This interview, realized in 1994, has been published since then in multipleversions in several publications. It was published in its entirety forthe first time on the Web in Revista do Mestrado de Arte e Tecnologiada Imagem, N. 0, Institute de Arte, Departamento de Artes Visuais,Universidade de Brasilia, Brazil (http://www.unb.br/vis/revista/k.htm).

EDUARDO KAC -- THE AESTHETICS OF DIALOGUE

by SIMONE OSTHOFF

A tricultural, multilingual, interdisciplinary artist, Kac has centeredhis work around the investigation of language and communication processes,emphasizing dialogic experiences in a world increasingly dominated by themass media. Originally from Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Kac has lived in Chicagosince 1989. He has just accepted a position as Professor of Art at theUniversity of Kentucky in Lexington, where he will start the program inNew Media bringing about curriculum change that will incorporate computerimaging, interactivity, 3-D animation, multimedia, computer-holography,and telecommunications as an art form.

Kac is part of the 80's generation in Brazil, a generation that awokefrom the nightmare created fifteen years earlier by the military dictatorship.During the 80's, the civilian society fought for democracy and artiststook part in the reclaiming of political freedom. In the first half ofthe last decade, Brazilian art critics celebrated the return to the pleasuresof painting. The trans-avant-garde movement, inflated by the media reachedmythic proportions. However, as the decade unfolded, the diversity of theperiod became more clearly translated in its sculptures, objects, installations,and multimedia works. Following the Brazilian avant-garde tradition which,without ignoring local roots, engaged in the international pool of aestheticand conceptual ideas, Kac was among the few who continued to chart newterritory, becoming increasingly concerned with the experimental use ofnew technologies and the new set of cultural problems they raise. To hispresent work with telecommunications and computer holography, he bringsthe experimental concerns we find in his early underground performanceson the beach of Ipanema.

Contemporary Brazilian art has only recently began to receive internationalrecognition through the works of young artists such as Jac Leirner, DanielSenise, Leda Catunda, Beatriz Milhazes, Cildo Meireles, Tunga, to namea few. However, the rich cultural heritage these artists are coming from,remains still unknown outside Brazil. With few exceptions, such as HélioOiticica, who had a large retrospective traveling through Europe and theU.S. last year, and Lygia Clark, whose work was on the cover of Art inAmerica, July 94 issue, Brazilian cultural production is still buried undermedia images of exoticism -- destruction of rain forests, magic realism,abject poverty, tropical iconography, exuberant sensuality, and urban violence.

Employing language both as material and subject matter, Kac exploresin his holograms, hypertexts, and telepresence events, the perplexitiesof language, culture and consciousness in a new participatory paradigm.Working in the intersection of literature and visual arts, Kac investigatesthe verbal material in a constant state of flux, engaging the participantsin a dialog that is continuously generating new meanings. On the followingpages Kac talks about the development of his work from the early 80's,as an experimental writer in his teens, in Rio de Janeiro, to his performances,holograms, telecommunication events, and telepresence installations. Headdresses both theoretical questions and social concerns, areas that remaininseparable in his work.

Osthoff- You seem to move very easily between different languages andcultures. Do you think that growing up in Rio de Janeiro might have anythingto do with that, in the sense that Rio, as a port city, has traditionallybeen very cosmopolitan?

Kac- I don't feel tied to any particular place or culture, but I don'tknow if that has to do with the fact that I grew up in Copacabana, appreciatingthat multiplicity and diversity as I grew up. Many people I grew up withdo not share that view, or feel the same way. My grandparents were immigrants.That may be a factor, but what makes me comfortable today, is the possibilityof developing the work. That comes first.

O- You have at least three strong cultural influences. With which onedo you identify the most?

K- I like to think of myself beyond national boundaries, and beyondmedia boundaries as well. I don't see myself as "Brazilian artist"or "American artist" or "Holography artist" or "Computerartist" or "Language artist" or "Installation artist."I find that labels are not very helpful and are often used to marginalizepeople. I have shown work in holography shows and the same work in showsthat address word and image issues, or shows that address the use of newmedia. My name has been included in shows as representing the U.S. I havealso shown my work in Brazil, as part of national surveys. I prefer notbe bound by any particular nationality or geography. I work with telecommunicationstrying to break up these boundaries. Obviously, Brazilian culture is animportant part of my identity, but it's not the only one. I don't see whyI should have to choose only one aspect of my interests or my identityas the predominant one. I am comfortable with them all. I would like themall to express themselves and be equally present in my experience. Forinstance, I was in touch with a visual poetry scholar from California.I sent him my work. He sent me a cordial letter back expressing his disappointmentwith the fact that none of my works reflected, in a direct way, any aspectof a Brazilian identity. I was very disappointed with his disappointment.Can he define what a Brazilian artist or a person born in Brazil that makesart has to do? Does everybody who was born in Brazil have to talk aboutCarmen Miranda and bananas? Obviously not. People are more complex thanany specific compartment that one might want to fit them into.

O- What was Copacabana like when you were growing up?

K- Well, Copacabana has a little bit of everything. It is also the mostdensely populated neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. You find people fromall walks of life, tourists, transvestites, immigrants from all parts ofthe country and the world, intellectuals, prostitutes, movie and televisionstars, poor, rich, middle-class families, senior citizens, it's a miniworld in itself, anything but homogeneous. On top of it all, it's verybeautiful. It is a pleasure just being there and walking there. These daysit's very dangerous as well, a consequence of Rio's many social problems.You have the hills with the shantytowns on one side, and the Atlantic Oceanon the other, with very tall buildings in between. Rio is a mixture ofnaturally beautiful mountains, gorgeous beaches, and a very cosmopolitancity of about 6 million inhabitants. As a kid, the streets of Copacabanawere my playground. I grew up in a middle-class Jewish family. I had livedmy whole life in Copacabana, until I left to come to Chicago. I was raisedby my grandparents, who had fled Poland a few years before the war.

O- Did they have a big influence in your education?

K- Besides the fact that they supported both morally and financiallymy formal education up to my BA, they also had a great influence upon mylife. My grandmother was a good storyteller and a great listener; she alwaysadvocated dialogue. My grandparents were always reading something, books,newspapers, magazines. Reading was an activity they were always engagedin. So, on the one hand literature, and on the other hand comics and television,were very important and influential in terms of my thinking about imagesin motion, thinking about the interrelationship between words and images.

O- What was the intellectual and political climate in Brazil duringthe late 70's?

K- In the late 1970's, the country was slowly going through a periodof redemocratization, following more than a decade of military dictatorship,torture of political prisoners, and censorship. I became interested inbody politics, and found myself reading Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse,and Roland Barthes, among others. There was a certain sense of recoveringa lot of the things that were lost during the previous years, because ofthe lack of freedom, because of State sanctioned terrorism. In 1979, Iwas seventeen. Together with this national process of rediscovery of thepleasures of being alive and being free, there was also the teenager'sdesire to understand himself, understand others, understand his body, understandreality, that was just typical of that age. It was almost as if the countrywere going through the same process as a whole, that process of discovery.

O- What were your interests at that time?

