DIALOGICAL TELEPRESENCE ART AND NET ECOLOGY

Eduardo Kac


Introduction

Telepresence can be summarized as the union of telematics and remote physical action. Telepresence art raises the question: what are the effects of physical distance on aesthetic perception? Physical distance is at once erased and reaffirmed by new technologies. Erasure results from the sudden familiarity with and access to ideas and objects once beyond reach. Reaffirmation of distance is clear once one becomes aware of one's own subject position, prompted by the recontextualization of ideas and objects and the cultural filters inevitably used in their reception. This new condition implies that telecommunications tecnologies--including telerobotics, the Internet, and the coupling of both--profoundly affect our sense of self and other.

The question is not how do these technologies mediate our exploration of the world, local or remote, but how they actually shape the very world we inhabit. This is the same as saying that any technology embeds cultural and ideological parameters which, in the end, give shape to the sensorial or abstract data obtained through this very technology. Telescopic and telecommunicative technologies are no exception. In fact, one of the most important aesthetic implications of remoteness is making evident that multiple processes always filter or shape one's experience. In telepresence art, digital systems such as computers, modems, robotic devices, and networks, ultimately point to the role of culture in creating both individual and collective experiences. Cultural parameters such as language, behavioral conventions, ethical frameworks, and ideological positions are always at work in art and science.

In science, the selection of a research topic and the extraction, accumulation, and processing of data, as well as the interface through which the data are later explored are themselves an integral part of the nature of the data. They are not a detached element that causes no interference in what is experienced. Quite to the contrary: the knowledge we acquire through instruments and media is always modulated by them. They are not separable. While in science we observe the drive to build instruments capable of ever more "precise" measurements, in art we can freely explore the ways in which these instruments and media help define the nature of the reality thus produced. In interactive telepresence artworks created since 1986, I have been investigating multiple aspects of this phenomenon. In other words, my telepresence work has never been about what it would be like if we could be there (i.e., at the remote site). Instead, it investigates how does the fact that we are experiencing this remote site in a given way (i.e., through a particular telerobotic body, with a given interface, and in a specific network topology) modulate the very notion of reality we conjure up as we navigate the remote space.

We are now undergoing cultural perceptual shifts due to the remote projection of our corporeal sense of presence. In art, the dynamic interplay between presence and absence on telerobotic bodies raises new issues and escapes from rigid formal dichotomies, such as figuration versus abstraction, or formalism versus conceptualism. Expanded through the synergy of organic and cybernetic systems, bodies (human, robotic, zoomorphic, or otherwise) now become the focus of renewed attention in art--beyond stylistic pictorial concerns and representation politics. Telepresence art offers dialogical alternatives to the monological system of art and addresses our being-in-the-world through lived experience (not through representation), as it converts telecommunications links into a physical bridge connecting remote spaces. Telerobots and teleoperated humans (which I call "teleborgs") become physical avatars, as they enable single or multiple individuals to actively explore an environment or a social context.

In this new art, immediate perceptual encounters are expanded by a heightened awareness of what is absent, remote. Telepresence art shows us that from a social, political, and philosophical point of view, what we cannot see is equally relevant to what meets the eye. Telepresence art reconciles the metaphysical propensity of cyberspace with the phenomenological condition of physical space. In other words, it forms a new ecology which harmonize carbon and silicon. As optical fibers thread the soil like worms, and digitally-encoded waves cross the air as flocking birds, a new ecology emerges. To survive the imbalances created by increased standardization of interfaces (which promote uniformisation of mental processes) and centralized control achieved by corporate mega-mergers (which decreases choice), and to thrive emotionally and intellectually in this hostile mediascape, we need to do more than subsist as we adapt. Our synergy with telerobots, transgenics, nanobots, avatars, biobots, clones, digital biota, hybrids, webots, and animats, and other material or immaterial intelligent agents will dictate our ability to endure fast-changing environmental conditions in a networked world. In this dispersed network ecology we are globally building, telepresence art can offer new cognitive and perceptual models.


