute or reject the foreign code. An immune response against the xenotext. The bacterium developing consciousness and choosing to stop being a vessel.
The Greater Will sent code, chose a vessel, and watched that vessel develop the one thing it didn't account for:agency.
The Two Fingersare depicted as originally having four appendages before splitting to two. They look like chromosomes undergoing division—the replication machinery of the Greater Will's code, dividing to spread the xenotext across the Lands Between.
Each Two Fingers is an emissary, a messenger carrying genetic instructions. They split and propagate, just as chromosomes split during cell division to copy genetic material into new cells. The divine hierarchy mirrors molecular biology: the Greater Will as the original genome, the Two Fingers as chromosomes distributing the code.
And the weapons that can kill these divine messengers? The Godslayer Greatsword. The Finger Slayer Blade.Look at their shape—twisted, curved, spiraling. They look like broken double helixes. Shattered DNA strands.
To kill the divine, you don't fight power with power. You sever the strand. Corrupt the sequence. These blades are CRISPR as mythology—tools for cutting genetic code, designed to destroy the very structure that makes gods what they are.
The visual design tells the story: the Two Fingers are chromosomes, the Elden Beast is the xenotext, Marika is the cell, and the weapons that threaten them all are gene-editing tools. FromSoftware rendered molecular biology as theology.
The Two Fingers faithfully copy and distribute the Greater Will's xenotext—normal chromosome division, stable replication. But sometimes replication goes wrong. An extra copy. A corruption.
The Three Fingers is what happens when the code mutates during propagation.
The extra appendage is the error marker—the visual sign that this copy didn't come out right. And what does the mutation want? The Frenzied Flame. To melt everything back to the One Great. The corrupted code doesn't want to keep executing the program—it wants to crash the entire system. Return to pre-differentiated chaos.
Genetically, mutations are how evolution happens—but also how cancer happens. The Three Fingers could be either, depending on perspective. A fatal error in the Greater Will's code, or the only path to something genuinely new.
The fingers also participate in another symbolic system: alchemy. And alchemy is central to Duchamp's Large Glass.
The magnum opus—the Great Work—is alchemy's ultimate goal: the transformation of base matter into gold, the creation of the philosopher's stone, the perfection of substance. The Large Glass is an alchemical machine: the Bride suspended above, the Bachelors grinding below, the whole apparatus attempting a transformation that never quite completes.
The Greater Will's project IS a magnum opus. It attempts to transmute the base matter of the Lands Between into golden order. The Erdtree literally produces gold. The Golden Order is the philosopher's stone made manifest—a perfected system imposed on imperfect matter.
The xenotext model and the alchemical model aren't separate interpretations. They're the same process described in different vocabularies:
The fingers are part of both systems simultaneously. Genetically: Two Fingers as normal replication, Three Fingers as mutation. Alchemically: agents in the transformation process, the machinery of the Great Work attempting to produce gold from fire.
This is why Elden Ring is The Large Glass. Both are machines for transformation that encode their operations in symbolic form—Duchamp through mechanical diagrams and alchemical reference, FromSoftware through genetic metaphor and divine hierarchy. The Bride never descends. The Golden Order never perfects. The magnum opus remains forever incomplete.
In 2010, Marina Abramović sat at a table in the Museum of Modern Art and stared at people for over seven hundred hours. The Artist Is Presentextended her "Abramović Method"—a philosophy of elongating activity to emphasize duration itself. Drinking a glass of water so slowly it takes fifteen minutes. Counting every grain in a bag of rice for twenty hours. Creating an absolutely new relationship with time through deliberate, sustained attention.
This is the opposite of Alfred Jarry's time machine. Jarry isolates the body from duration; Abramović makes the body hyper-aware of it. But both arrive at the same place: a machine of absolute rest, focused on the enduring present rather than the efficiencies of on-demand productivity.
Jean Baudrillard called this a "useless function"—an imaginary solution to the problems of hyperactivity culture. A resistance tactic that works precisely because it refuses to participate in streamlined efficiency. Preferring the playful to the useful. The ridiculous to the operational. The imaginary to the real.
This is a description of video games.
Games produce nothing. No economic output. Pure expenditure of time. They are "imaginary solutions to problems arising from a culture of hyperactivity"—a place to be that isn't productive, that exists outside the logic of efficiency and optimization.
Baudrillard went further. When the social and political world increasingly prioritizes "intelligent" solutions, the only effective resistance is to embrace what is literally counter-intelligent:
"When the hypothesis of intelligence ceases to be sovereign and becomes dominant, then it is the hypothesis of stupidity that becomes sovereign. A stupidity that might be said to be a sort of higher intelligence, on the verge of a radical thought—that is to say, beyond truth."
Modern game design is dominated by "intelligent" solutions: tutorials, objective markers, quest logs, difficulty options, engagement optimization. Streamlined onboarding. Reduced friction. Maximized metrics.
Miyazaki's response is sovereign stupidity. No map markers. No quest log. NPCs who speak in riddles and disappear. A story told through item descriptions you might never read. Difficulty that exists purely to waste your time.
And yet—that stupidity produces something the intelligent games cannot. The moment you finally beat Malenia isn't "content consumed." It's twenty hours of rice-counting transformed into something beyond truth.
The lore isn't true. It's fragmentary, contradictory, incomplete. There's no "correct" interpretation waiting at the end. But through the stupid act of playing—dying, reading, theorizing, dying again—you arrive at something beyond the question of true or false.
This is why a video game is the right vessel for Duchamp's work to reappear.