K- I read a lot. After having read and studied the work of the mostimportant modern and contemporary Brazilian poets, as well as some of themost prominent modern and contemporary American and European poets, I noticedthat works that openly expressed what I perceived as political issues relatedto the human body, were absent from Brazilian poetry. I discovered thatpoetry and writing actually had a long, repressed tradition, in the sensethat poetry was a form of verbal expression that always suppressed anythingthat had to do with bodily functions, body fluids, body parts, scatology,plural forms of sexuality. Little by little I started to study works thatdealt with these issues, going back to Catulus, Martial, Aretino, Gregóriode Matos, Bocage, all the way to the beautiful Medieval 13th century "Cantigasde Escárnio e Mal-dizer do Cancioneiro Medieval Galêgo-Português"(Galician-Portuguese Medieval Songs of Sarcasm and Malediction) in whichthese bards sing the female body and the male body and all the bodily functionsin a way that is funny and interesting. So, from ancient Rome through Medievaltimes through the Renaissance and the Baroque and into 19th century forbiddenlanguage poems by Verlaine and Rimbaud, Apollinaire's own "obscene"poems, to the more dramatic Antonin Artaud, in the use of scatology andthe body in his poetry, and of course Marquis de Sade, I started to findthat international tradition which had celebrated the body free-spiritedly.I also started to dig out a lot of Brazilian writings that had to do withthat, that were, and still are, kept buried and in certain cases have seldomor never been published as is the case of Bernardo Guimarães' andEmílio de Menezes's work. Coelho Neto was sort of a late Symbolistwho produced works on this theme that are absolutely unknown. Even Oswaldde Andrade, who was one of the founders of the Antropophagic Movement ofthe 1920's, created work in this vein as well, work which came out onlya couple of years ago.

O- Were you writing poetry then?

K- When I was 17, I won a national poetry contest, which was very encouraging.Because of it, I met some other poets, writers, and artists. Then, thingschanged quite a bit afterwards. The poetry I developed after that had strongpolitical overtones and was build on the "forbidden" vocabularyI found absent from the modern and contemporary work I admired. I focusedon semantic content without ornamentation or euphemism. I decided thatthis poetry would also incorporate other elements considered inferior orunacceptable by the critics but which would be empathic with the audience,such as calembours, slang, and humor. But very quickly -- everything seemedto have happened quite quickly, at that stage of my life -- the work movedto the body actually freed from the text and out into space, performingand doing things. I started to write specifically for public performances,rather than for book publishing, addressing the man and the woman on thestreets.

O- What made you go from the written to the performed poetry?

K- At the time I started to question a lot of assumptions we have aboutlanguage, primarily on a semantic level: the stigmatization of language;how certain expressions are created that make references to animals anddehumanize men and women. for instance, you say -- "Fuck you!"as an aggressive comment. How come we got to a point where something thatshould reflect a very pleasant, enjoyable, orgiastic experience has nowturned out to be, in our use of language, a curse? How are certain expressionscreated that try to denigrate other forms of sexuality that are not mainstream?How are capitalism and imperialism tied to a certain exploration and massacreof the body? I was very interested in the writings of William Reich andhis views on sexuality, as well as Marcuse's. It was a concern then thatrelated to the political context, but was also a concern that related tothese issues of written language, poetry, and the visual arts. So, allthe way from Marquis de Sade to Marcel Duchamp, I started to see that thehuman body was a fascinating support for work. I didn't want to do bodyart. But I wanted to do some kind of body poetry perhaps. So I made poetryout of the raw material of the forbidden side of the Portuguese language.I wanted to turn it around and use this forbidden vocabulary with its liberatingpower, with its cathartic power, and create a political view that was tiedin with an appreciation, a liberation, a celebration of the human body.And I wanted that to manifest itself directly in the work. The performancesfrom 1980-82 had elements of scatology, surprise, humor, subversion, gags,and the mundane. In these poetic performances, the so-called vulgar orbad words become noble and positive. Scatological discourse and politicaldiscourse were one and the same and were manifested through cheerful orgiasticliberation. It was an attempt of using the body and working with the bodyas a tool, as a medium to express the multiplicity of the body, the possibilitiesof the body, the possibilities that involve multiple forms of sexualityas well as scatology, and everything that has been kept suppressed andrepressed.

O- Did you perform alone?

K- From early 1980, to February 1982, I worked with a group of peoplethat became interested in working along the same vein. We gave weekly performancesin public and private spaces in Rio de Janeiro and other Brazilian cities.During this period I also created graffiti-poems, object-poems, and sticker-poems,which expanded the scope of my performances. In our group we had all kindsof points of view being expressed and shared with the public. Many of usalso embraced multiple forms of expression, be it verbal, visual, musical,or sexual or whatever in-between forms you have. There was this view weall shared, just a general openness to any form of expression.

O- Where did these performances take place?

K- Every Friday night we performed in the heart of downtown Rio, inCinelândia, an open area where you have on one side the NationalLibrary, on the other side the Opera House and the State House of Representatives.Theaters, bookstores, motels, banks, movie theaters and bars abound inthe area. There are hundreds of people leaving work, hanging out, goingto bars and just walking around -- prostitutes, intellectuals, beggars,business executives, transvestites, bankers, street kids, artists, politicians,street vendors. We found that that was the perfect place to perform, notonly because it was in the heart of Rio, the very Bohemian "alive"part of town, but also because you could address a very wide range of people.It eventually became known that we were performing regularly and some peoplecame there specifically to see us. We didn't specify time or anything.All of a sudden, when the whole group was in the right mood, we just startedshouting very loudly in all directions. We were very colorful and verydynamic, wearing sort of funny, interesting clothes. At the time, my typicalcostume were these scuba diving red boots. I took my Grandmother's pajamasfor pants. I found this Peruvian belt and silk-screened this t-shirt witha distich that was also one of the sticker-poems -- "Pra curar amorPlatônico/só uma trepada Homérica."(To cure Platoniclove/only a Homeric screw). We used to travel a lot and performed in variousplaces such as the beach, which was absolutely free, but also in theaters,where people would have to pay to see us. We would do sudden performancesin the middle of social gatherings and other events. We would improvisea lot. /p>

O- It seems to me that you were using scatology, the vernacular, multipleforms of sexuality, humor, as a political tool, and a way of underminingthe phallocentric patriarchal foundation. Was there any specific politicalagenda in your mind at the time?

K- I guess the 26 years I lived in Brazil taught me not to believe inorganized politics. My group believed that we could perhaps change people'slives in a smaller way, opening up their eyes to other forms of existence,forms of behavior, forms of sexuality, and forms of thinking, that perhapsthey were not even aware of.

O- Were these performances the only outlet your work had at that time?

K- No. I published two anthologies of poetry, compiling work that wasproduced in that vein. There was also another aspect of that work -- individualperformances. I did a revision of Flavio de Carvalho's "Novo TrajeMasculino" piece (New Male Garment). I also did performances thatwere not for a live audience but for the camera. This whole project wasdocumented in its three-year span in varied forms, including books, magazines,newspapers, and television and radio coverage. In 1983, I published anartist's book, called ESCRACHO, which is a word very difficult to translate.It can mean a number of things, like: direct, blatant, unmasked, perverted,sarcasm, to dress carelessly, to be booked in the police headquarters,demoralize, tease, make fun of, etc. Some of the work in ESCRACHO stillhas ties with the body-based work I was doing at the time, some is alreadypointing in other directions.

O- What was your revision of Flavio de Carvalho's piece?

K- I was aware of the work Flavio de Carvalho first did in the early30's, which he called "Experiences". In 1931, for example, hewore a hat and walked in the opposite direction of a Corpus Christi processionto question the rationale of the ritual and to study the multiple consequencesof his own act. The participants wanted to beat him up. Much later withKaprow and others, this kind of work would be known as "Happenings"and "Performance Art". But Flávio de Carvalho was aftersomething else, a psychological edge. In 1956 he designed and made thiswhole new male garment, which included a skirt for better ventilation,and he wore it once on the streets of São Paulo. It was shocking.People thought he was crazy, which he kind of was, in the best sense ofthe word. He proposed to change the way Brazilian men dress. I thoughtthis work was a very important precursor to other ideas relating to thebody. I chose to wear a skirt on a regular basis, in the same way a womanwears pants going to the supermarket or to concerts. This "being there"in a real life situation, as opposed to staging a performance, which wasFlavio's case, was the next radical step.

