Eduardo Kac
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Eduardo Kac ›dwardoÊŠ kæts; Ä•d·wâr′·dÅ kăts(1962) is a contemporary
artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, th ...
of dual nationality (American and Brazilian) whose artworks span a wide range of practices, including
performance art Performance art is an artwork or art exhibition created through actions executed by the artist or other participants. It may be witnessed live or through documentation, spontaneously developed or written, and is traditionally presented to a pu ...
, poetry,
holography Holography is a technique that enables a wavefront to be recorded and later re-constructed. Holography is best known as a method of generating real three-dimensional images, but it also has a wide range of other applications. In principle, i ...
,
interactive art Interactive art is a form of art that involves the spectator in a way that allows the art to achieve its purpose. Some interactive art installations achieve this by letting the observer walk through, over or around them; others ask the artist ...
, digital and online art, and bio art. He is particularly well known for his works of space art. Kac began his art career in 1980 as a performance artist in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 1982 he created his first digital work and in 1983 he invented holopoetry, exploring holography as an interactive art form. In 1985 he began creating animated poetic works on the French Minitel platform. Throughout the 1980s Kac created telecommunications artworks, using media such as fax, television, and slow scan tv. In 1986 Kac created his first work of telepresence art, in which he used robots to bridge two or more physical locations. During the 1990s he continued to produce these works, expanding his practice with works of interspecies communications. In 1997 he coined the phrase bio art. Throughout his career, Kac has coined numerous neologisms to describe his transdisciplinary art practice, including biorobotics (functional merger of robotics and biotechnology), plantimal (plant with animal genetic material or animal with plant genetic material), and transgenic art (the expression of genes from one species in another in an artwork). Kac is well known for his transgenic artworks that use biotechnology to create plants and animals with new genetic characteristics. His works ''Time Capsule'' (1997), ''Genesis'' (1999), ''GFP Bunny'' (2000) and ''Natural History of the Enigma'' (2003-2009), in particular, are recognized as notable works for having joined biotechnology, art and bioethics together into artworks that are at once political and philosophical. In 2017 Kac created ''Inner Telescope'', an artwork conceived for zero gravity and made aboard the
International Space Station The International Space Station (ISS) is the largest modular space station currently in low Earth orbit. It is a multinational collaborative project involving five participating space agencies: NASA (United States), Roscosmos (Russia), JAXA ...
. Kac worked with the French Space Observatory office, from the French Space Agency, to have this work made in space by the astronaut Thomas Pesquet. Since 2019, Kac has been developing ''Adsum, an artwork for the Moon''. Conceived in five phases, as of 2022 Kac had completed the first three parts. “Adsum†is a glass artwork with four visual symbols internally laser-engraved in three dimensions and is meant to exist in the lunar environment. A multidisciplinary artist, Kac has also employed poetry, fax, photocopying, photography, video, fractals, RFID implants, virtual reality, networks, robotics, satellites, telerobotics, Morse code and DNA extraction in his practice.


Life

Kac was born July 3, 1962, in
Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a b ...
,
Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
. He studied at the School of Communications of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, receiving a BA degree in 1985, and then at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which grew into the museum and ...
where he received an MFA degree in 1990. In 2003 he received a doctorate from the
Planetary Collegium The Planetary Collegium (a.k.a. CAiiA / Centre for Advanced Inquiry in Integrative Arts) is an international transcultural and transdisciplinary new media art educational research platform that promotes on the doctorate level the integration of a ...
at the
University of Wales The University of Wales (Welsh language, Welsh: ''Prifysgol Cymru'') is a confederal university based in Cardiff, Wales. Founded by royal charter in 1893 as a federal university with three constituent colleges – Aberystwyth, Bangor and Cardiff †...
,
Great Britain Great Britain is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean off the northwest coast of continental Europe. With an area of , it is the largest of the British Isles, the largest European island and the ninth-largest island in the world. It is ...
. Kac is a professor of art at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) is a private art school associated with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to an art students' cooperative founded in 1866, which grew into the museum and ...
.