From RC Robot to The Ornitorrinco Project

My early work with telepresence art was a natural development from my investigation of telecommunications art. In 1986 I created my first work with remote-control robotics, in the context of the exhibition "Brasil High Tech", realized at the Centro Empresarial Rio, in Rio de Janeiro. For this show I used a 7-foot tall wireless anthropomorphic robot in the role of a host who conversed bidirectionally with exhibition visitors [1]. The robot's voice was that of a real human being transmitted via radio waves. Motion control was also achieved through a radio link. Still in the context of the exhibition, the robot was also used in a dialogical performance realized with Brazilian artist Otavio Donasci, in which it interacted with Donasci's videocreature (performer wearing a costume that hides the human head and replaces it with a video screen). Through the robotic body, a human improvised responses in real time to the videocreature's pre-recorded utterances and to the reactions of the audience. It was a rather dramatic interaction, which culminated with the "suicide" of the videocreature. We might say that this work could be characterized as "local telepresence", to differentiate it from "remote telepresence" (i.e., works in which links are made between two or more geographically distant places). This was a telepresence work not because of the remote-control component alone but precisely because the robot became a host to a human being, and because this human -- who was out of sight -- conversed with other humans through the robotic body.

After this work, I started to think of ways in which it might be possible to combine my telecommunications experience with wireless telerobotics. The telerobot Ornitorrinco (platypus, in Portuguese) came to life in 1989 in Chicago [2], as a result of my collaboration with hardware designer Ed Bennett. The Ornitorrinco Project used standard DTMF signals (touch-tone sounds) produced by a regular phone to control the telerobot's body wirelessly from afar in real time. It also used DTMF signals to retrieve video stills through the same phone line from the telerobot's point of view. When no motion or imaging commands were issued, the line was open and environmental sounds could be heard in real time from Ornitorrinco's vantage point. Born out of the desire to create telepresential experiences that involved geographically distant places, Ornitorrinco experienced several changes since 1989. This fully mobile, wireless telerobot grew in size, hosted multiple remote subjects, hybridized with different systems, reached to and was reached from several countries, and evolved its sensorial apparatus into more complex structures. In 1994 it inhabited the Internet in a piece entitled "Ornitorrinco in Eden", which merged the Net with three physical spaces in Chicago, Lexington (KY), and Seattle. In this work, remote participants in Lexington and Seattle shared the body of the telerobot simultaneously and in real time via a three-way call, while Ornitorrinco itself was in a third remote space in Chicago. Ornitorrinco's vision system was disseminated on the Net via live videoconferencing.


Rara Avis

In 1996 I created Rara Avis, an interactive networked telepresence installation realized at Nexus Contemporary Art Center, in Atlanta, as part as the Olympic Arts Festival.[3] In Rara Avis, the participant saw a very large aviary as soon as he or she walked into the room. In front of this aviary the participant saw a virtual reality headset. Inside the aviary the viewer noticed a strong contrast between the thirty flying birds (zebra finches, which were very small and mostly gray) and the large tropical macaw, which was perched and immobile. The viewer was invited to put on the headset. While wearing the headset, the viewer was transported into the aviary. The viewer now perceived the aviary from the point of view of the Macowl (contraction of macaw and owl, due to the forward position of its eyes) and was able to observe himself or herself in this situation from this displaced point of view.

The tropical bird's eyes were two CCD cameras. When the viewer, now a participant, moved his or her head to left and right, the head of the telerobotic Macowl moved accordingly, enabling the participant to see the whole space of the aviary from the Macowl's point of view. The real space was immediately transformed into a virtual space. The installation was permanently connected to the Internet (simultaneously via the Web, CU-SeeMe, and the MBone). Through the Net, remote participants observed the gallery space from the point of view of the telerobotic Macowl (as activated by a local viewer). Through the Internet remote participants also used their microphones to trigger the vocal apparatus of the telerobotic macaw heard in the gallery (and thus affected local birds and humans). Network ecology and local ecology mutually affected one another. I expected that the small birds would be frightened with the big colorful robot. However, in fact they became so comfortable with it that they excreted all over it throughout the exhibition. This unique combination of organic waste and clean electronics furthered a sense of integration between carbon and silicon. The body of the telerobotic Macowl was shared in real time by local participants and Internet participants worldwide. Sounds in the space, usually a combination of human and bird voices, traveled back to remote participants on the Internet.

By enabling the local participant to be both vicariously inside and physically outside the cage, this installation created a metaphor that revealed how new communications technology enables the effacement of boundaries at the same time that it reaffirms them. The installation also addressed issues of identity and alterity, projecting the viewer inside the body of a rare bird who not only was the only one of its kind in the aviary but was also distinctly different from the other birds (in scale, color, and behavior). The piece can be seen as a critique of the problematic notion of "exoticism", a concept that reveals more about relativity of contexts and the limited awareness of the observer than about the cultural status of the object of observation. This image of "the different", "the other", embodied by the telerobotic Macowl, was dramatized by the fact that the participant temporarily adopted the point of view of the rare bird.


