Eduardo Kac has been a prolific and pioneering art figure since the mid 80s. His works using biotechnology and genetics, to create and explore scientific techniques, position him as a « transgenic » or « bio » artist.
Eduardo Kac earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1990 from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. He went on to become a Professor of art and technology at the university and became a Ph.D. Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in Interactive Arts at the University of Wales in Newport, Wales.
He is celebrated for his success in pushing the borders of art, that fringe into the realms of Science Fiction. From his holographic poetry, to telerobotics and the glowing bunny, Alba, he has ravenously challenged traditional notions of the “viewer” and the “art object” which has necessitated a space for Kac to coin his own art forms.
Born in 1962 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Eduardo Kac’s appearance on the art scene first began with performances in the early 80s. This deepened his interest in technology and manifested in his exploration of poetry and of scientific investigation. Introducing new terms into contemporary art criticism is something Kac has explored ever since his early experiments and he has been published in journals like Leonardo, Visible Language et Art Journal.
Eduardo Kac is mainly well known for his telepresence art, biotelematics, and transgenic art. He defines telepresence art as “the merger of telerobotics and communications media”; biotelematics as “art in which a biological process is intrinsically connected to computer-based telecommunications”; and transgenic art as “an art form using genetic engineering to transfer either synthetic genes to an organism or natural genetic material between species so as to create unique living hybrids”. His term “holopoetry” was coined in 1983 to mean “a spatio-temporal poetic work, conceived, realized and exhibited with light in a four-dimensional fashion. As the reader or viewer looks at the holopoem, it changes and generates new meanings.”
Eduardo Kac’s communication-based art
Eduardo Kac’s investigations into the philosophical and political dimensions of the communication processes, explore his visionary integration of robotics, biology and networking to show a fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital word. This interest was sparked from his roots in poetry, music and writing, but after his initial entry into the art work, Kac quickly became dissatisfied with the unidimensionality of the printed word.
Eduardo Kac’s three-dimensional, laser spun floating text, including Holo/Olho (Holo/Eye) (1983) and Chaos (1986), explores a novel syntax of display and it expresses the relationship between artistic practice and its consequences after hybridization with technology.
Eduardo Kac moved next into Telecommunications art to « demonstrate the necessary move from pictorial representation to communicative experience. » Experience seems to be an immaterial, temporal observation that is somehow less stable, yet nonetheless linked to the material physical. For Kac, « the word ‘immaterial’ should be understood here as applied not to something that doesn’t give itself to the senses, but as something whose ultimate reality cannot be translated into tangible materials. »
Telepresence Garment (1995) was an allusion to the results of integration of telecommunication in robotics. It was perceived to investigate the notion of the mediascape “as an expended cloth”, Kac writes, “to consider wireless networking as a new fabric that envelops the body.” The work featured a robotized human body converted into a host. It was an interactive piece “to be worn by any local participant willing to allow his or her body to be engaged by others remotely”.
A new direction for Eduardo Kac: transgenic art
Genesis
Using the foundations of his exploration into communication, Kac began a new direction at the turn of the century with his “transgenic art”. In 1990, Kac converted Genesis 1:26 into Morse code, and then converted the Morse code into base pairs to create a genetic sequence. He planted the sequences into ecoli bacteria, in a petri dish, in a box under an artificial lamp. The lamp could then be activated by online viewers who would literally watch Genesis grow via webcam.
The intention of this work was to pose the viewer with a philosophical problem inferred from the Bible passage: « And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth ».
By linking virtual and physical spaces, the viewer must choose whether or not to destroy the idea that man is entitled to dominion over nature. If they choose to activate the light and allow the bacteria to grow it will cause a mutation in the genes. By paradox this is a display of man’s power over nature.
Alba
This idea broke new ground when Kac explored the practice of questionable genetic experimentation in the year 2000. Kac allegedly commissioned a French laboratory to create a green-fluorescent rabbit, using a green fluorescent protein, commonly found in Pacific Northwest jellyfish, implanted into the DNA of a breed of rabbit. Kac used this gene as a social, symbolic marker to question how society constructs notions of difference. His aim with this project was to show that transgenic art is more than the creation of the mutant or hybrid and that at a deeper level was a platform for the discussion of identity and how that is experienced.
Beyond the medium, identity
Eduardo Kac’s work deals with issues stemming from his poetics of the online experience, to the cultural impact of biotechnology. It questions the changing condition of memory in the digital age and juxtaposes this with the distribution of a collective agency. It encapsulates the idea of the « exotic » and uses that to explore the creation of life and witness evolution. Kac also examines linguistic systems, dialogic exchanges, and inter species communication, standing at the vanguard in questioning human perception about the nature of identity.
See also Eduardo Kac’s website.
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