Art career


1980s

In 1980 Kac launched the Movimento de Arte Pornô (Porn Art Movement) on Ipanema Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, with the stated goal of subverting the logic of normative pornography at the service of activism and imagination. Working under the extremely conservative political climate of Brazil under a military dictatorship, Kac and other Movement members, such as Glauco Mattoso, Leila Míccolis, and Hudinilson Jr., developed the new body-centered aesthetics collectively until 1982. Kac was also a performer with the Gang, the performance unit of the Movimento de Arte Pornô; the Gang performed in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities. Beginning in 1982, Kac started to create digital works. In 1983 Kac invented holographic poetry (which he also called holopoetry), the first of which was HOLO/OLHO, named after the Portuguese word for "eye". 24 holographic poems followed this first work, including Quando? (When?) (1987), a cylindrical work that could be read in two directions. Around the same time, and drawing on his interest in experimental poetry forms, Kac began making animated poetry works with the French
Minitel The Minitel was a videotex online service accessible through telephone lines, and was the world's most successful online service prior to the World Wide Web. It was invented in Cesson-Sévigné, near Rennes in Brittany, France. The service was ...
system that was then in use in Brazil. In 1985 he contributed one such work, ''Reabracadabra'', to the ''Arte On Line'' exhibition, organized by the Livraria Nobel bookstore in São Paulo. Other Minitel animated poems by Kac include ''Recaos'' (1986), ''Tesão'' (1985/86) and ''D/eu/s'' (1986). In 1986, with Flavio Ferraz, Kac organized the ''Brasil High-Tech'' exhibition at the Galeria de Arte Centro Empresarial Rio in Rio de Janeiro. From 1985 to as late as 1994, Kac did a number of telecommunications artworks that used
Slow-scan television Slow-scan television (SSTV) is a picture transmission method, used mainly by amateur radio operators, to transmit and receive static pictures via radio in monochrome or color. A literal term for SSTV is narrowband television. Analog broadcast tel ...
(SSTV),
FAX Fax (short for facsimile), sometimes called telecopying or telefax (the latter short for telefacsimile), is the telephonic transmission of scanned printed material (both text and images), normally to a telephone number connected to a printer o ...
, and live television, to create interactive exchanges between separate locations. In 1986 Kac created his first telepresence artwork, using a robot to connect distant audiences. In 1988 he began work on his Ornitorrinco project, a telepresence artwork completed in Chicago, in 1989, in collaboration with Ed Bennett. The work brought together robotics, telecommunications technologies and interactivity to create a robot that was controlled remotely. The piece allowed viewers in one location to control the robot's camera and motion, creating a telepresent work and effecting the experience of viewers in the other location. In 1989 Kac moved from Brazil to Chicago, where he would complete his MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago the following year.


