The human genome is roughly 3 billion base pairs. The axolotl’s is around 32 billion.
About ten times larger. When it was sequenced in 2018 it was the largest genome ever assembled.
Sit with the proportions. This is an animal the length of your hand, carrying ten times the genetic instruction set you are.
It isn’t ten times more complicated
That is the part people get wrong. Genome size and complexity are not the same thing, and biology has known it for decades.
The extra length is mostly repetition. Long duplicated stretches, sequences copied and copied again, vast regions that do not code for anything obvious. Enormous, and enormously redundant.
Which is a picture, not just a caption
Repetition at scale is a compositional idea. The same form appearing again, and again, at slightly different sizes, overlapping itself — until the repetition stops reading as pattern and starts reading as mass.
Not a diagram of DNA. Not a double helix. The structural fact of the thing: a shape that will not stop repeating.
Editions of 25. Then never again.
Large-format archival pigment prints. Numbered, issued with a certificate of authenticity, and never reprinted.
Deliberately unsigned — every piece is entered in a public register instead, so you can see where all twenty-five are in the world at any time. A signature can be forged. A register cannot be quietly rewritten.
The first edition has not released yet
New drops go to the list before they go on sale. One email a month, at most.