Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) is one of the initiators of this trend. His artistic productions rely on genetic engineering to create works which are actually the creation of living beings based on the manipulation of their genes. Also famous at the international level for his interactive installations on the Internet, this artist has developed through his work a semantic concerned with living organisms. A pioneer of telecommunication art in the pre-Web 1980s, he has developed a body of work in which the scientific is associated to poetry, graphic art and animation.

The exhibition “Life, Light & Language” is a perfect introduction to his work. It gathers together in a careful staging a selection of important pieces: lagoglyphs, video installations, diverse objects, and even lithographs. The relationship between the physical and the virtual is an essential element in Kac’s work. These aspects, present in the interesting holograms incorporating texts known as holopoetry, appear through a different discursive strategy in the works performed between 1989 and 1996: the telecommunications and the telepresence. Teletransporting an Unknown State (1994-96) is a computer-based telecommunication piece which establishes a relationship between a biological and a digital process. Featured in a dark room, a great pedestal with earth hosts a single plant. The plant is able to live and grow thanks to the participation of remote individuals in different geographical locations sending light via the Internet and enabling the plant to photosynthesize and stay alive.

Eduardo Kac proposes a “transgenic art” based on genetically modifiable organisms only for artistic purposes. An example of this art was his project GFP Bunny 2000, a green fluorescent bunny, later called Alba, which rendered the artist controversial and famous. He has recently created a new life form, a “plantimal” he has called Edunia. Developed between 2003 and 2008, this work, entitled Natural History of the Enigma, is a hybrid of the artist himself and a petunia, an act of transgenic fusion between humans and plants. Invented thanks to molecular biology, Edunia does not exist in nature and Eduardo Kac’s DNA is expressed only in the red veins of the flower, a plant resulting from molecular manipulation. Natural History of the Enigma is a series which includes, besides the flower, photographs, lithographs and sculptures. Anticipating the future, Eduardo Kac has created the series “Edunia Seed Packs”, containing seeds to be planted. And there is no reason to be concerned: all the necessary information to grow the plant is available.
Kac’s oeuvre encourages dialogical interaction and confronts complex issues such as identity, communication, mediation and responsibility. The artist is interested in the spectator’s participation in situations which include elements such as video-conferences, light, language, video, information exchange and transformation. He proposes that we inquire into our relationship with nature and offers the possibility to virtually alter the environment by means of technological devices. Without being plethoric, the exhibition attracts the spectator’s attention towards the essential points in Eduardo Kac’s artistic reflection.