1990s

In the 1990s, Kac continued creating telematic works, with ''Dialogical Drawing'' (1994) and ''Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' (1994) both using networks to explore the viewer experience of an artwork mediated between two sites in real time. In the latter case, the artwork joined a plant in New York city and a live canary in Kentucky in conversation. The inclusion of a bird and a plant as part of an interactive system is an early example of what Kac called interspecies communications. In 1996, Kac’s space artwork ''Monogram'' was included in the DVD that flew to Saturn mounted to the side of the Cassini spacecraft. ''In Teleporting An Unknown State'' (1994), Kac built a system that allowed a plant to survive in a gallery, illuminated not by direct sunlight but by the action of local or remote viewers of the work. In practice, local or remote viewers of the work selected from a set of webcams facing the sky of distant cities. A video projector above the plant relayed the webcam images to the plant, thus enabling it to do photosynthesis with light transmitted remotely. As a result, the system transmitted light values (frequency and amplitude) from distant skies to a local plant. Notably, Kac coined the term "bio art" with his 1997 performance work ''Time Capsule''. In ''Time Capsule'', Kac implanted himself with an RFID chip originally designed for use in pets. A participant in Chicago then triggered the RFID scanned in the Brazilian gallery where Kac was performing, causing the scanner to display a unique code for the implant. Kac then registered himself on the pet database associated with the implant, becoming the first human to do so. ''Time Capsule'' was simultaneously live on television and the Internet. By the late 90s Kac defined himself either as a "transgenic artist" or a "bio artist," and was using
biotechnology Biotechnology is the integration of natural sciences and engineering sciences in order to achieve the application of organisms, cells, parts thereof and molecular analogues for products and services. The term ''biotechnology'' was first used b ...
and
genetics Genetics is the study of genes, genetic variation, and heredity in organisms.Hartl D, Jones E (2005) It is an important branch in biology because heredity is vital to organisms' evolution. Gregor Mendel, a Moravian Augustinian friar wor ...
to create provocative works that concomitantly explore
scientific technique Arthropod, A scientific technique is any systematic process, systematic way of obtaining information about a science, scientific nature or to obtain a Desire (emotion), desired material or Product (business), product. Scientific techniques can be d ...
s and critique them. Kac's next transgenic artwork, created in 1998/99 and titled ''Genesis'', involved him taking a quote from the
Bible The Bible (from Koine Greek , , 'the books') is a collection of religious texts or scriptures that are held to be sacred in Christianity, Judaism, Samaritanism, and many other religions. The Bible is an anthologya compilation of texts of a ...
( Genesis 1:26 - "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth"), transferring it into
Morse code Morse code is a method used in telecommunication to encode text characters as standardized sequences of two different signal durations, called ''dots'' and ''dashes'', or ''dits'' and ''dahs''. Morse code is named after Samuel Morse, one of ...
, and finally, translating that Morse code (by a conversion principle specially developed by the artist for this work) into the base pairs of genetics. The new DNA sequence was introduced into bacteria. Participants were then able to shine ultraviolet lights onto the bacteria containing the new DNA, thus altering it. So when Kac translated it back to English, it said something completely different. Through this work, Kac encourages audiences to consider the new interconnectedness between biology, technology, and meaning.