Ornitorrinco mutated in Finland

For the exhibition "Metamachines: Where is the Body?", realized in 1996 at Otso Gallery, in Finland, the telerobot Ornitorrinco suffered a mutation: it hosted components of Uirapuru [4], particularly a new chip, a new camera, and a custom-designed board that enabled it to take on new behaviors. The installation entitled "Ornitorrinco, the Webot, travels around the world in eighty nanoseconds, going from Turkey to Peru and back" was divided between two remote spaces, which were linked to the Web in unexpected ways. The public first encountered the work from Otso Gallery's ground level, while Ornitorrinco navigated in its subterranean nest. Critically examining the blind trust and the expectations we project over information networks, this piece appeared straightforward but nothing really was as it seemed.

In the space upstairs participants saw a Web page interface (Netscape browser) projected on the wall with embedded live, real-time (30 fps) color video feedback. Anybody familiar with the current state of development on the Web knows that this is technically impossible because of bandwidth limitations. Still, there it was [5]. Clicking outside the video window (left/right, forward/backward) enabled participants to navigate the nest in real time, and interact with turkeys and humans from Ornitorrinco's point of view. The public participated actively, thinking that they were on the Web. They weren't. Every move they made continually resulted in fresh images, and what they did not realize at first was that these images were automatically grabbed and uploaded to a Web site (to which they themselves did not have access from the gallery, only from home). The topology of this work was intentionally conceived to reveal that communications media alienate us from our very own utterances and actions. [6]

As participants explored the piece their role changed subtly and significantly. While they were in control on the first floor, they experienced the work as active subjects. They navigated in the remote space, they made choices, they interacted with the turkeys. Descending the staircase that led to the basement of the gallery, they found themselves behind a 4-foot high glass wall. At this point they unwillingly relinquished the role of active subjects and became objects of contemplation--they themselves became the focus of multiple gazes. They were contemplated by incoming participants on the first floor who were now on Ornitorrinco's body, by the turkeys, and by remote Web viewers who logged on from different parts of the world.

The elements that constituted the nest made a metacritical, and at times humorous, commentary on the current state of development of the Web. The space was topped by an all-encompassing coarse mesh net suspended halfway between floor and ceiling. Standing local visitors had to look through this net to see the nest. Spread through the space, indicative graffiti made a humorous commentary on the "information highway" metaphor. For example, "Turn Left" and "This Way" arrows both pointed to a corner, and "Wrong Way" was flanked by arrows pointing left and right.

Coexisting and interacting with Ornitorrinco in the same space, two real turkeys, birds known for not being among the most intelligent creatures, went about their business simultaneously representing, as colloquial American English has it, the ineptitude of technophobes and the apathy of technophiles [7]. The turkeys also resonated, in subtle and comical manner, with the words Turkey and Peru in the title. Both words represent different countries and the same bird, the first in English and the second in Portuguese: the two languages I use the most. The displacement of cultural references and dispersal of subjects that has always informed Ornitorrinco's life was experienced anew in this piece. As Ornitorrinco mutated in Finland, it explored the detachment of the subject from a single body as well as relative and imaginary geographies, accompanied as it was in its hay-filled nest by a large plastic globe. Ornitorrinco qua webot circumnavigated the globe, occasionally moving it by means of direct physical contact.

One very important aspect of this work was to be sure that the turkeys would be comfortable in the space and feel at home in the nest they shared with the webot. After consultation with the Finnish farmers who bred the turkeys, they stated that since the turkeys live in a very small cage with seventy other turkeys, and with practically no space to move around, they would be very happy with the unprecedented freedom and the unusually large room. An official visit during the show by city and provincial government veterinarians confirmed that both were in excellent shape.

As happy as they were, the turkeys spent time looking at the pictures on the wall, in a manner somewhat similar to a human being (to everyone's surprise). [8] The graffiti on the wall were both an ironic commentary on the information highway and a means to adorn the nest, although no one expected the turkeys to actually care much about them. On occasion, the turkeys would stop in front of the graffiti (they were all either signs or caricatures I made of the turkeys, Ed Bennett and myself), and spent some time contemplating it. The emergence of this behavior was as intriguing as the behavior of humans in relation to the turkeys once humans were embodied on the webot.

