Art at the biological frontier

Eduardo Kac

Summary: In this paper I will discuss three recent electronic art worksin which biological processes or interfaces are investigated. These worksare entitled "Teleporting an Unknown State" (1994/96), "A-positive"(1997), and "Time Capsule" (1997) The first work created a situationin which actual photosynthesis and growth of a living organism took placeover the Internet. The second piece proposed a dialogical exchange betweena human being and a robot through two intravenous hookups. The third approachedthe problem of wet interfaces and human hosting of digital technologiesthrough the implantation of a memory microchip.

Keywords: art, biology, telematics, telepresence, robotics, interactivity,dialogism

Working with multiple media to create hybrids from the conventionaloperations of existing communications systems, I hope to engage participantsin situations involving biological elements, telerobotics, interspeciesinteraction, light, language, distant places, time zones, video conferences,and the exchange and transformation of information via networks. Oftenrelying on contigency, indeterminacy, and the intervention of the participant,I wish to encourage dialogical interaction and to confront complex issuesconcerning identity, agency, responsibility, and the very possibility ofcommunication.

Biotelematics

"Teleporting an Unknown State" is the title of my biotelematicinstallation which linked the Contemporary Art Center, in New Orleans,to the Internet (August 4-August 9, 1996). This piece was part of "TheBridge", the Siggraph '96 Art Show. "Teleporting an Unknown State"combined biological growth with Internet (remote) activity. In a very darkroom a pedestal with earth served as a nursery for a single seed. Througha video projector suspended above and facing the pedestal, remote individualssent light via the Internet to enable this seed to photosynthesize andgrow in total darkness. The installation created the experience of theInternet as a life-supporting system.

As local viewers walked in they saw the installation: a video projectorhung from the ceiling and faced down, where a single seed laid on a bedof earth. Viewers didn't see the projector itself, only its cone of lightprojected through a circular hole in the ceiling. The circularity of thehole and the projector's lens flushed with it are evocative of the sunbreaking through darkness. At remote sites around the world, anonymousindividuals pointed their digital cameras to the sky and transmitted sunlight to the gallery. The photons captured by cameras at the remote siteswere re-emitted through the projector in the gallery. The video imagestransmitted live from remote countries were stripped of any representationalvalue, and used as conveyors of actual wavefronts of light. The slow processof growth of the plant was transmitted live to the world via the Internetas long as the exhibition was up. All participants were able to see theprocess of growth via the Internet. The computer screen, i.e., the graphicalinterface on which all the activity could be seen, was dematerialized andprojected directly onto the bed of earth in a dark room, enabling directphysical contact between the seed and the photonic stream.

This piece operated a dramatic reversal of the regulated unidirectionalmodel imposed by broadcasting standards and the communications industry.Rather than transmitting a specific message from one point to many passivereceivers, "Teleporting an Unknown State" created a new situationin which several individuals in remote countries transmitted light to asingle point in the Contemporary Art Center, in New Orleans. The ethicsof Internet ecology and social network survival was made evident in a distributedand collaborative effort.

During the show, photosynthesis depended on remote collective actionfrom anonymous participants. Birth, growth, and death on the Internet formeda horizon of possibilities that unfolded as participants dynamically contributedto the work. Collaborative action and responsibility through the networkwere essential for the survival of the organism. The exhibition ended onAugust 9, 1996. On that day the plant was 18 inches tall. After the show,I gently unrooted the plant and replanted it next to a tree by the ContemporaryArt Center's front door.

Biorobotics

"A-positive" was a dialogical event realized by Ed Bennettand myself on September 24, 1997, at Gallery 2, in Chicago, in the contextof the ISEA 97 art exhibition. This work probes the delicate relationshipbetween the human body and emerging new breeds of hybrid machines thatincorporate biological elements and from these elements extract sensorialor metabolic functions. The work created a situation in which a human beingand a robot had direct physical contact via an intravenous needle connectedto clear tubing and fed one another in a mutually nourishing relationship.To the new category of hybrid biological robots the general epithet "biobots"is ascribed. Because of its use of human red blood cells, the biobot createdfor "A-positive" is termed a "phlebot".

In "A-positive", the human body provided the robot with life-sustainingnutrients by actually donating blood to it; the biobot accepted the humanblood and from it extracts enough oxygen to support a small and unstableflame, an archetypal symbol of life. In exchange, the biobot donated dextroseto the human body, which accepted it intravenously. In "A-positive",oxygen is extracted by the phlebot and used to support the erratic flame.The conceptual model created by this dialogical work is far from conventionalscenarios that portray robots as slaves that perform difficult, repetitiveor humanly impossible tasks; instead, as the event unfolds the human beinggives his own blood to the biobot, creating with it a symbiotic exchange.

This work proposes that emerging forms of human/machine interface penetratethe sacred boundaries of the flesh, with profound cultural and philosophicalimplications. "A-positive" draws attention to the condition ofthe human body in the new context in which biology meets computer scienceand robotics. We can no longer regard the body as isolated from firm contactwith the technoscape or protected from the biological surveillance of biometrics.Not even DNA or blood are immune to the invasion of the body by technology.A DNA computer has been successfully demonstrated through the joint effortof a biologist and a computer scientist. Instead of electrical impulses,it employs deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, to control the commands a processorgives to a computer and uses nucleotides, the basic units of DNA, to replicatethe actions of a processor. The technologies that condition our imaginaryand sensibility at the end of the century (including nanotechnology andgenetic engineering) also penetrate our skin -- our blood stream, even-- enabling new forms of therapy. Miniaturized electronic devices and newchemical compounds are invading (and cohabiting) the physical structureof an organism. For example, a new technology aptly called "electroinsertion"proposes to increase a drug's effective potency manifold by binding specificdrug molecules directly to the red blood cells, rather than adding a drugto the circulatory system. This and other related developments clearlyreveal that technology has already permeated the body in subtle ways. Thedialogical situation created in "A-positive" quite literally"wires" the human being to the robot, with four connection pointsin a prototypical biological LAN (Local Area Network). Once extracted andreleased inside the sealed chamber, the oxygen supports the minuscule glowingmass of burning gas, the symbolic "nanoflame".