O- It is quite common to see men wearing skirts and a general exaltationof androgyny during Carnival in Brazil. However, to do so within a day-to-daycontext, blurring and shifting gender distinction to that extent, was probablybeyond the limits our patriarchal society, still under a military dictatorship,was willing to accept. I imagine that you must have encountered quite areaction...

K- People yelled at and spat on me... I like to think more of activatingthe space around myself, making people look back and reflect on assumptionsthey make about people's sexuality, as well as the conventions that dictatewhat we can wear, what we should look like. Consequently, this work helpsus question the clichés, stereotypes and stigmas that are associatedwith social behavior, both in language and images in our lives. On theone hand, you can look at this as an extended performance that lasted forabout two years. On the other hand, you can look at it as an attempt tobreak down the barrier of art and life. You see, I am a Jew who doesn'tgo to the Synagogue as well as a Brazilian who doesn't get into the spiritof Carnival. Dressing like that, to me, had nothing to do with a carnivalesqueattitude.

O- The way I see it, the limitations of the official Carnival are notnecessarily those of carnivalesque strategies in the arts. I am lookingat your performance as a carnivalesque-transgressive metaphor, and in thatsense, it has been previously used, not only by the Brazilian avant-gardes,in order to subvert traditional hierarchies. I am just stretching the conceptbeyond the four official days of Carnival, the same way you did.

K- In that sense, yes. You are saying that I have rebelled against theofficial Carnival, which is something unthinkable, and pretty hard to do.(Laughs) Never thought of it this way, but it makes perfect sense in lightof my general disdain for any form of organized behavior.

O- I must confess, it is very hard to picture you with a skirt on.

K- At the time, I was a basketball player and the muscles in my legswere very salient. I was dating a very sensual and charming 'morena', andI would go out with her, dressed in this pink mini skirt, wearing a t-shirtwith the Anarchy symbol, and a punk bracelet. I also had very long curlyhair. People could not tell if I was a gay man in the company of a straightwoman, or if I was a crazy straight man, a transvestite, or if I was abisexual. They just could not resolve what the hell I was.

O- What kind of performances did you do for the camera?

K- The idea of approximating the letter and the human body culminatedin pieces in which I performed so as to create the letters themselves withmy own body. I realized the only way I could push the performances furtherwas to transform my body into an alphabet. One of these photographs wason the cover of ESCRACHO. There were other pieces. In one of them, I ammaking love to stylized letters that spell POEM. Each letter had graphicsexual innuendos.

O- When did your work with performances end?

K- I realized that by early '82 I had done what I had to do within thatframework, that it was about time to move on. It just so happened thatthe 60th anniversary of Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) of1922 was going to be celebrated in February. I felt that that was a gooddate, and decided to take advantage of that coincidence and conclude theproject at the same time that the Semana occurred. Not necessarily tryingto imply any parallels, it's just that same sense of liberation. It wasa liberation to do the work, and it was another liberation to move on,to get out of it. The last performance on the beach was very interesting.

O- In which way?

K- We did the whole body of performance that we used to do, with theverbal presentations, the songs, the puzzles, the surprise object presentation,the graffiti done in real time, all these different things that we usedto do. Then, towards the end of the performance, we started to undress,and called upon everybody around us to undress too, and many people did.And there we were in a natural state. And then we made this demonstration,with manifestos, slogans and banners. People that we did not know, allof a sudden, appeared with cameras, with sculptures, with things. We justsort of activated the whole beach. Ipanema beach around 'posto 9' becamethis frantic, this interesting, dynamic place. Some people followed us.Some people sort of walked around us. Then, towards the very end, as agesture of rebirth and purification, we all went into the ocean. We cameout of the ocean, hand in hand. That was it. It was this rebirth, thisstripping down of everything, this rediscovery. That was the end. It wasextremely gratifying. Everybody had a great time, not only the performers,but the people. There were no physical boundaries between performers andaudience; everybody was mingling together. And there was this wonderfulcelebration. Oswald de Andrade wrote in 1928 in the Anthropophagic Manifestothat before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.So in a sense, that performance was a rediscovery of happiness and whatcould have been more appropriate to celebrate the Semana... And to me thatwas it. That was the last performance.

O- What happened after that?

K- My interest for word and image issues continued to increase as mydedication to oral and versified poetry ended. Between 1982 and 1983 Iwas very unsatisfied by what I then considered the blind alley of visualpoetry. Aware of the multiple directions the genre had taken in the twentiethcentury, I experimented with different media. I worked with multiple media-- billboards, Polaroid cameras, artist's books, fine graffiti, electronicsignboards, mail art, photocopiers, videotext, and finally holography.

O- The show "Como Vai Você, Geração 80?",(HowAre You, '80s Generation?) which happened in Parque Laje, Rio, in 1984,is still considered one of the most important shows of the decade, in Brazil.It launched many careers and highlighted artistic tendencies. What kindof work did you show there ?

K- I had already made my first hologram when the Geração80 show came up. But, I was also working with public installations, billboards.I was making twenty-seven meter square murals based on Cro-Magnon cavepaintings that were displayed publicly, both in São Paulo and inRio. And that's what I showed in the Geração 80 show. Ona personal level, it was very important for me to participate in that showbecause it defined that generation of artists, presenting the multiplicity,the diversity of media and interests, from those who were mimicking BonitoOliva's Italian trans-avant-garde, to those, like myself, who were interestedin exploring new technologies and multi-media possibilities.

O- Could you trace the formal development of your work up to this point?

K- See, my problem was, I was first dealing with traditional language,then the body became the issue. Then the body was performing verbally.Then the body became written language itself. I had moved so far away fromthe page, from the surface of the page, that I didn't see any going back.Having moved so far from stable surfaces, such as those of objects andthose of the surface of the page, I had to find something else. I startedto explore a lot of other media and became interested in holography.

O- When did holography become reality, so to speak, for you?

K- I recalled having read in '69, when I was 7, a comic book, of allthings, in which the main character was going to fight this villain. Andthe villain was this gigantic hologram. As a kid, I used to collect comicbooks, and I still have this one comic book in Portuguese. The hero, inorder to fight this villain, had to become himself a gigantic hologram.In some of the balloons, the villain and the hero would explain what holographywas in a very indirect way. So that sort of came back to me. I kept readingabout the dematerialized image, the multiple points of view, the 3D imagecontained on a 2D surface. But that seemed to be a pure paradox. I wasintrigued but I could not visualize it. An encyclopedia article I readin my teens described the scientific principles of holography, but thatwas not enough. In São Paulo in 1983, a little before the Geração80 show, an artist I had included in ESCRACHO, knew someone with littleexperience who was building a small holographic lab. I called him and hewas willing to see me. It was there that I saw my first hologram and Irealized immediately that that was what I wanted to do. So, having no clueexactly how holograms were made, or anything, it became obvious that thatwas the medium that would allow me to solve the aesthetic problem I hadimposed upon myself. I worked with him for a couple of years on my project,which resulted in a show -- Holopoesia, at the Museum of Image and Soundin São Paulo. A few months later, the show came to Rio. I receivedexcellent press coverage including from many TV stations. Because on topof everything, this was probably one of the first times that art made withholography was seen there, if not the first time, I don't know, but certainlyone of the first times. So there was all that curiosity about it. Thatwas very stimulating.

