This Critical Anthology was originally published in the catalogue of the exhibition "Eduardo Kac,", a mid-career survey curated by Angel Kalenberg, Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM), Valencia, Spain (September 27 to November 11, 2007). Additional information about the catalogue.
CRITICAL ANTHOLOGY (pp. 107-125)
The impact of Eduardo Kac's transgenic art, and in particular his daring creation of new animals, on the contemporary art scene has been considerable, but one can see the whole of the artist's audacious inventions and achievements as a decisive contribution in the realm of biotechnological and telecommunication art. His works introduce a vital new meaning into what had been known as the creative process while at the same time investing the notion of the artist-inventor with an original social and ethical responsibility.
Frank Popper
Kac's elaborate installation [Uirapuru] invites one into an environment that we can explore from multiple points of view. The telerobotic fish hovers above the landscape, embodying the artist's personal mythology which is created out of a dialogue with the facts and myths of the Amazonian rainforest. The viewer's interaction with Kac's installation is extended through the web as virtual and real spaces explore an ecology of place and memory.
John G. Hanhardt
In Eduardo Kac's "Uirapuru" an enormous, brightly colored fish floats above an artificial jungle beckoning us into a humorous utopia rather than burdening us with different kinds of web information control mechanisms. Sitting on the bench in the back and watching the fish meander above I was reminded of the various programs played out in Raymond Russel's "Impressions of Africa". The work involves a fairly complicated system, but listening to the birds voices connected to the Internet one feels oneself drawn into a cyber version of "Impressions of the Amazon". Whatever the mechanisms used, whether the Internet or sensors, the casual surface of works like Kac's is hard to come by.
Keiji Nakamura
Despite the whiz-bang technology that Kac brings to bear in getting his message across, he employs a very under-stated use of technology. Even in the robotic works, which combine the most baroque elements, he creates a very self-contained presence. His work for Out of Bounds [Rara Avis] issues an invitation to the viewer to participate through interacting with elements and imagining how one's worldview changes as a result of taking on a role. It is an understated piece. One has to come prepared to let it unfold. It would seem, given his incredible expertise with any kind of technology, that Kac could have used more bells and whistles if he wanted to. But it's never about the bells and whistles. Technology is a tool in the service of the idea, the particular intersection between a thought, a phrase, and a meaning that he's seeking.
Annette DiMeo Carlozzi
The proliferation of artificial life forms has placed at stake the problem of living matter. Life was nearly inconceivable in the absence of carbon and its derivatives. However, studies on artificial life show us how the concept of life is no longer based on discrete organic compounds of matter, but on the technobiological programs that condition its look and behavior. “GFP Bunny” is a work of living art created by the artist Eduardo Kac in collaboration with a group of biotechnological investigators: a fluorescent rabbit that glows thanks to the synthetic mutation of a jellyfish GFP gene!
Pierre Restany
Whether or not viewers regard artists’ use of living animals as justifiable, the resulting work is almost always difficult and uncomfortable, and can prompt complex ironies and unlikely alliances when art and animal advocacy come face to face. The clearest case of this is undoubtedly the furore surrounding Eduardo Kac’s recent artwork, GFP Bunny. […] His concerted campaign to secure Alba’s release has attracted media attention in France and the United States, and a representative of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals went so far as to say that GFP Bunny was ‘helpful for laboratory animals everywhere’, and could highlight their plight. […] What can be learned from such a case? It certainly confirms that there is no consensus on what constitutes ethical behavior towards the animal in contemporary art. More radically than this, however, it may suggest that ethical questions cannot even be adequately framed in this context. […] It may be that those working within the arts are especially well placed to devise new forms of responsible action – critical and improvisatory forms that sidestep a rule-bound or unduly moralistic notion of ethics. The recognition of such moves will call for a trust in the integrity of the artist, and a reluctance to be outraged too quickly when the animal takes unexpected or controversial forms. […] As one scientist has said in defense of Eduardo Kac, ‘How did I and my fellow scientists become anointed to do things that should be prohibited to artists? Because we are contributing to the understanding of things? So are artists’. The value of the science is open to question, but prohibiting the art is by no means certain to improve matters.