Bioimplants

"Time Capsule" was a work-experience realized on November11, 1997, at Casa das Rosas, a cultural center in São Paulo, Brazil.The piece lies somewhere between a local event-installation, a site-specificwork in which the site itself is both my body and a remote database, anda simulcast on TV and the Web. The object that gives the piece its titleis a microchip that contains a programmed identification number and thatis integrated with a coil and a capacitor, all hermetically sealed in biocompatibleglass. The temporal scale of the work is stretched between the ephemeraland the permanent; i.e., between the few minutes necessary for the completionof the basic procedure, the microchip implantation, and the permanent characterof the implant. As with other underground time capsules, it is under theskin that this digital time capsule projects itself into the future.

When the public walked into the gallery where this work took place,what they saw was a medical professional, seven sepia-toned photographsshot in Eastern Europe in the 1930s, a horizontal bedstead, an on-linecomputer serving the Web, a telerobotic finger, and additional broadcastingequipment. I started (and concluded) the basic procedure by washing theskin of my ankle with an antiseptic and using a special needle to insertsubcutaneously the passive microchip, which is in fact a transponder withno power supply to replace or moving parts to wear out. Scanning the implantremotely via the Net generated a low energy radio signal (125 KHz) thatenergized the microchip to transmit its unique and inalterable numericalcode, which was shown on the scanner's 16-character Liquid Crystal Display(LCD). Immediately after this data was obtained I registered myself viathe Web in a remote database located in the United States. This is thefirst instance of a human being added to the database, since this registrywas originally designed for identification and recovery of lost animals.I registered myself both as animal and owner under my own name. After implantationa small layer of connective tissue formed around the microchip, preventingmigration.

Not coincidentally, documentation and identification have been one ofthe main thrusts of technological development, particularly in the areaof imaging, from the first photograph to ubiquitous video surveillance.Throughout the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries photography and itsadjacent imaging tools functioned as a social time capsule, enabling thecollective preservation of memory of our social bodies. At the end of thetwentieth century, however, we witness a global inflation of the imageand the erasure by digital technologies of the sacred power of photographyas truth. Today we can no longer trust the representational nature of theimage as the key agent in the preservation of social or personal memoryand identity. The present condition allows us to change the configurationof our skin through plastic surgery as easily as we can manipulate therepresentation of our skin through digital imaging, so that we can nowembody the image of ourselves that we desire to become. With the abilityto change flesh and image also comes the possibility of erasure of theirmemory.

Memory today is on a chip. As we call "memory" the storageunits of computers and robots, we antropomorphize our machines, makingthem look a little bit more like us. In the process, we mimic them as well.The body is traditionally seen as the sacred repository of human-only memories,acquired as the result of genetic inheritance or personal experiences.Memory chips are found inside computers and robots and not inside the humanbody yet. In "Time Capsule", the presence of the chip (with itsrecorded retrievable data) inside the body forces us to consider the co-presenceof lived memories and artificial memories within us. External memoriesbecome implants in the body, anticipating future instances in which eventsof this sort might become common practice and inquiring about the legitimacyand ethical implications of such procedures in the digital culture. Livetransmissions on television and on the Web were an intergal part of "TimeCapsule" and brought the issue closer to our living rooms. Scanningof the implant remotely via the Web revealed how the connective tissueof the global digital network renders obsolete the skin as a protectiveboundary demarcating the limits of the body.

The need for alternative ways of experience in the digital culture isevident. The wet hosting of digital memory--as exemplified by "TimeCapsule"--points to traumatic but perhaps freer form of embodimentof such proposition. The intradermal presence of a microchip reveals thedrama of this conflict, as we try to develop conceptual models that makeexplicit undesirable implications of this impulse and that, at the sametime, will allow us to reconcile aspects of our experience still generallyregarded as antagonistic, such as freedom of movement, data storage andprocessing, moist interfaces, and networking environments.

Eduardo Kac is an artist and writer who works with electronic and photonicmedia, including telepresence, robotics, and the Internet. His work hasbeen exhibited widely in the United States, Europe, and South America.Kac's works belong to the permanent collections of the Museum of ModernArt in New York, the Museum of Holography in Chicago, and the Museum ofModern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, among others. He is a member of theeditorial board of the journal Leonardo, published by MIT Press. His anthology"New Media Poetry: Poetic Innovation and New Technologies" waspublished in 1996 as a special issue of the journal Visible Language, ofwhich he was a guest editor. Writings by Kac on electronic art as wellas articles about his work have appeared in several books, newspapers,magazines, and journals in many countries, including Argentina, Australia,Austria, Bolivia, Brazil, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Hungary, Mexico,Paraguay, Portugal, Spain, Russia, Uruguay, United Kingdom, and UnitedStates. He is an Assistant Professor of Art and Technology at the Schoolof the Art Institute of Chicago and has received numerous grants and awardsfor his work. Eduardo Kac can be contacted at: ekac@artic.edu. His workcan be seen at: http://www.ekac.org.