O- What kind of support did you find for your ideas in Brazil at thattime?

K- The new generation of art critics in Rio, including Marcus Lontra,Reynaldo Roels, and Lygia Canongia, supported my work. A few artists, likeAbraham Palatnik and Anna Bella Geiger, were also supportive. Some timelater, I managed to get several grants from Federal institutions, but mywork was not included in the international shows that were meant to berepresentative of my generation.

O- Did you have any financial or institutional support during 1983-85,in the Rio-São Paulo period?

K- No. Against all odds, I was able to fund this work out of my pocket,as a college student, basically. You know, I was still in college, workingpart-time and doing whatever I could. I was buying film that was not availablein the country, that had to come from the U.S. I was paying for my ownexpenses, traveling back and forth between Rio and São Paulo, whichrepresents a distance somewhat equivalent to the distance from Chicagoto Detroit, on a very regular basis, either flying, or taking the train,or taking the bus, for two years. I guess I carried the same obsessionfrom the performance period into holography in this first phase, but youhave to do that. Because it's that initial moment where you're developing,you're learning, you're exploring. This initial two-year period resultedin two shows and also some publications, and then later, in a residencyat the Museum of Holography in New York in '86, and a trip to Europe in'87 to show work. Back in Rio, I presented the work in a second solo showin '86. I also organized with Flávio Ferraz, a Brazilian artistwho also works with computers, the Brazil High Tech show, which was thefirst national survey of Brazilian artists working with new technologicalmedia specifically. That was also in 1986.

O- Where did the Brazil High Tech show take place ? What kind of workcould one see in it?

K- The show was in Rio, at the Galeria do Centro Empresarial Rio, avery nice gallery in front of Botafogo beach. It attracted a lot of publicityand a lot of people. It was the most popular show in the gallery ever.There were eleven artists from São Paulo and two from Rio. We setup a database for art works. When I say database for art works, I don'tmean art works that existed previously in other media that were then putin these databases, like people are doing now, Microsoft and many Museumsare doing that. I mean that these were art works created for the mediumof videotext, and were made therefore available, on-line, so that peoplecould see them from any part of the country. There were also infrared sculptures,computer animations, holograms, videotheater performances, and a robotthat was a mixture of sculpture, performer and gallery host.

O- After you came back from New York, did you continue to make yourholograms in São Paulo?

K- No. I managed to put a simple lab together in Copacabana, two blocksaway from the beach. I went to the beach to get sand to build my vibrationisolation table. To pay the bills I worked as a journalist for severalnewspapers in Rio and São Paulo. I worked all day, came back homeexhausted, and went to the lab until 2 or 3 in the morning, basically everynight. It was extremely difficult, not only because of my daytime schedule,which , I guess a lot of people had to deal with too. The biggest problemwas that none of the materials I had to work with were available in thecountry. I was never able to buy any film there. Optics were very hardto get. Everything that a holographer needs to work with is virtually impossibleto get there. But when my laser broke down for the first time, that's whenreality settled in, and I realized that it was impossible to continue towork in Brazil. I sent my laser back to the U.S. once. I got it back. Themanufacturer said it was fixed and it just wouldn't work. Either they fixedit and it broke on the way back, or they didn't, but the fact was, I couldn'tuse it. I sent it back, and got it back and it still didn't work. Afterthe third attempt to fix it, and having spent a couple years doing that,from '86-'88, I realized that this was a dead-end. I was never going tobe able to actually be productive and experiment and get my work done.In the meantime, I was working in collaboration with another artist tocreate my first computer-generated, fully synthesized holographic piece,which resulted in my third solo show entitled Holofractal, in 1988. I realizedthen that I had to leave, and the country of choice was the U.S.

O- You have always found a way to continue pursuing your interests,inside or outside institutions, being very resourceful in finding informationpertinent to your work. As a journalist, you have published important interviewswith some key artists in the history of Modernism in Brazil that were leftbehind, buried by the official accounts of art history, as was the caseof the poet Luis Aranha and the visual artist Abraham Palatnik. Is thisa skill you developed in the years you worked as a journalist?

K- I don't know. I guess if you really want to know what's going on,the way I look at it, you have to find out for yourself... Ultimately,this idea of researching, and finding out for yourself has always beenmy main tool, my main method of producing work.

O- You already mentioned Flavio de Carvalho, were there any other earlyartistic influences?

K- I was always very interested in the avant-garde side of Brazilianart. People are still very surprised when I mention in lectures that modernart started in Brazil with two women. And I do that right in the beginningof my lectures to make people realize that some expectations they mighthave about what Brazil is all about might fall apart right away. One ofthem is that Brazilian art is made of colorful paintings and folk objects,which is of course, only one aspect of our heritage, the one normally labeledas the "exotic and primitive tradition". But there is also, amongothers, a whole tradition of avant-garde innovative work, which still remainsunknown. Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Abraham Palatnik and WaldemarCordeiro are some of the artists that I admire the most in the Braziliancontext. I believe their experiences transcend local issues and have atrue universal contribution. What I see as a common ground in them is atotal rejection of what they inherited from previous generations. Theyreally decided to digest what had been done, break new ground, and tryto find their own path, no matter the price they had to pay. I admire theirlesson and yet, I definitely want to avoid duplicating their results, duplicatinganybody's results.

O- Hélio and Lygia addressed the relationship between art andlife, dealing with the body in a phenomenological sense. Palatnik and Cordeiroworked on the frontier between art and technology. From the beginning ofyour career you seem to have continuously searched to establish a dialogamong perception and cognition, sensorial experience and rationality, andthese domains of human culture -- science, art and life.

K- I guess you are right. I am fascinated both by the human body andby the possibilities of technology. These artists have always excited myimagination. The fine arts have traditionally privileged visuality anddefined the viewer as this disembodied eye. I think Hélio Oiticicaand Lygia Clark put the rest of the body back into the viewer, who becomesparticipant. And into the artist himself/herself as well. The idea of interactivity,that Hélio and Lygia always pursued in a quite dramatic way, theidea of the work as a living organism, was very important to me. The ideathat the work only exists when manipulated by the viewer, that intellectand intuition cannot be separated, is something that has to do with thewhole Neoconcrete movement. Hélio and Lygia blended the more rationalaspect of Constructivism with the more sensorial aspect of what it is tolive in Brazil, and produced very original work out of this. What somecould see as antinomy, they saw as perhaps two sides of the same coin.They had already realized that there was much more to art than the productionof objects. Today, however, most of these works that were meant to be manipulatedare now in important collections and they can't even be touched, whichis kind of sad. Hélio's Parangolés are not being danced with.When they are shown in a museum, they are hanging lifeless. They're dryand kind of old. They were not meant to be seen that way, and it's sadthat works that do not conform with tradition, that do not conform withthe idea of the artwork being an object that you hang on the wall, or youput on a pedestal, end up that way. When they don't even have some kindof material embodiment, like telecommunication art events, then they justdisappear. It's another problem that needs to be addressed. A new generationof curators must learn to deal with the problem of preserving, documenting,and sharing with the public, events of that nature.

O- Going back to early influences, how were the experiences of Cordeiroand Palatnik relevant to your work?