Steve Baker
At another extreme of technological production would be the holographic poems of Eduardo Kac, for whom the spatialized dynamics of the page are transcended through a medium which allows dimensionality to be factored into the linguistic production. Kac's explorations extend the use of the computer as a tool in poetic composition employed by Max bense, among others, in the 1960s, while also engaging with the sort of visual manipulation of surface appearance which characterized the work of Raymond Hains, also in the 1960s. However, in Kac's works as in Hains', the distortions introduced into the final form of the language through light projection, surface manipulation, or computer processing are not additions or supplements to the text. Instead, they are intended to be integral to its linguistic function, to extend the definition of what comprises linguistic function, to include the potential of material to signify.
Johanna Drucker
Kac was among the first writers to realize that holography, a visual technology new to our times, could be a medium for language. In the 1980s, he created holograms in which, among other clever constructions, words from two languages meld into one another, the same letters are reorganized to create different words, a cylinder reveals a series of words, seen only in parts, that reads differently clockwise from counterclockwise ("Quando?" ["When?" 1987]). For art such as this Kac coined the epithet "holopoetry", whose significance he has explained in several manifestos.
Richard Kostelanetz
The transgenic rabbit… transgenic art is renewing the other arts from the inside. Because its focus is the map of the human genome. And we can't treat genetic science as just another science in parallel with the others. It is inside all the other sciences. It is a way to focus science on its source -- the living organism and the knowledge of it. In this sense, it is a snake swallowing its tail. Science is becoming myth again. Instead of enhancing reason, it is welcoming unreason and magic, a factory for anything at all: the demiurgic, centaurs... Alchemists helped originate science, and then we moved beyond alchemy… […] Experimental science is the opposite of storytelling, chimera and myths. The rational position of science had freed itself little by little from alchemy and magic. But now knowledge has been mortally wounded. Instead of opposing the alchemist, the scientist is becoming an alchemist again. It is the idolatry of calculation, the idolatry of the genetic bomb, that has brought us back to alchemy. So, to say that the transgenic art is an art like the others -- it's not, because it exterminates the source of the other arts. The living organism is irreplaceable. The living organism is not of the same nature as what produces it. […] What I'm trying to say is that today calculation is leading us back to the chimera and the myth of the super-human. Not Nietzsche's super-man, but the super-man of teratology.
Paul Virilio
The Roslin Institute's lamb called Dolly and Eduardo Kac's Alba will likely inform the nursery tales of a new generation, along with more and more creatures emerging from the moistmedia substrate: Steve Grand's Lucy, the orang-utan, for example, or Robokoneko, Starlab's kitten.
Roy Ascott
Eduardo Kac's rabbit Alba, infused with jellyfish genes, could glow bright green in public. Alba the rabbit made a well-nigh perfect art-world cause célèbre at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Alba really panicked the bourgeoisie and was a nice succès de scandale, a worthy credit to the social insight of the artist.
Bruce Sterling
From an ethical point of view, in principle there’s no problem in creating a rabbit that glows green in the dark. For me the question is to know if this genetic mutation can make the animal suffer. I just would like to know if care was taken with the health of the animal, to be sure that no other rabbit suffered in order to arrive at this result.
Peter Singer
Kac's objective? To help us realize, in a militant manner, the normalcy of cloned beings, which some, technophobes, consider to be the emergent monstrosity. Alba heps us think the new flesh, the laicized and dechristianized body.
Michel Onfray
Kac's approach recalls that of Renaissance artists such as Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, who were fascinated equally by the universal laws of science and the universal truths of art.
Christiane Paul
Biotech art is life neighboring Art. Already in Body Art artists used their bodies. Today we can see a difference between those who modify their own body, like Orlan, and those who manipulate DNA, like Kac. With Orlan we find ourselves in a traditional sculptural logic, in which it is not marble but the artist's body that is given shape. With Kac the operation is less showy, it is more extensive, a turn towards the foreign. Artist or scientist? Not a question. What was Leonardo?
