Shari Margolin, Words in Flight, English Thesis (published online),15 December 1999, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York. Advisor: MichaelJoyce. http://vassun.vassar.edu/~shmargol/shari/thesis/uirapuru.html

UIRAPURU

(Dissertation excerpt)

Eduardo Kac has been experimenting in visual poetries since the early1980s. He is probably most famous for what he entitles holopoetry, a kindof poetry that comes out at and towards the reader like a hologram would.Kac also creates digital poetry, in which the visible area changes by the"bending" of the screen. This type of viewing emphasizes perspective,and a reassurance of the reader's place as a mass, within a body. I believea more appropriate name for this type of digital poetry is remote (control)poetry. The reader has to use a control bar in order to move the poem incertain ways so that she can read it. One example of such poetry is "Secret."

Kac's most recent work is "Uirapuru," a recreated Amazon forestin which a legendary bird, "Uirapuru" lives. According to theIntercommunication Center in Tokyo, where the work exists, "Visitorscommunicate with the Uirapuru through a Web interface and via sensors placedinside the artificial forest. Through interaction with the Uirapuru, whichis at the same time both a fantasy and a real avian creature, visitorscan explore both the virtual and the real aspects of telepresence."(http://www.ntticc.or.jp/special/biennale99/exhibition/eduardo_e.html [Accessed28 October 1999].)

In Kac's "Uirapuru," the fabled Amazonian bird is no longera bird, but a flying fish. It is animal, and yet digitized, able to surviveoutside an acceptable living environment. It emphasizes the mechanicalin the flying, the only aspect retained of the bird, in relation to commandsgiven by visitors to the gallery and / or web site.

There are birds, "pingbirds" whose sole job it is to singin a manner related to traffic to the site (i.e., sing more when there'smore traffic). These birds also emphasize the machine, and lead to thequestions, why do we use the bodily and representations of the alive toclothe the machine, why not build digital lamps or pencils that fly byvisitor commands?

""Uirapuru" explores the interconnectedness of two parallelworlds, physical and virtual" (email announcement from Julia Friedman,info@juliafriedman.com [3 November 1999].). It merges telepresence withvirtual reality on the Internet, it transforms machine into virtual reality,machine to bodily simulation.

This artwork shows life given to non-living objects that represent theliving through machine-transformed actions of the living. Inanimate creations,or machines, the Uirapuru bird / fish and the ping birds, perform taskssuch as flying and singing, actions real fish and birds perform. They dothis both in a virtual and a real environment. People travel the net, peoplego to this exhibit through the internet, a machine. By mechanical means,a message is sent to the birds representing the amount of people on thenet at that moment. In relation / response, the birds come alive for amoment, but mechanically, singing and flying, simulating the body, whichis possible through technology.

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