K- Cordeiro and Palatnik are different in many ways, particularly inthe fact that Cordeiro appropriated the computer, a technology that existedalready, for different purposes. And we must remember that the computerat that time was not an image-making tool. It was primarily for business,statistics, and number crunching. I think Cordeiro really came up withsomething unique when, towards the end of his career, from '68 to '73,to be more precise, he used an IBM mainframe to make images that were verystrong in political content, during the height of the military dictatorship.This was very interesting, his whole attitude of realizing that we mustinvestigate the possibilities of new technologies for art making. The workhe did during that period of time is really remarkable. Palatnik is bydefinition the pioneer of kinetic art in the second half of this century.He produced the "cinechromatic" light machine, as Mario Pedrosaonce called them, and showed it publicly at the first São PauloBienal in 1951. He also worked with motion and magnetism. He came fromabstract painting, trying to push it beyond the canvas towards pure light,and then he ended up starting a whole new field. That is fascinating tome. That is the kind of attitude, the kind of lesson I've absorbed andthat I admire. He was addressing a fundamental question of art itself.Painters have pushed the canvas and issues of color and light in paintingto a certain limit. With Palatnik, we're talking about movement and light.With Palatnik, color is free in space. Painting becomes a time-based event.You look at a Palatnik piece and you look at yourself, you are envelopedin a field of color. Light is floating around you and you are immersedin that field of light. It immerses the viewer in a color field. It's colorfieldpainting in another sense.

O- And international artists, which ones were more relevant to yourwork?

K- Moholy-Nagy is a name that always comes to mind. Moholy is an artistwhose life and achievements I have studied extensively. He's an artistthat I truly admire in all aspects. He always believed in light as an artisticmeans. He pioneered kinetic art and telecommunication art. Moholy touchedon so many different aspects, so many different possibilities for lightand art... but again, it is the lesson of inquiry that he left us thatI think is truly remarkable. I admired and studied Rodchenko, Schwitters,Duchamp, Takis, Tinguely, Schoeffer, Kosuth and Mark Rothko, to name afew. I like to think of language as colorfields which blend, multiply andchange. What happens when you think of language in that way? In my holograms,I try to address this question. That's a connection that I started to makeonly recently. The point would be, what if you're thinking of the transitionsin language in a way that's somewhat similar to the way you see transitionsin a colorfield painting by Rothko. These ideas fascinate me because that'san impossibility in terms of language as a practical means of social intercourse.But experimental poetry is not a practical means of social intercourse.Poetry is an open ground for discovery and invention, and so is art. Andwhen visual art and poetry and language art come together, or word andimage come together in a color field that oscillates as in my holograms,then, I feel somewhat close to Rothko, to the beauty of that colorfieldthat is enveloping in a spiritual way.

O- Would you define your work as visual poetry or language art?

K- If we consider these two extremes, writers going towards the worldof visual arts developing what is known as visual poetry, and visual artistsgoing towards the world of writers developing what is known as languageart, I would like to oscilate between these two poles. I hope that my workswould engage the viewer or the participant, both at a literary level anda visual level.

O- You coined the term holopoetry and have been searching the possibilitiesof holographic poetry since 1983. Could you relate your holopoems to thetradition of visual poetry as well?

K- Many contemporary artists use language, but most seem to be interestedin the way language is used in the media. I'm more interested in the zoneof intersection between literature and visual arts. Visual poetry, forexample, has a long ancestry, which runs from Simias of Rhodes (circa 325BC), through the Baroque poets, to Mallarmé, to Marinetti, Apollinaire,Housmann, Kamensky, Cummings, and Beloli, and to the experimental poetsfrom the 40's and 70's, including those associated with French Letrismand Poesie Sonore, Brazilian Concretism and NeoConcretism, Italian PoesiaVisiva, and many others. I have always been excited about the ideas thatcame out of the neo-concrete movement in Brazil, and I will give you anexample from a collaboration between Ferreira Gullar and Hélio Oiticica,which I always found fascinating -- Poema Enterrado (Buried Poem), whichinvolved viewer participation. The "Buried Poem" was built inHélio's yard, and Gullar still tells the story today that Hélio'sfather was very upset because Hélio was digging this gigantic holein their yard. But they made this hole underground and you had to go insidethis underground cube. There you would find another cube. You lifted thatcube, and then found another cube, and then on the bottom of this lastcube, in the ground, you would read the word "REJUVENATE", rejuvenesçain Portuguese, which is just awesomely beautiful. And that captivated myimagination. How can you use a single word and, by involving the body,using space, color, and the action of the viewer, charge that single wordwith so much power, that it surpasses any dictionary definition that youcan possibly think of, and in many cases, surpasses the whole experienceof reading a 50-page poem? How can we push the word beyond syntax, beyondits limits and charge it with energy, with meaning, that you could notdo otherwise? You're involving three-dimensionality, verbal economy, andthe idea of being born again. Because you're actually going underground,you're in the grave, and then you read the word. You're empowered, you'rere-energized by the word, and then you come out. The power of the word,in touch with the body, and with earth, in touch with three-dimensionalityof space and time. And no other art movement in Brazilian history touchedon these issues as dynamically and as intensively as the Neo-Concrete movement.

O- You have basically only used words as your holographic images. Canyou talk about this process of transformation between verbal and visualelements?

K- The reason I got involved with holography in the first place wasagain because of language. Each of my holograms addresses a different problemso to speak, a different issue. But there is something that underlinesthem all -- my interest in communication processes. I am not interestedin holography as a 3D form; we might as well look at sculpture. I am reallyinterested in holography as a 4D medium, as a time-based medium. In manyof my holograms, you have a bi-directional path for time. I just don'tthink linearly, in terms of one word after another, as we normally speakand write. I just don't think in terms of art works that way anymore. Inmy holograms, I'm less interested in conveying the result of my thought.I'm more interested in conveying the process of my thought. That's whythe language in my holograms fluctuates and oscillates and changes, anddisappears. I only work with language, I don't use objects, I don't usepeople, I don't use any form of figure.

By not having a linear sequence, you can explore the image in any directionyou want. You have a time-reversal possibility. There is no hierarchy,no climax. There is no suspense. It's almost like if you had a strip offilm that you suspended in time, and that you can, in your mind's eye,project that, in any direction that you want, but not only horizontally,also vertically, diagonally, any way in space. You plan, you orchestratetime structures in space. You're really dealing with a space-time continuumand breaking it into orchestrated discontinuities. I think everything thatI have done is a consequence of this fascination for communication processesin it's multiple forms. Be it communicating with the body on the beach,or through an electronic medium, the fascination is with the communicationprocess itself.

O- How would you define communication in art?

K- Absolutely. If something is totally predetermined there's no communication.It is nothing but unilateral transmission. Communication must imply openness.Communication must imply bi-directionality or multiple directionality.In this case you are dealing with a network. It could be bi-directionalas on the phone or it could be multi-party, as on a network. I think communicationimplies, as again Baudrillard has said, responsibility. When Baudrillardtalks about restoring responsibility to the media, I love the ambiguityof this sentence because it refers to the social responsibility that themedia has, but it also opens up the idea for the artist to restore theresponsibility of the media, in the sense that the media must allow peopleto respond. The media must bring people closer, not keep them apart, astelevision does. The media must allow for people to interact, to share,to discover together, rather than be at the end as consumers. So this ideaof shared spatiotemporal responsibility is what I truly understand by communication.

O- I understand now why you like the telephone so much. I remember astory you told me about being fascinated by the possibilities of the telephonesince you were a kid, because it separated voice from gesture and facialmovement. It was in the dialogic essence of that machine you were probablyinterested in.

K- I am a phone freak, I must confess. I like the possibility of exchangingand sharing. I like these forms of communication that involve reciprocity.Lately I have also been working with interactive navigational texts, hyper-textsand hyper-media. I have finished one piece and I want to continue exploringthat too. There are certain things that I can only do in holography though;there is a level of interactivity that only holography has. However, thereare other things that only in that labyrinth-like structure of hypermediaI can create, as I've done recently appropriating the structure of theKabbalah tree.