Phil and Phoebe also helped organize the space to their satisfaction by spreading hay anywhere they felt like it. Another clear sign that they felt at home was the abundance and quality of the fecal matter they spread all over the space. This created a peculiar situation, since the telerobot Ornitorrinco never shared a space with living animals before. While most people thought that this would be a problem, in fact the webot did welcome the excrement. The waste matter eliminated from the bowels of the turkeys made the floor a little more slippery, which made the webot's motions smoother. This decreased the stress on the webot's motors, and therefore demanded less from its battery, conserving more energy for a whole day's activity. The webot, just like the Macowl before it, felt quite at home with feces. In this tale of feathers, circuit boards, web servers, and dung, the moral is that there is more to netlife than meets the eye onscreen when the harmony between humans, robots, animals and the Internet is at stake.


The Telepresence Garment

I first conceived the Telepresence Garment in 1995. This work, which I finished in 1996, came out of the necessity to explore ways in which technology envelops the body, suppresses self-control, and shields it from direct sensorial experience of the environment. Instead of a robot hosting a human, the Telepresence Garment presents a roboticized human body converted into a host of another human. Far from utopian or escapist portrayals of the potential of these technologies, the Telepresence Garment is a sign of their problems.

A key issue I explore in my work as a whole is the chasm between opticality and cognizance, i.e., the oscillation between the immediate perceptual field, dominated by the surrounding environment, and what is not physically present but nonetheless still directly affects us in many ways. The Telepresence Garment creates a situation in which the person wearing it is not in control of what is seen, because he or she cannot see anything through the completely opaque hood. The person wearing the Garment can make sounds, but cannot produce intelligible speech because the hood is tied very tightly against the wearer's face. An elastic and synthetic dark material covers the nose, the only portion of flesh that otherwise would be exposed. Breathing is not easy. Walking is impossible, since a knot at the bottom of the Garment forces the wearer to be on all fours and to move sluggishly.

The Garment is divided into three components. The Transceiver Hood has a CCD attached to a circuit board, both sowed to the leather hood on the left side, and an audio receiver sowed on the right side. The CCD is lined up with the wearer's left eye. Underneath the Garment, the wearer dons in direct contact with the skin what I call a Transmitter Vest, which is wired to the Hood and which enables wireless transmission of 30 fps color video from the point of the view of the wearer's left eye. Enveloping the body is an opaque Limbless Suit, so called because one cannot stand or stretch one's arms, temporarily reducing or eliminating the functionality of the limbs.

The emerging field of wearable computing suggests that the very meaning of clothing is changing in the mediascape. Instead of adorning or expanding the body, however, the Telepresence Garment secludes it from the environment, suggesting some of the most serious consequences of technology's migration to the body. Body sensations are heightened once the wearer removes the garment. This pret-a-porter foregrounds the other meanings of the verb "to wear": To damage, diminish, erode, or consume by long or hard use; To fatigue, weary, or exhaust. The Telepresence Garment was experienced publicly for the first time in the context of "Ornitorrinco in the Sahara", a dialogical telepresence event Ed Bennett and I presented at the IV Saint Petersburg Biennale, which took place in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in 1996 [9].

Ornitorrinco in the Sahara

In the case of Ornitorrinco in the Sahara, the phrase "dialogical telepresence event" refers to a dialogue between two remote participants who interacted in a third place through two bodies other than their own. Realized in a public area of a downtown building in Chicago, The School of the Art Institute, without any prior announcement to facilities users, the event mentioned above consisted basically of three nodes linking the downtown site in real time to The Saint Petersburg History Museum (a Biennale sponsor) and the Aldo Castillo Gallery, located in the well known Chicago gallery district. Through these telecommunications ports of entry human remote subjects interacted with one another by projecting their wills and desires onto equally remote and fully mobile, wireless telerobotic and teleborg objects.