Achille Bonito Oliva
Kac's piece [Genesis] does prompt the thought that perhaps some omnipotent translator led the artist (and the rest of humankind) to this level of handiwork; that once upon a time we were encoded with a system of marks, which we've finally discovered and interpret as an alphabet written into our very core. Now that we've picked up the code, we've begun our own translations. With increasing ease in our genomic age, the script of life is revised, science fiction becoming science fact.
Steven Henry Madoff
Here's how the artist Eduardo Kac made one of the works in "Paradise Now", a show at Exit Art, New York, in which thirty-nine artists address themes of genetics and biotechnology. Kac condensed a verse from Genesis: "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth." He translated it first into Morse code, and then, using a system of his own devising, into four-lettered genetic code. With the sequence that resulted -- "GTCCA" and so on, very catch -- he fashioned a gene and introduced it into live bacteria. Kac cultured the bacteria in a petri dish, which he rigged with a video camera. The apparatus occupies an elegantly designed booth in this show. A magnified, real-time image of the microbe colony is projected onto the wall and, at the same time, broadcast on the Internet. Kac's Web Site (http://www.ekac.org/) is interactive. With the click of a mouse from afar, you can zap the bacteria with ultraviolet light, creating mutations. […] Eduardo Kac may translate his beleaguered Frankengene back into English at the end of "Paradise Now." He has done this before. After a Kac show in Austria, the Biblical sentence came out only slightly rumpled: "Let aan have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that ioves ua eon the earth." Of course, we know that subtle anomalies in a strand of DNA can make the difference between, say, a Nobel laureate and a mime. But pardon me for noting something obvious: the changes in the verse are not improvements. Nor do they affect its meaning, which persists in a manner that is independent of biology. Meaning may arise from ultimately explicable chemical and electrical events in the brain, but it then takes wing -- across thousands of years, in this case, directly from somebody else's mind to ours. The beauty of the sentence clinches its argument. A creature that can think and sing like that is irretrievably stuck with a fateful edge over other species.
Peter Schjeldahl
Eduardo Kac is suspicious of metaphors. The genome as a book? Twenty–three chapters reflecting the twenty–three chromosomes? Genes as the tangled narrative strands within each of these chapters? For Kac, the notion that we might relax on a lazy afternoon flipping through a document which mirrors the complexity of the human genome, makes about as much sense as describing the beautiful symmetries of the genes themselves as a kind of glorious, self–organizing machine code. […] Kac is well aware that when describing in lay terms the nuances of recent genomic mapping, whether mathematical algorithms or New Age biorhythms are your operative metaphor of choice, ultimately you must face the fact that metaphors simplify. They reduce. What was once a dynamic concept, merely becomes a static literary conceit. A double–helix described as a Mobius strip, or an M.C. Escher painting, or even some kind of primitive aquatic radiolarian, might help you to visualize the process of a chain of amino acids folding itself up into a unique protein, but a metaphor, no matter how inventive or well phrased, doesn’t allow you to become a part of that process. And process, embodied in the gradual mutation of a synthetic “artist’s gene,” is exactly what Kac wants to implicate us in. […] Kac’s statement, then, is best expressed through the single sentence from the Book of Genesis laser–etched into the Encryption Stones: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth”. But Kac is not so easily convinced. His iconoclastic critique is armed with multiplicity, ambiguity, irony, and a certain deflation of pompous rhetoric. He translates the sentence into Morse Code, long known as the originary language of global information, and then converts the dots and dashes into a sequence of genetic bases according to a system of his own devise. Back in the heyday of Morse Code, experts were said to possess a “subtle–fist,” pounding out their unique handles in a percussive dance of the palm. This symphony of beats and pregnant pauses, here, offset by the genetic language of the base pairs, and further decentered by the biblical text, not only shows the flexible nature of language as a tool of ideology, but conclusively debunks its heavy totalitarian cadences.