2000s

In one of his best known works, ''GFP Bunny'', presented in 2000 in Avignon, France, Kac commissioned a French laboratory to create a green-fluorescent
rabbit Rabbits, also known as bunnies or bunny rabbits, are small mammals in the family Leporidae (which also contains the hares) of the order Lagomorpha (which also contains the pikas). ''Oryctolagus cuniculus'' includes the European rabbit speci ...
; a rabbit born with a
Green Fluorescent Protein The green fluorescent protein (GFP) is a protein that exhibits bright green fluorescence when exposed to light in the blue to ultraviolet range. The label ''GFP'' traditionally refers to the protein first isolated from the jellyfish ''Aequorea ...
(GFP)
gene In biology, the word gene (from , ; "...Wilhelm Johannsen coined the word gene to describe the Mendelian units of heredity..." meaning ''generation'' or ''birth'' or ''gender'') can have several different meanings. The Mendelian gene is a ba ...
from a type of
jellyfish Jellyfish and sea jellies are the informal common names given to the medusa-phase of certain gelatinous members of the subphylum Medusozoa, a major part of the phylum Cnidaria. Jellyfish are mainly free-swimming marine animals with umbrella- ...
. Kac named the rabbit Alba. Under a specific blue light, the rabbit fluoresces green. ''GFP Bunny'' proved to be hugely controversial, in part due to the unprecedented nature of the artwork, in part because of the general lack of familiarity with the safety of the process at the close of the twentieth century. The safety of the process was evidenced by the award of the Nobel Prize, in 2008, to the inventors of the GFP technique. The cultural contribution made by ''GFP Bunny'' was acknowledged by one of the scientists in his Nobel Lecture on December 8, 2008. Kac's original aim was for Alba to live with his family, but prior to the scheduled release of Alba to Kac, the lab retracted their agreement and decided that Alba should remain in the lab. Kac responded by creating a series of works that called for her freedom. Other works would follow, focused on celebrating her life. As familiarity with bio art, in particular, and biotechnology, in general, increased in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, GFP Bunny ceased to be controversial and gained significant presence in popular culture, appearing in franchises such Big Bang Theory, Sherlock, and Simpsons, and in novels such as ''Oryx and Crake'', by Margaret Atwood, and ''Next'', by Michael Crichton. His work ''Natural History of the Enigma'' (2003-8) continued in the theme of bio art by merging his DNA with that of a petunia, creating a hybrid organism that Kac called a plantimal. The plant, also given the name Edunia (from Eduardo and Petunia), mimicked the flow of blood through human veins by mixing Kac's DNA only with the plant's genetic components that made the veins in its leaves red. Kac’s bio art has been celebrated by contemporary at critics and historians.
Frank Popper Frank Popper (17 April 1918 – 12 July 2020) was a Czech-born French-British historian of art and technology and Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the Science of Art at the University of Paris VIII. He was decorated with the medal of the Lé ...
called it “revolutionary†and Didier Ottinger wrote that “the fluorescent rabbit poses questions that lead toward a redeï¬nition of our aesthetic notions and criteriaâ€.
Christiane Paul Christiane Paul (; born 8 March 1974 in Berlin-Pankow) is a German film, television and stage actress. Paul first worked as a model for magazines such as '' Bravo''. She was 17 when she obtained her first leading role in the film '. Prior to h ...
stated that “Kac's approach recalls that of Renaissance artists such as Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, who were fascinated equally by the universal laws of science and the universal truths of art.†Eleanor Heartney wrote that in Kac’s transgenic art “advances in bio-engineering and genome research are applied to living entities in ways that raise philosophical questions about the ethics of science and the human potential to alter the basis of natural law.â€


2010s

In 2017 Kac collaborated with French astronaut Thomas Pesquet to create an artwork in space called ''Inner Telescope''. Following Kac's instructions, Pesquet cut and folded two pieces of paper into a sculptural form. Floating in zero gravity, the form could be read as the three letters forming the French word for me, M-O-I, or a stylized human figure with the umbilical cord cut.


2020s

Since 2019, Kac has been developing ''Adsum, an artwork for the Moon''. Conceived in five phases, as of 2022 Kac had completed the first three milestones. ''Adsum'' is a glass artwork with four visual symbols internally laser-engraved in three dimensions and is meant to exist in the lunar environment. The four symbols that constitute the work are: an hourglass (representing time at a human scale), two circles (one large, representing the Earth; one small, representing the Moon), and the infinity symbol (representing time at a cosmic scale).


Permanent collections

Kac's work is included in the permanent collections of the
Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
, New York,
Tate Modern Tate Modern is an art gallery located in London. It houses the United Kingdom's national collection of international modern and contemporary art, and forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. It is ...
, London,
Institut Valencià d'Art Modern The Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (; es, link=no, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno; English: "Valencian Institute of Modern Art"), also known by the acronym IVAM, was the first center of modern art created in Spain, opening in 1989 in the ...
in Valencia, Spain, Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid, Spain,
Les Abattoirs Les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse, combines a museum of modern and contemporary art (''Musée'') and a regional collection of contemporary art (''Frac''). It is located in the French Occitanie region, in the city of Toulouse. ...
Toulouse, France, and the
Victoria and Albert Museum The Victoria and Albert Museum (often abbreviated as the V&A) in London is the world's largest museum of applied arts, decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.27 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and nam ...
, London. Several of Kac's
artists' book Artists' books (or book arts or book objects) are works of art that utilize the form of the book. They are often published in small editions, though they are sometimes produced as one-of-a-kind objects. Overview Artists' books have employed a ...
s are included in the library of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...
, New York.


