Ugo/eduardokacchicago

EDUARDO KAC: Trangenic Artist Chicago Humanities Festival, November 9th, 2013

Eduardo Kac is a pioneer of bio art. The School of the Art Institute professor has pushed boundaries—and buttons—throughout his career. He is best known for his series of "transgenic" works, art that blends natural and created elements in highly unexpected ways. These works include a green fluorescent rabbit, a synthetic gene built on a Morse code translation of a sentence from the Book of Genesis, and a genetically engineered petunia that contains Kac's DNA. Join curator Hamza Walker and Kac for a conversation on his radical art practice and the many questions it poses for our genomic time

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LSJVD0m1Mg

http://ekac.org

Main fields of work:

Experimental poetry / writing

Visual Art

Early 80’s was a significant transition period, with two parallel breakthroughs:

1. the rise of the personal computer ( he sees it as personal studio that can synthesises all interactions, sound, images, text…)
2. early global network

This two will connect, the computer will enable a window into the other. The computer does not take a nomadic form anymore. EK sets the challenge of developing intersubjective art form for the media age.

Language is important in the work in a poetic literary sense.

Wanna be involve in the making of the world. 1983 Holographic poetry, reading as a kinesthesique experience, language dissolve, disappear constantly in relation of your body motion. Acts of appearance and disappearance. Oscillations. His vision of language is one in which language resists ascription of meaning. Resists even, the perceptual attempt to make it stop and let itself be fully read. Language is in constant flow, constant transformation that escapes us, our attempt to impose and fix a semantic sphere.

Interactive, VR text. Strategies that you develops in real time to control the text, meanings.

Human and non-human characteristics?

But other beings have created means of interaction that are complex and interesting.

What could art be like if we could tap into these other modalities of communication that are not exclusively based on human structures.

"Sensorial aspect of the artistic experience. All art has been made within the human visual spectrum (all art). What a bee sees when she land on a flower? Human cannot see it." SO:

"What could art be like if we could on one hand recognise the aesthetic dimension in the non-human and at the same time sensitise ourselves to this richer, larger world."

Push language into other realms of what language can be and do.

Essay concerning human understanding 1994

“The piece is predicated on actual geographic distance. In one gallery we find a canary in a cage and miles away we have a plant. They are connected through the network, the canary sings and the plant is exposed to the singing of the bird remotely. An electrode touching the leaf of the plant is sensing the micro voltage fluctuation, the electrical fluctuation of the plant. That is connected to a computer that is triggering sounds in real-time, that travel back to the cage and the bird is expose to that. They experience a kind of interspecies sonic, interactive, telematic dialogue. Its a work of interspecies communication.” Use IBV (interactive Brainwave Analyser)

The presence of human presence in this non-human sensorial world (birds don't sing with himan around).

“ The simple act of looking at something plays a direct role in what the thing is and becomes. We always participate actively even when we don't realise that we do”.

1-dissolution of the language 2-searching and experimenting with other modes of networking / human-non-human

Teleporting an unknown state

Live camera, living plant, sending light to a plant from a picture. Sending light for the photosynthesis. Convergence of many to one.

Rare Avis 1996

Continue the research on modes of co-presence / interactions human and non-human / VR Headset from a robot in a cage full of birds. Participants experiences spaces inside and outside the cage simultaneously. The view is available for internet participant remotely.

"This work is on the internet, control and voice and vision are coming and leaving the body of the parrot, the parrot is a hub.”

The internet -Computer processing – Live stereoscopic color video Head tracking – Telerobotic macaw and 30 live small birds.

The works brings together LOCAL / REMOTE + HUMAN / NON-HUMAN + THE LIVING / THE ROBOTIC = the production of a cultural space Back in 1996 he has to cable the museum by hand = transform the museum to enable the museum to support this kind of work = flexibility of museums materiality?

Time Capsule 1997

A piece in wich he implanted a microchip in his own body live on tv and internet. He allows internet participants (live) to read the content of the digital microchip. Participants extract that information and externalize it on a screen and transformed his body in a hub. Turning point in his work: he created the term bio-art

He saw a kind of digital mannerism beginning to develop, it was time for a visceral turn, an exploration of the body as we had not seen before. He wanted to dive into the body instead of manipulate the surface or doing body-art. Working with metabolic and molecular aspects of the body.

The pieces touches also on questions of memory, with the seven photographs from his grandma in 1939.

“The microchip is a memory microchip, i implanted this microchip in front of these images. Photographs externalize memory, the microchip internalized memory. As we contemplate these images we internalize them and the content of the microchip (live on internet, TV) was also externalized when its content was retrieved. I wanted to signal that we were on the verge of profound transformations (body representation, art, privacy...): the very notion of memory was about to undergo change.” Turning point 21century, what life is and what life can be.

Transgenic Art 1998 Manifesto book Clarify and specify what he wanted to do within bio-art: the creation of new beings, new life forms, with a process known as transgenesis. Moving DNA sequences between species.

The Transgenic trilogie: Bacteria – Mammal - Ecology

'Genesis 1999' First transgenic work presented publicly. He copied a bible and pasted it on microsoft word, then translated it to morse. Then he created a specific code to go from the two elements of morse to the four genetic basis. The code is partially arbitrary and partially motivated. Sent it to a company that synthetised it and sent it by post, as a white powder. But DNA needs a context, aka a body and the body also needs a context.

The DNA was then introduced in a bacteria spliced with GFP wich allows the bacteria to glow green. You can activate a UV light bulb remotely (from home..), the UV frequency is causing mutation.

Fundamentally: Text on the screen , enter the text in a living body, alter the text in the living body, retrieve the text. = INPUT – PROCESSING – OUTPUT = computer

The idea that the distinction between information processing, the world of nonliving technologies and the world of the living is an insurmountable barrier is in the 21st century not the case anymore. It has profound philosophical impacts.

So the barriers faded out.

GFP bunny 2000

He created a green glowing bunny (Alba), born in France. Glowing under. Mixed reviews. Art, Science, Ethics. Links with tech-labs

8th Day 2001 (The biobot)

Blue bubble floatin, like an earth, total darkness. There is green glowing, mices, fishs, plants, amibe control. Touching or normality. To glow or not to glow...

Natural History of the enigma – Edunia 2009 Move a fragment of the DNA in to the flower, being integrated into the chromozome. Speciffically on the genes of red veins. “Plantimal” a plant with animal characteristics new life form. Ontologically speaking we have a new bee=ing that emerges from the art work and exists in the world like any other being.

“What does this mean for an artist to imagine a creature, engage the procedures to bring this creature into the world and effectively have her in the world, share the world, be part of the world, modify the world, experience the world just like you and I”

Is the production of an imaginary being presents in all civilization, societies?

“Through pursuing into bio art, we have transformed life from mythology into a medium, we have transformed this vision of new beings from legend to life”

“ It is my belief that in the world that we destroy at least one species everyday one role that artists can exert is to expand biodiversity, 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 the non-living, the local and the remote, the biological and the robotic are dissolved and a new model, a more open model of interspecies communication can be brought to the fore and better correspond to the life that we seek to develop in the 21st century.”