David Hunt
The artist Eduardo Kac has assumed the role of educator, researcher, scientist, social critic, inventor, and co-creator of life. His struggle as an artist is no longer to interrogate his own "hybridity" to register his own "agency," but rather to actually be part of creating a visually and genetically new, transgenic creature, and then focus on her integration into society, her agency, individuality, and potential designation as "other." […] In the universe of the posthuman it would appear that the human species will now not only fuse with machines to determine their destiny and how human they will become, but also, no longer the victim of nature ourselves, will become even more the choreographers, curators, and programmers of all other existent, and yet-to-be-imagined species.
Carol Becker
Part of Eduardo Kac's production would appear to be immersed in the conversion into poetry of what has been defined as "post-human nature". GFP Bunny, however, emerges from extreme scientificism, appearing as a political symbol of the significance of knowledge of the genome. […] In the effervescent process of dematerialization of art and of the incorporation of digital media, some say that video was awaiting its Turner. It may well be said that advanced and popular technology was waiting to be converted into a sublime image. Eduardo Kac fully understood that advanced science was waiting for a body, for someone to push it beyond a set of instruments. It is in fact necessary to confront the field of logos with the phenomenological experience of the lived body, and at this nerve center Kac proposes his Time Capsule with the implantation of an electronic chip in his own body.
Paulo Herkenhoff
Kac's work dramatizes the difficulty biocybernetic art has in making its object or model visible. In looking at the Genesis installation, or hearing about the synthetic rabbit, one takes it on faith that the work exists and is doing what it is reported to be doing. There is, in a very real sense, nothing to see in the work, only documents, gadgets, black boxes, and rumors of mutations and monsters. […] The object of mimesis here is really the invisibility of the genetic revolution, its inaccessibility to representation. The real subject matter, then, becomes the idea of the work and the critical debate that surrounds it as much as its material realization.
W. J. T. Mitchell
Kac's technical confidence enables him to create complex and challenging works. It is not just conceptual with him. He is confident handling the genetic material and hardware.
Fumio Nanjo
Kac subverts the centrality of the human and of anthrocentric modes of knowing and experiencing the world by displacing the centrality of its metonymic stand-in, human (and humanist) visuality. He does this in several different ways, some of which are relatively straightforward, such as Darker Than Night (1999) and Rara Avis (1996). […] More interesting still, I think, is how Kac's work also exploits what we might call our lust for the visual and its (humanist) centrality by trading upon it repeatedly (the glow in the dark creatures, the rather outré coloring of the bird/camera in Rara Avis, or even the playful visual pun on the human eyeball in the webcam watching the seedling in Teleporting an Unknown State [1996], just to name a few.) This is not just, I think, a matter of the “scopic reversal” that is a “recurring theme” in Kac's work (particularly the works on telepresence), nor is it just about a “dialogical interchange” that serves “to multiply the `points of view' available,” as in The Eighth Day. […] In fact, I would argue that the use of GFP in Kac's work, particularly with the rabbit Alba in GFP Bunny, operates as a kind of feint or lure that trades upon the very humanist centrality of vision that Kac's work ends up subverting. On display here, in other words, are the humanist ways in which we produce and mark the other (including the animal other), our “carnophallogocentric” visual appetite, displayed here in the form of spectacle, which gets “fed” in this instance by GFP. […] It is a question, then, of what we might call the “place” of the visual. […] And this involves in Kac's work-as one might now expect-a circular and indeed recursive procedure, where the artist uses or otherwise appeals to specifically human visual habits, conventions, and so on, for the purposes of making the point that the visual as we traditionally think of it can precisely no longer be indexed to those conventions and habits at all. In this light, one way to underscore the difference between productive recursivity in Kac's work and a mere “hall of mirrors” reflexivity is to say that the whole point of the glow in the dark rabbit of GFP Bunny and how it seizes upon certain spectularizing modes of human visuality, is that the harder you look, the less you see. Alba's “meaning,” if we want to put it that way, is not to be found in the brute fact of the glow of her coat; in fact, one might well say the “meaning” of the work is everywhere but there.