Awards

In 1998 he received the Leonardo Award for Excellence from ISAST. In 1999, he received the Inter Communication Center (Tokyo) Biennial Award in 1999. In 2002 he received the Creative Capital Award in the discipline of Emerging Fields. In 2008 he received the Golden Nica award at
Ars Electronica Ars Electronica Linz GmbH is an Austrian cultural, educational and scientific institute active in the field of new media art, founded in Linz in 1979. It is based at the Ars Electronica Center (AEC), which houses the Museum of the Future, in the ...
for his project ''Natural History of the Enigma''.


Bibliography

Books by Eduardo Kac * Kac, Eduardo. ''Luz & Letra: Ensaios De Arte, Literatura E Comunicação ng.: ''Light & Letter: Essays on Art, Literature and Communication''" Rio De Janeiro: Contra Capa, 2004.'' * Kac, Eduardo. ''Telepresence & Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, & Robots.'' Foreword James Elkins. Ann Arbor, Michigan: U Michigan P, 2005. * Kac, Eduardo. ''Signs of Life: Bio Art and Beyond'',
MIT Press The MIT Press is a university press affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts (United States). It was established in 1962. History The MIT Press traces its origins back to 1926 when MIT publish ...
, Cambridge, 2007, * Kac, Eduardo. ''Media Poetry: an International Anthology'' (Second Edition), Bristol, United Kingdom, Intellect Books, 2007. Catalogues and Monographs of Eduardo Kac's exhibitions * ''Eduardo Kac''. Published on the occasion of Kac's mid-career survey, curated by Ãngel Kalenberg. Valencia, Spain: Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM) (in Spanish, English and Valencian), 2007. [Texts by Consuelo Císcar Casabán, Ãngel Kalenberg, Didier Ottinger, Eleanor Heartney, Steve Tomasula, Gunalan Nadaranjan, Annick Bureaud, Eduardo Kac, Santiago Grisolía. Also includes a Critical Anthology, Chronology, and Bibliography] * Kac, Eduardo. ''Hodibis Potax: Poetry Anthology [Oeuvres poétiques].'' Ivry-sur-Seine, France: Édition Action Poétique (in French and English), 2007. [Published on the occasion of the solo exhibition Hodibis Potax, by Eduardo Kac, realized in the context of Biennale des Poètes en Val-de-Marne (Poetry Biennial, France), May 2007.] * ''Eduardo Kac: Histoire Naturelle de L'Enigma et Autres Travaux / Eduardo Kac: ''Natural History of the Enigma'' and Other Works.'' Poitiers, France: Al Dante Éditions (in French and English), 2009. ["Ouvrage conçu & par les éditions Al Dante à l'occasion de l'exposition énonyme au centre d'art comtemporain Rurart... en partenariat avec l'espace Mendes France (centre de culture scientifique) de 8 octobre au 20 decembre 2009." / "Book edition designed by Al Dante on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at Rurart Contemporary Art Center ... in partnership with Espace Mendes France (Center of Science and Culture,) from October 8 to December 20, 2009."] Additional publication information quoted from the title page of this catalogue. Books about the Art of Eduardo Kac * Rossi, Elena Giulia (ed.). "Eduardo Kac : Move 36". Filigranes Éditions, Paris (in French and English), 2005, . * ''The Eighth Day: The Trangenic Art of Eduardo Kac.'' Eds. Sheilah Britton and Dan Collins. Tempe, Arizona: The Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University, 2003. . * Azoulay, Gérard (ed.). ''Télescope intérieur''. Observatoire de l'espace/CNES (in French and English), 2021, .


References


External links


Official website




{{DEFAULTSORT:Kac, Eduardo 1962 births Living people Brazilian artists BioArtists New media artists Conceptual artists Electronic literature writers Brazilian Jews