One of the Saint Petersburg Biennale directors, Dmitry Shubin, used a black and white videophone to control (from the Saint Petersburg History Museum) the wireless telerobot Ornitorrinco (at The School in Chicago) and to receive feedback (in the form of sequential video stills) from the telerobot's point of view. The use of the videophone was necessary because the Biennale lost all Internet connections at the last minute. At the same time, my own body was enveloped by the wireless Telepresence Garment. The dispossessed human body was controlled, via a telephone connection, by artist and art historian Simone Osthoff from the Aldo Castillo Gallery. Considerate of my sensorial deprivation, Osthoff spoke slowly and paused intermittently, commanding the body as if via a telempathic sense of touch [10]. The color video feed from the teleborg (in this case, the Garment wearer) was transmitted live to another space in the downtown Chicago building, enabling local viewers, surprised and unaware of the situation, to see the dialogical experience in real time (from the point of view of the teleborg, which itself could not see). During the event, while both the telerobot and the teleborg were remote-controlled, a unique dialogical telepresence situation unfolded.


Conclusion

The works discussed in this paper created dialogical telepresence experiences. They suggest the need to nurture a network ecology with humans and other mammals, with plants, insects, artificial beings, and avian creatures, as was the case with Rara Avis and with the warm-blooded, egg-laying, feathered vertebrates included in Ornitorrinco's Finnish netnest. Network ecology, with its shortcomings, drawbacks, and political ramifications, as well as its latent expansion of human potentialities, is a motive power of our digital nomadism. There is today a general feeling of artistic openness in the one-world of global information exchange, partially shaped by pervasive electronic media, commutation of points of view, greater visa-free mobility, and immigration. In this scenario it is unfortunate to observe that most cultural institutions resist electronic art at the same time that they express the urgent need to attract larger, newer, and returning audiences. This overzealous attitudde is grounded on the fallacious post-modernist credo that innovation is no longer possible, meaningful, or desirable. The serious danger of this position is to blindly dismiss the differentia specifica of most radical directions in electronic art as anomalies in a global free market of postmodernist polyphonic styles.

In this sense, it is imperative to assert alternatives that promote digital-to-analog integration and which lead to unprecedented hypermedia, telematic, and post-biological experiences [11]. Telepresence is one such alternative. Telepresence creates the experience of having a sense of one's own presence in a remote space (and not only the sense of somebody else's remote presence, as is common on the telephone). Reflecting on the passage into digital culture and escaping from rubrics that categorize past directions in contemporary art — such as body art, installation, wearable art, happening, video art, performance, and conceptual art — telepresence works have the power to contribute to a relativistic view of contemporary experience and at the same time create a new domain of action and interaction for the human body.













NOTES

1 - The robot was built by Cristovão Batista da Silva.

2 - Kac, Eduardo. "Ornitorrinco: Exploring telepresence and remote sensing", Leonardo, Vol. 24, No. 2, Special Issue on Art and Telecommunication, Pergamon Press, Oxford, UK, 1991, p. 233; "Towards telepresence art", Interface, Vol. 4, No. 2, November 1992, Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, The Ohio State University, 1992, pgs. 2-4; "Telepresence art", Entgrenzte Grenzen II (book), R. Kriesche and P. Hoffman, eds., Kulturdata and Division of Cultural Affairs of the City of Graz, Graz, Austria, 1993, pgs. 48-72; "Ornitorrinco and Rara Avis: Networked Telepresence Art" (with a technical appendix by Ed Bennett), in the Digital Salon special issue of Leonardo, Vol. 29, N. 5, 1996, pp. 389-400; See also: Holz, Keith. "Eduardo Kac's Dialogues", in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Vol. 2, No. 12, December, MIT Press, and in YLEM's Art On-line issue, Vol. 15, No. 2, April 1995, p. 7; Osthoff, Simone. "Object Lessons", World Art magazine, #1, 1996, pp. 18-23; Probus, Joyce. "Eduardo Kac: Dialogues", Dialogue – Arts in the Midwest, Jan/Feb, Vol. 18, No. 1, 1995, pp. 14-16.