O- This allusion to the Kabbalah in your work, is it a reference thatgoes back to your childhood? When does that tradition tie into your lifeand into your work?

K- As a kid, I performed Jewish rituals with my family. I studied Hebrewfor eight years, which is kind of lost now because, you must admit it,if you live on Copacabana beach for a quarter of a century as I did, youreally have no use for Hebrew. I love the language and I will hopefullycome back to it. I don't know if at school, or out of my own curiosity,or if steered by my grandma, the fact is that I got interested in the Kabbalahand the whole mythology and literature that comes with it -- the Golem,the Dibuk, Lilith, who was the first woman, the archetype of the independentwoman. I became fascinated with all that mysticism. You start thinkingabout Golem, you start thinking about the Dibuk, you start thinking aboutall these things that really excite your imagination.

And then when you talk about Kabbalah, you necessarily start talkingabout the way language works and how these different systems, such as thesystem of numbers and the system of language, not to mention many others,are related, and the multiplicity of meanings that result from these complexrelations and permutations and layers of simbolic interpretations. I wouldnot have the ambition to say that I fully comprehend nor that I have studiedKabbalah in depth. I've read about it and I keep coming back to it. Dibukwas in one of my three-dimensional graffitis from 1983. My new "Storms"piece, from 1993, is an interactive text, the structure of which is basedon a 17th century Sefirotic tree of the Kabbalah. Another interesting pointof intersection there is the relation between digital hypermedia and thenon-linear structure of the Talmud.

O- When you deal with language in your work, are you thinking of languageas a universal category? Does it make any difference which specific languageyou use?

K- The fact that I am working outside syntax is very important. I removelanguage from its function as social intercourse and try to get to morefundamental levels. I just respond to different contexts. I will eitheruse one of the languages I am confortable with or do research and workwith a particular language, if the concept calls for it. Very often, becauseI am working outside the syntax of English, some of these pieces can workin multiple languages at the same time. Because once the words are removedfrom a grammatical continuum, they can be read in multiple ways and inmany languages as well, not to mention that certain fragments that floatin the holographic space-time can also be read as full words in other languages.

O- What is the importance of holography as a medium to the way you dealwith language?

K- The reason I was attracted to holography was because with it I cancreate very complex discontinuous spatiotemporal events that I could notdo in any other electronic medium, like LED signboards and video-text,which I have used since 1984, in Rio. There is something intrinsic aboutthe holographic medium that allows me to work with language floating inspace and time, being discontinuous, breaking down, melting and dissolving,and recombining itself to produce new meanings. That kind of work revealsa distrust, a disbelief in the idea that we can simply use language tocommunicate a message. We say--" Do you know what I mean?"; "Do you know what I am talking about?"; these sentences we use on aregular basis express our attempt our desire to dominate language to makelanguage the slave of a meaning.

I believe that meaning will emerge only through the engagement of thoseenvolved in the process. In the case of the hologram when the viewer comesto see it and starts to look around, bounces his or her head, squats down,orchestrates that whole dance in front of the hologram, meanings will orwill not emerge based on the personal experience of the viewer. The engagementof the viewer with the piece reveals the fact that reality, language, theway we perceive and interact, all takes place according to our point ofview.

O- Other contemporary artists, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger for instance,are also situated in this same intersection of word and image. The wayI see it, they are using language in a more direct way, conveying straightforwardmessages that are presented as factual, even when they sound ambivalent.Could you comment on the different approach to language in your work andin theirs?

K- You can not resolve the problem of meaning. Words are not containersthat hold "meaning" like a cup contains coffee. I don't thinkone can even fully understand anything or anyone. I believe that therewill always be a tension between what one tries to communicate and whatone tries to understand, and this tension oscillates with the dynamic webof language. I don't really believe in the idea of a message that existsprior to the engagement of those involved in the process. I really distrustthe idea of communication when it comes from one end and it goes towardsthe other end, with no opportunity for the other person to participate.That's what happens in television, radio, the mass media, that pretty muchdefine our collective unconscious, the mass media defining what we see,what we hear, what we are exposed to, what we dream of. I really distrustthese systems when it comes down to language.

I am interested in proposing alternatives to the unidirectionality ofthe system of art. I think that, we have come to realize that languageis truly unstable and absolutely turbulent. Language speaks us insteadof our speaking the language. We would like to be in control of language,we would like to arrest this flux of events that surrounds us. I believein negotiation of meaning, not communication of meaning. When I defenda model of language as fluctuating, oscillating turbulent and so forth,I am not talking about ambiguity in a stable model of language that canbe interpreted in one way or another. I am talking about a completely differentmodel of language, a model in which language in a sense escapes us. Therealization that language has its own dynamic, and no matter how much onetries to grasp it, how much one tries to arrest it , how much one triesto condense and objectify it, it's going to continue to spill off, andspill out, and blend and merge and dissolve. When we use language in alinear way, we are in danger of bypassing the fundamental problem of ourown medium, which is language itself. What about language's role in shapingour perception of the world? I am trying to deal with a problem that Isee as being essentially epistemological. I am trying to reflect on thevery nature of language, focusing particularly on written language. Howdoes language shape our reality, define our own identity? How does it engageor not, our thoughts in the process of dialogue?

O- I believe that in Jenny Holzer's and Barbara Kruger's case, thereis a political concern, a desire to present the work to a larger public.

K- Everything is political: a bathroom graffitti is political and sois an epistemological discussion.

O- World wide telecommunications create a new context for the politicaldebate. When did you start working with telecommunications as an art form?

K- It was in 1985, around the time of the "Geração80 Show" that I became interested in working with telecommunicationprocesses. My bachelors degree, from Rio's Catholic University, is in Communicationsbut none of the things I wanted to do in the Fine Arts were really taughtin schools at that time. There were no artists, no schools, nothing organizedor even disorganized where one could learn holography, computer-imaging,multi-media work, not to mention telecommunications. In 1985, I took partin an on-line art gallery that was set up by a company in São Paulo.Some artists participated in that, and I had some works on-line. One couldsee that from any part of the country. That was something that encouragedme to continue and to try to do works that were more interactive. So aroundthat time I met Mario Ramiro, a sculptor from São Paulo, who wasworking with zero gravity and infrared sources. He had done some work withtelecommunications. I became very enthusiastic about it, having seen thefew things he had done. We explored bi-directional fax transmissions together,developing a whole chart of expressive possibilities of the fax machine,with the support from a local fax manufacturer, who gave us the phone linesand the fax machines to work with. We also worked with fax transmissionsinvolving a live television broadcast.

As a consequence of that work, while still in Brazil, I became interestedin the idea that telecommunications could be used for art, not only tosend, receive, manipulate, and change image, sound, and text in the process,but perhaps to engage the space where the remote person, remote artist,the remote telecommunication apparatus is located. Maybe that space couldbe activated somehow through telecommunications. In 1987-88, I drew somesketches for pieces that would use remote control and remote sensing andother related ideas to push telecommunications into a more physical domain.The idea is to do the non-physical where the physical belongs, the physicalwhere the immaterial belongs. All this to destabilize our expectation abouthow these things should work, to merge them, to bring them together, tosee how they produce meaning when they conflict, to study the tension betweenthem. It was not until I came to Chicago to get my Masters degree, in pursuitprimarily of access to holography facilities and more appropriate conditionsto develop the work, that it became possible to develop, in collaborationwith Ed Bennett, what I now call telepresence installations.