Cary Wolfe
If Survivor epitomized the summer of surveillance in the United States, Eduardo Kac's 1997 web-cast performance is a precursor: Kac implanted a veterinarian-approved bio-panoptic surveillance device--a microchip with a unique ID--into his own ankle and then scanned himself into a remote database of lost pets, classifying himself as both animal and owner.
Steve Dietz
What is the nature of a biomarker subverted to become a social marker, of a green protein that we can see only under blue light through a yellow filter and which makes the Similar look like the Other? If we remember Time Capsule, where Kac implanted a microchip — of the sort used to find lost ewes and other animals — in his leg, where he registered himself simultaneously as both the owner and the animal, and what's more, placed in a gallery his sepia family photos dating from 1930's, pre-war Poland, the marker takes on a very different color.
Jens Hauser
Eduardo Kac's work represents a turning point. What it questions is our current attitudes to creativity, taking that word in its most fundamental sense.
Edward Lucie-Smith
It is in bio art, especially there where life is manipulated, that we find the transgressive margins of XXIst century art. Bio art uses the most recent biotechnologies, as long as they are legal, to modify natural processes and to produce new objects. The best-known example is artist Eduardo Kac’s Alba, the fluorescent bunny. […] The true significance of bio art for XXIst century art is its devilish transgressive power, its capacity to produce monsters and to circulate transgressive objects.
Yves Michaud
I'd like to suggest that we are faced here with a problem of aesthetics rather than one of ethics. I use these terms in the strictest Kantian sense. Ethics, for Kant, is universal. An ethical judgment is valid at all times and for all situations. Aesthetics, by contrast, is singular and ungrounded. An aesthetic judgment, Kant says, is not just a personal preference; in making it, I must go beyond my own subjectivity. But neither is such a judgment objective. I am forced to make a decision without having any preexisting rules to guide me, and I must try to convince other people that I am right without having any common foundation to appeal to. An aesthetic judgment responds to a particular, contingent situation; it cannot be repeated, generalized, or codified. [...] In order to confront the new biotechnology, then, we need a bioaesthetics more than a bioethics. We need an aesthetic practice that is as radical and innovative as the biological sciences themselves have been. Biological art, however, is still in its infancy; just look at the time line. Eduardo Kac first proposed the idea of transgenic art in 1998, and his own example of it, Alba the genetically altered, glow-in the-dark bunny, was born in 2000. [...] Bioaesthetics needs to be excessive as well as critical. It must be wasteful, extravagant, and non-utilitarian. It must be ready, at any moment, to turn back upon itself, experiment upon itself, and put itself at risk, as the ethically dubious artist does in Jeffrey Thomas's short story. It must try to imagine the unimaginable, to ask questions that are not supposed to be asked, and to transgress the limits of positivist understanding. Bioaesthetics will be convulsive or not at all.
Steven Shaviro
Both "Genesis" and "The Eighth Day" subtly interpolate humans into the recursive loops that connect various forms of biomedia to one another. In "Genesis" this interpolation occurs when Internet and gallery visitors participate in the processes of mutation, and in "The Eighth Day" it happens through the first-person perspective created by placing a camera inside the biodome. We are not outside the systems we view but rather become part of them. In this fusion of outside with inside, biology with technology, spectators with genetically modified creatures, I think I see the future of the human. The complex visions granted us by "Genesis" and "The Eighth Day" are far from innocent, but they are also rich enough to engage us in the consequential issues at stake as we become like the creatures upon which we gaze, biomedia created by the drive for domination and control. When we become the objects of that domination as well as the subjects who enact it, who then is in control? This is the unavoidable and unanswerable question posed by these disturbing and engaging works.