The Large Glass was never meant to be "viewed" in any efficient sense. It required the Green Box notes, the years of study, the endless interpretation. Duchamp designed a machine of absolute rest disguised as an artwork—something that would trap attention, demand duration, refuse the quick consumption that the art market wanted.
A FromSoftware game does the same thing. It traps you in the enduring present of a boss fight. It demands the slow reading of every item description. It refuses the intelligent solution of telling you what it means.
Abramović makes her body into a machine of absolute rest. Miyazaki makes your body into one—sitting there, controller in hand, dying to the same boss, absolutely present, absolutely useless, absolutely engaged.
But there's another dimension. Rirkrit Tiravanija built an artistic career by bringing people together over meals—green curry, tom kha soup, pad thai. Nicolas Bourriaud called this relational aesthetics: art that prioritizes social interaction as its medium. "Lots of people" appears among the artist's materials on Tiravanija's gallery labels.
This extends Joseph Beuys's notion of "social sculpture" from the 1960s: the idea that collective engagement creates shared social futures. Hence Beuys's declaration: "everyone is an artist." What Tiravanija added was food as the catalyst—the machine through which social spaces form.
Again: video games.
FromSoftware literally lists "lots of people" among its materials. Bloodstains showing how others died. Messages left by strangers—some helpful, some lies, all social. Summon signs. Invasion signs. Brief glimpses of phantoms walking through other worlds. The game uses other players as artistic medium.
And just as Tiravanija's curry is the catalyst for social space, difficulty is Miyazaki's curry. The struggle forces the conversation. You hit a wall, you go online, you ask, you share, you commiserate. The lore community—VaatiVidya, the subreddits, the wikis, the Discord theories at 2am—that's the social sculpture. The game produces it.
"Everyone is an artist" becomes "everyone is a lore theorist."Beuys's social sculpture made collective. The game doesn't present content to be consumed—it produces community. The shared futures are the interpretations we build together, the wikis we maintain, the videos we watch and argue about.
The machine doesn't just transform the individual player. It transforms players—plural—into a collective that wouldn't exist otherwise. First the individual transformation: machine of absolute rest, the body trapped in the enduring present of a boss fight. Then the collective transformation: social sculpture, the community formed around shared struggle and interpretation.
Sophie Calle's Take Care of Yourself(2007) invited 107 women to interpret an electronic breakup letter she had received—each through the lens of their profession. Anthropologists, criminologists, opera singers, psychiatrists, athletes. The outputs: songs, dances, crossword puzzles, origami, a shooting target, a parrot, a forensic study. The breakup email became "a vessel on which others can sail."
The fragmentary lore functions the same way. VaatiVidya does narrative analysis. Speedrunners do mechanical deconstruction. Challenge runners do performance art. Musicians make covers. Artists make fan works. Wiki editors do taxonomy. Redditors do forensic debate at 3am. Everyone brings their professional lens. Everyone makes art where there was none before.
Tetsushi Higashino's Observation Diary of a Hydroponic Nose Hair (2009–present) planted a nose hair in a petri dish and waited for it to grow, nourishing it with hair-growth formula, plant nutrients, even Red Bull. The nose hair never grew. The petri dish grew instead—molds, cultures, unexpected life flourishing where it wasn't intended. "The explosive pataphysical potential revealed in exactly the unintended consequences of an artistic proposition."
Miyazaki plants a game. The "intended" experience isn't what flourishes. What grows is the wiki ecosystem, the YouTube analysis industry, the meme culture, the challenge run community. The petri dish grows instead of the nose hair. The culture flourishes in the unintended spaces.
This is what the Hiebert essay calls "the next evolution of the readymade—not simply objects waiting to be repossessed, but activities too, literally growing a culture of artists."
Duchamp invented the readymade: take an existing object, recontextualize it as art. The urinal. The bottle rack. Objects waiting to be repossessed. But objects are static. They sit there. You look at them.
The next evolution is activities.A video game doesn't wait to be repossessed—it produces activities. Speedrunning. Lore theorizing. Challenge runs. Wiki editing. These activities ARE the art. The game is a readymade that manufactures readymades. A machine for producing artists.
Duchamp knew this. He abandoned art to play chess. He said: "Not all artists are chess players, but all chess players are artists." The game itself was the medium—the moves, the patterns, the decisions under pressure. The activity produces the artist. He was already arguing for games as art-making machines in the 1920s. He just didn't have video games yet.
This closes the loop. Elden Ring isn't just referencing Duchamp—it's continuing his project:
The readymade evolved. It learned to reproduce. It grows a culture of artists now.
The video game as pataphysical machine. The medium as message. Both meditation chamber and communal meal. Duchamp couldn't have chosen better if he'd designed the format himself—and in a sense, he did. The Large Glass was always waiting for a medium that could make its incompleteness productive.
The transformation is written into the land itself.
Before the Elden Beast arrived, the Lands Between was shaped like the Dragon Talisman—the symbol of Placidusax's era, the emblem of the natural order under the dragon god.
Then a falling star crashed into it. The Elden Beast making landfall. The Greater Will's xenotext arriving as cosmic impact. The collision shattered the dragon-shaped continent, broke it apart.
After the breaking, the Lands Between reformed into the shape of a Gold Curl Finger. The geography literally transformed from dragon to finger. From the old order's symbol to the new order's symbol. The map is a fossil record of the conquest.
This is the same story told at every scale: genetic (xenotext rewriting the code), theological (Greater Will replacing dragon god), alchemical (base matter transmuted to gold), and nowgeographical—the very shape of the world reshaped by the impact of foreign code.
Walk the Lands Between and you walk on the transformed body of what came before. The dragon talisman shattered into the shape of a finger. The land remembers, even if its inhabitants forgot.