O- Why Chicago?

K- I received a grant from the Brazilian government to pursue my graduatestudies abroad. I chose Chicago because it has a very strong traditionin holography, and you have the School of the Art Institute which has beenteaching holography as an integral part of the curriculum since the early80's. There is a nucleus in the city that is not exclusively related tothe fine arts, but is interested in promoting holography. I taught studioand art history classes for more than three years at SAIC, until I movedto Lexington, Kentucky, this past August.

O- You have lived here in Chicago for the last 6 years. What has beenthe impact of the move to the U.S. in your work?

K- Well, I was already doing the work with holography that I do nowstarting in '83, and I got here in '89, so in that sense, it didn't reallychange the work dramatically. However, it made possible for me to continuedoing it, in the sense of having access to the material conditions thatallowed me to take the work to the next step that I wanted to take it.That was actually the main reason why I left Rio and came to Chicago inthe first place. Although it really hasn't changed much in terms of "whatis it" that I'm doing.

O- Did you find a more supportive environment for your work and yourideas here in Chicago?

K- In a sense, yes. I have met and collaborated with many artists bothin the U.S. and in Europe since I arrived here. I worked a lot with BruceBreland, and the group DAX, in Pittsburgh. One of the pieces we did betweenChicago and Pittsburgh was called Interfaces, in which I tried to restoresome of the spontaneous quality of face-to-face conversation, but usingvideo images transmitted one at a time over the phone line. So we had noverbal or oral communication, but we would send images of faces, createdlive on the spot. These faces would overlap on line and this was projectedon a very large screen here in Chicago, so people could see that. But thiswas really not work for an audience. The work in telecommunication is foranybody that participates in the work, not for the concept of somebodywatching it, although you can make it available so people can see what'shappening. In this case, intermediary faces were being formed. So, we weresharing and creating identities over the phone line, collaging my eyeswith his face, part of his mouth with my face. These elements were everflowing and changing. They were never quite resolved. And this was happeningas a sort of conversation. And that was happening bi-directionally, continuously,live, through the phone line. That was Interface in 1990. Since 1989, Ihave developed with Ed Bennet the telepresence series of installations.

O- How would you define telepresence art?

K- Telepresence art can be identified in the intersection of robotics,telecommunications, and computers. It is part of a wider framework of electronicinteractive art. It implies less stress on form (and composition) and moreemphasis on behavior (choice, action) and negotiation of meaning. It highlightsthe public who, as participants, acquire an active role in shaping theirown field of experience. The role of the artist here is not to encode messagesunidirectionally, but to define parameters from which experiences willunfold. Telepresence art also implies the primacy of real time over realspace.

O- The emphasis on experience and process seems to be central to yourtelepresence installations. How do you deal with this issue of real timeover real space in your work? Could you talk about a specific event?

K- I create the installations to the scale of the telerobot and conceptualizea certain electronic sensorial apparatus on board. Having done that, Iask you to navigate in this space from a remote place, to move around,to make decisions and to experience this space according to your own decisionmaking process, so there is nothing that will determine your experienceprior to you having it. For instance, in this particular case of Ornitorrincoon the Moon, which took place in '93, between Chicago and the museum Kunstlerhausin Gratz, Austria, people would come to the museum in Austria and pushthe buttons on the telephone and they would see a monitor, which happenedto be green this time. I treat the keypad as a Cartesian grid. You pushthe number 2, the robot moves forward immediatly. You push the number 3,the robot turns right, and so forth. We keep changing the installationin all aspects. The robot is never the same, the interface is never thesame, nothing is ever the same. What is it? Well, it's nothing until youmake it. So you push the buttons on the phone, and you navigate around.You see the different places. You construct, through these isolated stillimages that you capture from the point of view of the robot, the spacein your mind. But then comes the next person and navigates in a differentdirection, does not perceive the same thing you saw, and that person constructsa completely different space. So, the things people see, the notion ofthe three-dimensional space they are navigating in, all these differentthings are relative to the points of view that you pursue in your explorationof that space. And each person leaves that space with a different Moon,a completely different understanding of what that space looks like. It'snot that they are failing to accomplish anything. No, they are accomplishingwhat is out there to accomplish, which is to navigate in a situationalenviroment and construct their own experience.

O- What was the telepresence installation Ornitorrinco in Copacabanalike?

K- The installation was part of the Siggraph Art Show in 1992, in Chicago.People navigated in the installation from McCormick Place, where the telephoneand the video monitor were, but the installation itself was in the Electronicsdepartment of the School of the Art Institute. So, people came to McCormickPlace and through a monitor and a telephone link, controlled the telerobotat the School of the Art Institute and looked at the space. But there wasn'tin the installation really anything that would mimic Copacabana in particular.The leaves were improvised. The images of fish were drawn from life atWoolworth. And the lizard, for example, I drew from life watching a lizardin this pet shop on Belmont street, close to where I used to live. That'sCopacabana for me. Copacabana is my suitcase. Copacabana is like this postcardI have on the wall, but it's a postcard that is also in my heart. But myheart is my suitcase and my suitcase is on my wall.

O- What was the public's reaction after they experienced "Copacabana"through the eyes/camera of Ornitorrinco?

K- Some loved it and some didn't. Many didn't understand it. Curiously,during the Siggraph Art Show, among the 25,000 people that came to theshow, this gentleman experienced the work, and started this conversationwith me about the piece. He said that he believed the work was interestingbut that he didn't think it was art. I was then talking to him about someof the ideas behind my work, about using communications not to simply sendand receive messages, but to create an experiential context with it. Hesaid-- "Anything is an experience. When I put my shoe on in the morning,it's an experience." The natural response to that was -- "Sure,you have an experience when you put a shoe on, but not from the perspectiveof the shoe"...

O- Ornitorrinco means platypus in Portuguese, a hybrid of reptile andmammal. I find it a great name for your telerobot because it suggests somany heterogeneous mixtures. However, the idea of looking at the worldfrom the perspective of the shoe, from the perspective of the object, orfrom the perspective of the other, although fascinating, seems still animpossibility.

K- Klee once wrote that objects in his studio contemplated him. Lacanspeaks of objects looking back, in the sense that objects have meaningnot only because we can see them, but because they are part of a much largernetwork of meanings, which includes language. No idea in art can be lookedat literally. Look at Mondrian's "straight" lines from upclose.They are anything but straight. Art works are not functional as chairsand tables, they can't be understood only from the point of view of theirmaterial manifestation. Otherwise, you have people visiting museums, lookingat a Jackson Pollock painting, and saying the famous words: "my four-yearold can do this in five minutes!" What the telepresence installationwith the Ornitorrinco telerobot is all about is to metaphorically ask theviewer to look at the world from someone else's point of view. It's a non-metaphysicalout-of-body experience, if you will. You are asked to remove yourself fromyour direct experience of the space that surrounds you and transport yourself,in space and time, to another body, to another situation, to another identity.You're asked to put yourself in somebody else's shoes.

O- So, Ornitorrinco in Copacabana has nothing to do with the real Copacabana.

K- Actually, our very first event with Ornitorrinco was performed in1989, in a link between myself in Copacabana, and Ed Bennett in Chicagowith the telerobot. But the issue here is not mimesis, or duplication ofan existent space. I am working with geographic displacements, mythicalas well as imaginary landscapes. My next installation, for instance, tobe presented next October between Chicago, Seattle and Lexington usingthe Internet, will be Ornitorrinco in Eden...

O- Your work seems to imply that the fundamental relation today is thatbetween appearance and disappearance and no longer between appearance andreality.