N. Katherine Hayles
Transgenic art is interventive, that is, it uses the actual processes of genetic engineering and genetic manipulation to make the final work of art. Eduardo Kac has made a whole series of works in which the manipulation of the genetic material makes the work—hence the glow-in-the-dark bunny, which was engineered and fluoresces. Eduardo Kac is not critical of genetic engineering nor is he approving of it. He is simply using it as a creative tool to make something new. So, clearly, transgenic art might well not embody any particular social stance towards or against it in itself.
Martin Kemp
Some of Kac's most interesting installations create an interface between the fields of ethology and ethnology. His work Darker than Night (1999)--a telepresence piece that allows the participant to be in the body of a telerobotic bat among real, living bats--is not a refutation of philosopher Thomas Nagel's arguments (1974) but the interface between humans and bats as a cultural experience. In many of his works Kac explores the life-sharing spaces between humans and non-human animals, which are precisely the focus of study of etho-ethnology and ethno-ethology. In Genesis (1999)--a work in which the artist enables Internet participants to activate a UV light through the web to mutate living bacteria remotely--Kac extends the relational space between humans and animals to the level of microorganisms. Kac's works belong to a realm, which he fully claims and asserts, that is known as Bio Art. His works present multifaceted forms of shared life between humans and animals. Kac's art generates unprecedented and innovative situations that will continue to stimulate and interest those who will work with and reflect on the interface between humans and animals.
Dominique Lestel
Kac is an extremely important person because his work shows what a complicated thing the body has become. The body used to be seen as a single human or animal anatomic fabric. What is interesting about Kac’s transgenic green bunny is that it is hard to see where the body begins or the artificial begins or ends. The two have become very interestingly merged. What is interesting to me about this piece is that it puts in the public sphere issues that are only implicit in science and the enormous unease regarding the power we now have to make micro-interventions in the body. That needs thought, it needs public dialogue. I think that Kac is quite right. His art is a way to externalize the unease that people have regarding the fact we are in these uncertain waters.
Barbara Stafford
Eduardo Kac is raising some of the really big questions. It's precisely because he's an artist that he has the freedom of expression to raise ideas that others won't. Kac's work is raising uncomfortable issues. At some level, he's the bad-boy artist-and that's a good thing.
Marvin Heiferman
Sources
Frank Popper , “L’art transgénique d’Eduardo Kac”, Artpress, Paris, N. 276 February 2002, p. 51.
John G. Hanhardt, catalogue of ICC Biennale '99 — Interaction, edited by Takuo Komatsuzaki, Haruko Kawai, Kei Kamikanda, and Takatoshi Shinoda (Tokyo: ICC, 1999), p. 61.
Keiji Nakamura, catalogue of ICC Biennale '99 — Interaction, edited by Takuo Komatsuzaki, Haruko Kawai, Kei Kamikanda, and Takatoshi Shinoda (Tokyo: ICC, 1999), p. 71.
Annette DiMeo Carlozzi and Julia A. Fenton, Out of Bounds, exhibition catalogue, Nexus Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, 1996, pp. 6-12.
Pierre Restany, “2000 arte e comunicazione: individualismo e Umanesimo”, D’ARS, N. 163/164, December 2000, p. 5.
Steve Baker, "Haunted by the Animal", Tate Magazine, N. 26, September 2001.
Johanna Drucker. "Experimental, Visual, and Concrete Poetry: A Note on Historical Context and Basic Concepts;" in: Experimental-Visual-Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry Since the 1960s, K. David Jackson, Eric Vos and Johanna Drucker, editors, (Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), p. 56-57.
Richard Kostelanetz, Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (Pennington, NJ: A Cappella Books, 1993), p. 116.
Paul Virilio (with Sylvere Lotringer). Crepuscular Dawn (New York: Semiotext(e), 2002), pp. 125-127.
Roy Ascott, “When the Jaguar lies down with the Lamb: speculations on the post-biological culture,” ArtNodes, November 2001, Universidade Oberta de Catalunia, Barcelona <http://www.uoc.edu/artnodes/eng/index.html>.
Bruce Sterling. Tomorrow Now (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 10.
