EDUARDO KAC - sounding out the non-binary
“In the course of pursuing Bio Art we have transformed life from mythology to a medium. We have transformed this vision of new beings from legends to life. It is my belief that in a world in which we destroy at least one species every day, one role that an artist can assert is to expand by diversity, to produce new types of relationships, to configure, to envision to bring about new modalities of networking in which these old fashion separations between the living and non-living, the local and the remote, the biological and robotic are resolved. And a new model of interspecies communication can be brought to the fore and better correspond to the life that we seek in the 21st century.”
- Eduardo Kac at Chicago Humanities Festival 20131
Where Digital Art and BioArt intertwine
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Eduardo Kac’s work is probably one of the best examples to demonstrate the close connection between BioArt and Digital Art. Starting in the ‘80s, the internationally renowned American artist with roots in Brazil can look back on more than 40 years of artistic practice. During his career he laid the groundwork for art genres like Telepresence and BioArt. Being visionary already before the era of internet, he has always been looking for an “intersubjective artform for the media age”. He not only wanted to “reflect, but especially to actively participate in the creation of the new world” that he was anticipating.
Starting his artistic practice with public performances in the early ‘80s, Kac’s background is informed by philosophy and literature, especially poetry, which plays a central role in all his oeuvre. Language in various poetic, visual and physical forms defined his early work which represents the beginning of digital literature, such as the holographic poem (holopoem) HOLO/OLHO (Holo/Eye) from 1993, or Letter from 1996. In visual texts, prints, small sculptures, graffiti and other mixed media works, Kac already expressed his special interest in communication and aimed to create the experience of language as something that is in constant flow and transformation.
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Major technological breakthroughs in the ‘80s, such as the rise of the personal computer and the transition to a digital global network through the internet, inspired Kac to explore the potential connections between artificial and biological systems as well as how he, as an artist, could apply these new modalities of communication in innovative and compelling ways.
Reflecting these new exchanges between digital and organic networks, Telepresence Art emerged as a new cultural experience, based on the integration of telecommunications, networks, robotics, human-machine interfaces, and computers.2
“To me, telepresence art creates a unique context in which participants are invited to experience invented remote worlds from perspectives and scales different than human, as perceived through the sensorial apparatus of telerobots. The rhythms created by this new art will be accented by intuitive interfaces, linking and networking concepts, telerobot design, and remote environment construction."3
Eduardo Kac’s radical blend of artificial and biological networks has frequently caused international recognition, controversy and conversation. In 1997, Kac implanted a RFID microchip into his leg while being live broadcasted on TV. The event, entitled Time Capsule, initiated a complex, multi-layered situation which explores the human body as a hub for the real time exchange of incoming and outgoing information via internet. Touching on notions of materiality, memory and corporeality, Time Capsule heralded a new era of artistic creation and introduced the genre of Bio Art. Using biology as subject and/or medium, the advent of Bio Art opened a new understanding of what life in the 21st century will or could be. Time Capsule contextualized a new dialogue on the potential digital hybridization of previously biologically exclusive phenomena. It is an essential dialogue that still continues today as humanity depends more and more on hybrid approaches in the face of environmental threats.4
Editor’s note:
Below you can read an excerpt of the extensive interview: “Time Capsule: Eduardo Kac on telepresence in memory, corporeality, and augmentation”, led by Samantha Mealing MA. This interview was made possible through her research on Eduardo Kac for her Master Thesis in Media Arts Histories program at Danube University Krems, Austria. You can also read and/or download the full interview here.
Following Time Capsule, Eduardo Kac also began to explore genetics. Published 1998 in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Kac’s manifesto “Transgenic Art”, described the developing genre as the creation or invention of new living beings, i.e. organic life forms through the use of genetic engineering techniques should be a central aim of the artist. However, Kac’s idea is not to take the role of a divine creator, but to question the power and cultural impact of biotechnology and, on the other hand, to “call for a dialogical relationship between artist, creature/artwork, and those who come in contact with”.5
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Genesis was the first transgenic work that was presented publicly at Ars Electronica 1999. An example of living artwork, Genesis is a bacteria developed from the "artist's gene" - a synthetic gene created by DNA base pairs made from Morse Code translated from biblical text. The bacterial growth is then mutated by gallery visitors switching on fluorescent light.6 Genesis was soon followed up by the infamous GFP Bunny (2000), where the gene of a rabbit called Alba was modified with EGFP, a synthetic mutation of the original wild-type green fluorescent gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea Victoria. Kac created a series of works using GFP (green fluorescent protein), proposing an “organism – mammal – ecology” where all creatures glow green under a blacklight. With this works, Kac's interest was not to create “genetic objects”, but “transgenic social subjects” that can be integrated into our society and environment in a responsible manner.
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“The extension of the concepts of biodiversity and interspecies communication;(…) the examination of the notions of normalcy, heterogeneity, purity, hybridity, and otherness; (…) the expansion of the present practical and conceptual boundaries of artmaking to incorporate life invention” (…)7
Kac’s recent works of Space Art reflect the human migration into space by examining a new global space culture presently „emerging in the twenty-first century through the collective explorations and often collaborative efforts of spacefaring nations.“ In 2017, Eduardo teamed up with French astronaut Thomas Pesquet to create the site-specific work Inner Telescope. Realized by Pesquet aboard the International Space Station, Inner Telescope is an anamorphic object formed in zero-gravity out of paper inside the space station.
Similar to Kac’s holographic poetry, the object is a sculpted word which morphs into another form through various visual angles. The composition of three letters "M", "O", "I" ("moi" is French for “me/myself”) changes into the image of a human figure with its umbilical cord cut.
Similarly, the sculpture Adsum (2019), a glass cube engraved with a highly symbolic anamorphic typography, can be read from multiple perspectives. On February 19, 2022 Adsum flew on the rocket Cygnus NG-17 to the International Space Station.
Sometimes in a poetic, subtle way, sometimes in a radical way - over the past 40 years, Kac's work has consistently confronted with complex issues and challenged us to transcend our notions of human limitations.
According to Kac, this elegant juxtaposition between image, word, identity and origin “leads us to rethink our relationship with the world and our position in the Universe.”9