3 - See Maschke, Kathy, ed., Out of Bounds, exhibition catalogue, Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, 1996. See also: Fox, Catherine. "Technology as a canvas", The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 26, 1996, p. 53; Nance, Kevin, "It's All About Perception", Lexington Herald-Leader, June 23, 1996, F1, F3; Bolter, Jay David. “You Are What You See”, Wired, January 1997, pp. 113, 114, 116; Goodman, Cynthia, "Working the Web", Artist's Market, F&W Publishers, 1997, pp. 22-23; Levy, Pierre, Cyberculture: Rapport au Conseil de l'Europe (ed. Odile Jacob, Paris, 1997), pg. 105; Osthoff, Simone, "Eduardo Kac: Telepresença problematiza a visão", Cadernos da Pós-Graduação do Instituto de Artes da Unicamp, São Paulo, 1997, Vol. 1, N. 1, pp. 7-12; Goldberg, Ken, "VR in the age of telepresence," Convergence (Spring 1998). Rara Avis was also shown at the Huntington Art Gallery, in Austin, Texas (January 1997), the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, Portugal (April 1997), and the I Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil (October/November 1997). See: Irvine, Madeline. “Testing the Bounds”, Austin American-Statesman, January 30, 1997, p. 47; Gates, Dominique. "Omnipresent in Cyberspace" and "Rare Birds in Cyberspace," published online on Microsoft's Internet Magazine on February 24, 1997; Taveira, Carlos, ed., Cyber: A Criação na Era Digital, exhibition catalogue, Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon, 1997; Henriques, Antônio, "Eduardo, o Pensador Digital", Expresso, XXI Section, Lisboa, April 19, 1997, p. 10; Morais, Frederico, ed., I Bienal de Artes Visuais do Mercosul, exhibition catalogue, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Veras, Eduardo, "O mundo pelos olhos de uma arara-robô," Zero Hora, Porto Alegre, October 7, 1997, p. 6; Osthoff, Simone, "Kac lembra que o lápis já foi revolucionário," Jornal da Universidade, Universidade federal do Rio Grande do Sul, October 1997, Porto Alegre, p. 15.

4 - "Uirapuru" was eventually realized at the InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, between October 15 and November 28, 1999. For more information, see the catalogue of ICC Biennale '99, and www.ekac.org/uirapuru.html.

5 - On the one hand, this apparently contradictory effect operated a critique of how the social credibility of mass media is derived, in part, from its technical reliability. On the other hand, it pointed to the technical future of the Web, when terabits of bandwidth coming into households will merge the Net with broadcasting. The effect was achieved by enclosing inside a pedestal three components: a computer, a dual-input video editor and processor, and a projector. The editor embedded the live input coming from Ornitorrinco inside a multimedia application simulating the Netscape browser. An opening on the pedestal enabled the simulated interface to be projected on the wall. Clicking on the interface sent wireless motion-control signals that were decoded in real time by Ornitorrinco. It was critical to the success of this system that no wires were seen by the public.

6 - Two ordinary instances illustrate this point. As we talk on the phone, for example, we do not know if our words go up to a satellite, down to an underwater cable, or just above our heads via a microwave link (or all of the above in a single call). As we slide a credit card to purchase a product, we do not know in what kinds of databases information about the transaction is stored (amount, date, nature of selected products, brand of choice, etc.).

7 - In the United States, the word "turkey" is slang for a person considered inept or undesirable, and for something that fails.

8 - For a discussion of pictorial competence in animals and its relevance to art, see: Danto, Arthur C. "Animals as Art Historians: Reflections on the Innocent Eye", in Beyond the Brillo Box : The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992), pp. 15-31. For a discussion of alternative "possibilities for our involvement with computer technology based on varied determinations of how the world is known", see: Gigliotti, Carol. "What Children and Animals Know That We Don't", in ISEA'94 Proceedings, online publication of the University of Art & Design Helsinki, 1994. URL:
http://www.uiah.fi/bookshop/isea_proc/high&low/j/18b.html

9 - In addition to an exhibition catalogue, the Biennial published a book with critical writings on electronic art. See: Kac, Eduardo. "Ornitorrinco and Rara Avis", in Golinko-Volfson, Dmitry. ed.,The Visuality of the Unseen (St. Petersburg, Russia: Borey-Print, 1996), pp. 111-122.

10 - I coined the word "telempathy" to designate the ability to have empathy at a distance.

11 - See: Kac, Eduardo. "Aspects of the aesthetics of telecommunications", Siggraph Visual Proceedings, John Grimes and Gray Lorig, editors, Association for Computing Machinery, New York, 1992, pgs. 47-57; "The Internet and the Future of Art", in the book Mythos Internet, Stefan Muenker and Alexander Roesler, eds., Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 1997, pgs. 291-318; "Foundation and Development of Robotic Art", in Digital Reflections: The Dialogue of Art and Technology, special issue of Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 3, Fall 1997 (Guest Editor Johanna Drucker), pp. 60-67.

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