Peter Singer quoted in: “Entrevista com o filósofo Peter Singer”, Revista Época, N. 421, 12 June 2006, Brazil <http://revistaepoca.globo.com>.
Michel Onfray. Archéologie du présent. Manifeste pour une esthétique cynique (Paris: Adam Biro/Grasset, 2003), pp. 105-107.
Christiane Paul quoted in: Jeremy Manier. "Making the bunny glow", Chicago Tribune, Perspective section, September 24, 2000, pp. 1, 4.
Achille Bonito Oliva quoted in: Pier Cattani. "Colpo di gene: l'artista diventa biotech" and "Bonito Oliva: scienziati, cioè creativi. Come Leonardo." Il Venerdì di Repubblica, Italy, 25 Avril 2003, pp. 11-13.
Steven Henry Madoff. "The Wonders of Genetics Breed a New Art", New York Times, Arts and Leisure section, May 26, 2002.
Peter Schjeldahl, “DNART”, The New Yorker Magazine, October 2, 2000, pp. 144-146.
David Hunt, “Eduardo Kac: Metaphor into Motif”, gallery brochure published on the occasion of Kac’s Genesis exhibition, Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago, May 4 to June 2, 2001.
Carol Becker, "GFP Bunny", Art Journal, Fall 2000, pp. 45-47.
Paulo Herkenhoff, “The Dazzle of Light & Letters”, foreword to : Kac, Eduardo. Light & Letter. Essays in art, literature and communication (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Contra Capa, 2004). First publication in English in: Anomalie_digital arts n°5, Annick Bureaud and Kean-Luc Soret, editors, Paris, 2005, pp. 156-167.
Mitchell, W. J. Thomas. “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction”, Modernism/Modernity - Volume 10, Number 3, September 2003, pp. 481-500.
Fumio Nanjo quoted in: Sebastian Tong, "Green bunny's creator says medium is not the message", Reuters, posted Wed Oct 4, 2006 8:41 AM ET.
Cary Wolfe, “From Dead Meat to Glow in the Dark Bunnies: Seeing “the Animal Question” in Contemporary Art”, Parallax (Animal Beings special issue), Vol. 12, N. 1, Taylor & Francis, United Kingdom, 2006, pp. 95-109.
Steve Dietz, "Eduardo Kac, Time Capsule,"ArtForum, October 2000, p. 41.
Jens Hauser, “Gènes, génies, gênes”; published in the catalogue of the homonymous exhibition L’Art Biotech (Paris: Filigranes Éditions, 2003), pp. 13-14.
Edward Lucie-Smith, “Eduardo Kac and Transgenic Art”; published in The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac, Sheilah Britton and Dan Collins, editors (The Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University / DAP, New York, 2003), p. 26.
Yves Michaud quoted in: "L'esthétisation généralisée", Beaux Arts magazine, Dossier L'art du XXIe siècle, December 2006, pp. 83.
Steven Shaviro, "Genetic Disorder : Bioasthetics", Artforum, January 2004, p. 42.
N. Katherine Hayles, “Who's In Control Here? Meditating on Eduardo Kac's Transgenic Art”, ; published in The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac, Sheilah Britton and Dan Collins, editors (The Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University / DAP, New York, 2003), pp. 79-86.
Martin Kemp, transcript of radio interview, BBC Radio 4, The Material World ("Genetic Art"), 31 March 2005.
Dominique Lestel (ed), Ethology and ethnology: the coming synthesis, Social Science Information, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2006, p. 311.
Barbara Stafford, transcript of radio interview, Studio 360 On the Air, December 9, 2000, WNYC Radio, New York.
Marvin Heiferman quoted in: Eskin, Blake. "Building the Bioluminescent Bunny", ARTnews, December 2001, (Volume 100/Number 11), in the special section The Next Wave: Ten Trendsetters to Watch, pp. 118-119.
Biographies
Frank Popper, Professor Emeritus of Aesthetics and the Science of Art at the University of Paris VIII, author of Virtual Art (MIT Press, 2007).