K- We live in a world where our mental images of places, cultures, andpeople, are no longer acquired through direct observation. We can conjureup images of the Moon, we can dream and see ourselves on the Moon, althoughwe have never been there in person. We have memories of places we havenever visited. We think of places and we have developed concepts aboutcultures that we have never seen, never experienced, based only on clichésthat are circulated by the media, Hollywood, television, magazines andso forth.

In my telepresence installations I'm making geographic displacementsthat reflect that. How do you go to Copacabana, to the Moon, and to Edenwithout ever leaving Chicago, or Graz, or Seattle? People might expect,"Well, Ornitorrinco on the Moon , I'm going to see a moon-like installation."No, you won't. Because the name is no longer attached to the object. Welive in a world where the signifier has fallen away from the signifiedand is no longer structured in that neat signifier-signified model thatwe inherited from the structuralist thinkers. Ours is a very unstable worldin which everything seems to fluctuate and be inconsistent, therefore theinconsistency between what the name means and what the place means. Wellit doesn't mean anything until you're there moving around and making yourchoices. Again, nothing exists until you make it your own, until you claimit, until you create your own narrative, until you construct it.

O- What is the place of the body in your work today, in relation tothe beginning of your career?

K- In my work in the early 80's, the body was everything. The body hadto be present. It was from the sounds of the body that the work emanated.The body was the tool I used to question conventions, dogmas, and taboos-- patriarchy, religion, heterosexuality, politics, puritanism, etc. Thebody became my writing medium at the very end ultimately. But ours is asociety that can save lives or massacre other societies from afar. Physicalpresence is acquiring a more and more secondary role in both processes.We use remote vision to look inside our own bodies and inside celestialbodies. We collect samples of both. Ironically, the distances between differentcultures shrink on a physical level but remain largely untouched on a socialand political level. The perpetuation of distance as such, be it territorialor symbolic, becomes an impediment to knowledge of different cultures andviewpoints. In this sense, perhaps, the simulated experience of a new identitywith Ornitorrinco (the participant "becoming" the telerobot)might have implications other than strictly artistic. Telepresence impliesa removal of the artist and the artwork. This is necessary in order forme to accomplish what I want to do, which is, among other things, to breakaway with the complete, final art work that implies a certain sense ofclosure, of cohesion, of completeness.

O- Is there a late Modern attitude of investigating possibilities intrinsicto the medium in your use of technology?

K- My whole use of technology is, in a sense, to humanize it, to bringit back to the human, individual scale. But at the same time I want toexplore what is unique to the media, which could be an interesting tensionto explore. Technology is definitely not the focus, but without it I simplycannot do the work I do. I am using it to question a lot of the elementsthat inform the so-called technological "progress". The political(military) structure in which new technologies are produced, the utilitarianuses they are meant to be put to, the increase in control they imply. Sothere it is, you wouldn't be wrong to identify a certain late modern discourseexploring the specificity of these media. The curious side of this is thatI am always using the lowest end of technology. I am using low-power lasers.The telerobot Ornitorrinco was made basically with Radio Shack technology,mostly paid for, to give you an idea, with the little money I made teachingpart-time. My videophone, my fax, and my computer are discontinued models.

O- Your work seems to embrace the new technologies with a certain ambiguity.On the one hand we can see the enthusiasm for new artistic possibilities.On the other hand, we find a critical perspective, a concern for the socialimplications of these same technologies. In your telepresence events youare basicly removing the artist from the artistic experience. What wouldthe role of the artist be, in this case?

K- The artist is no longer someone that creates a closed structure tobe pondered on, or gazed at. The dicotomy abstraction vs. representationno longer dominate the aesthetic discourse of our time. Artists can realizenew ideas in a small scale, in the immediate present, ideas that can reflector suggest models for new ways of thinking and for social transformation.I think that artists must have a sense of being uncomfortable, of investigating,of asking questions, of experimenting, or taking risks. When you look atstable three-dimensional works of art, the stability in these works seemsto resist the fluctuation, the flow, the instability we experience in ourthought processes, in our environment, in world politics, in our lives.I'm trying to acknowledge that instability and build it in the work itself.

Without the active participation of the so called viewer, none of myworks really exist. And that is true of my holography , and is true ofmy telepresence installation. It's also true of the new work I'm doingwhich involves interactive multimedia works that are meant to be experiencedon the computer and/or through the Internet. I've been working a lot withthe Internet lately. My next work with telepresence installation and withinteractive concepts will involve the Internet more and more. I have atpresent a piece called Storms that is available, free of charge, throughthe Leonardo Electronic Almanac. It's on line right now. Anybody that subscribesto Leonardo, including libraries, and that has access to the Internet canread about it and can see it. This is a piece that is an interactive navigationalvisual text based on the Sefirotic tree of the Kabbalah. So from Kabbalahto Copacabana, you have the whole kit and caboodle. (laughs)

O- What do you think the potential for the Internet is as a venue forartistic investigation?

K- I think the potential is great. On the Net you already have art gallerieswith shows and independent projects taking place. At the end of his life,Moholy was complaining about the status of filmmaking at the time. He feltthat in the 1930's and 40's, filmmaking was no longer a medium the independentcreator, the independent artist could work with. Because cinema had becomesuch a corporate-dominated medium, by Hollywood and many other film companiesaround the world, there was basically no room for distribution of independentfilms. But this is to say that we must prevent the same thing from happeningwith the Internet. We have examples from history. Another example thatcomes to mind involving the issue of communication and telecommunicationcomes from Bertold Brecht. Brecht wrote a magnificent, short essay on theproblem of communication. He was complaining about the fact that radiowas unidirectional. He said that by being unidirectional, this media wouldbe dominated by the producers. He said that radio must be bi-directional.Radio must empower people. Radio must be a means for social transformation,social change.

And of course, there's also the issue of censorship. I think that theInternet today has the potential of realizing Bertold Brecht's dream ofbeing not only bi-directional, but multi-directional. And multi-directionalhopefully, also on other levels, cultural levels, allowing for expressionof multiple, uncensored, points of view. That would allow people to shareall kinds of insights about all kinds of aspects of culture. There is alot of garbage too, but that is the price of freedom and democracy. However,there always is the fear and the danger of the Internet becoming corporateand becoming absolutely commercial. The Internet sort of grew out of amilitary network, which is kind of scary by itself, but has become a giganticmother of all networks. Anybody can virtually transform his or her owncomputer into another node on this network and share. So I think that thereis the potential for redefining the social role of the artist. I thinkwe must do everything we can to prevent it from becoming this corporate-dominatedcommercial enterprise. The Internet should be a place, or a space-lessplace, that allows everybody, anybody, anywhere in the world, to move around,to share information, to have access to information, so information becomesdecentralized. But when we talk about this issue, of course we run intothe problem of Third World countries. If you look at the map of the Internet,you see that Africa and South America do not have the same density of nodesyou see in Europe and North America. People that live in these continentsare being underprivileged, left behind. This is another very importantproblem because you're talking about new technologies and communicationmedia on a global scale. Think of Brazil for example. In Rio, if you pickup the phone, you don't know whether you're going to be able to get a lineor not, and if you get a line, you don't know if you're going to get aconnection or not. In many underdeveloped countries, even a basic thing,like the phone, is a very complex problem. I think there are layers andlevels of meaning that technology has in our lives that really haven'tbeen addressed. And I think that's true from a political view. If you lookat it.... Technology has the potential to empower people in many ways.If we leave technology behind in art, if we don't question how technologyaffects our lives, if we don't take charge, if we don't use these technologicalmedia to raise questions about contemporary life, who's going to do that?

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