John G. Hanhardt, Senior Curator of Film and Media Arts at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
Keiji Nakamura, art critic, lives and works in Tokyo. Senior curator at The National Museum of Art, Osaka,1986-95. Director/Chief Curator of the InterCommunication Center, Tokyo,1995-2000.
Annette DiMeo Carlozzi, Curator of American and Contemporary Art and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin.
Pierre Restany (1930-2003), art critic, coined the term and championed the mouvement New Realism (in French: Nouveau Réalisme). He was the author of countless publications, including the first monograph on Yves Klein.
Steve Baker is Professor of Art History in the Department of Humanities at the University of Central Lancashire. He is author of several books, including The Post-Modern Animal.
Johanna Drucker, book artist and writer, Professor of Media Studies, director of the Media Studies program, University of Virginia.
Richard Kostelanetz, New York-based independent writer and poet.
Paul Virilio, philosopher and urbanist, author of many books, including The Information Bomb, War and Cinema, and The Vision Machine.
Roy Ascott, artist, theoretician, President of The Planetary Collegium and Professor at University of Plymouth, United Kingdom.
Bruce Sterling, writer, author of several books including Islands in the Net and editor of Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology.
Peter Singer, philosopher, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and laureate professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, University of Melbourne. Author of many books, including Animal Liberation and Unsanctifying Human Life: Essays on Ethics.
Michel Onfray, philosopher, author of more than 30 books, including Archéologie du présent and La philosophie féroce, founded in 2002 the tuition-free Université populaire de Caen, France.
Christiane Paul is the Adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Achille Bonito Oliva, contemporary art critic, professor at University of Rome-La Sapienza, coined the term and curated the ground-breaking exhibition about the "Transavanguardia"
Steven Henry Madoff, art critic, was the executive editor of ARTnews magazine from 1987-1994 and in 1997 published Pop Art: A Critical History with University of California Press.
Peter Schjeldahl, art critic, The New Yorker. Schjeldahl has written several books of poetry as well as many books on art criticism.
David Hunt is a writer, critic, and independent curator living in New York.
Carol Becker, writer, Professor and Dean of the School of the Arts at Columbia University in New York.
Paulo Herkenhoff is an independent curator and critic based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was adjunct curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Prior to his appointment at MoMA, Herkenhoff was artistic director of the XXIV Bienal de São Paulo and chief curator of the Museu de Arte Moderna of Rio de Janeiro.
W. J. T. Mitchell is a Professor at the University of Chicago, editor of Critical Inquiry, and author/editor of ten books, including Picture Theory and The Last Dinosaur Book.
Fumio Nanjo, Director of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, was the chief curator of the first Singapore Biennale, 2006.
Cary Wolfe, cultural critic, Professor, Department of English, Rice University, Houston. Author of books such as Animal Rites and the edited collection Zoontologies.
Steve Dietz is a new media curator and director of ISEA 2006 Symposium ZeroOne San Jose International Festival of Art and Technology; 1996–2003 he was curator of new media at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department, the online art Gallery 9, and the digital art study collection.
Jens Hauser, independent curator and critic; curated exhibitions such as “L’Art Biotech”, Le Lieu Unique, Nantes, France.
Edward Lucie-Smith, art historian, author of Art Today and Visual Arts in the 20th Century.
Yves Michaud, Art Critic and Professor of Philosophy, Université de Rouen. Author of several books, including L'art à l'état gazeux. Essai sur le triomphe de l'esthétique (Paris: Stock, 2003).
Steven Shaviro is professor of cinema studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.
N. Katherine Hayles, Professor of English and Design/Media Arts, University of California at Los Angeles. Her boks include How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics ,Literature and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.).
Martin Kemp is a Professor of the History of Art at Oxford University and a curator. He has curated shows such as Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery in London (2000) and has authored books such as The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (2007).
Dominique Lestel is a philosopher and professor at the École normale supérieure, Paris. His books include Les Origines animales de la culture (Flammarion, 2001), L'Animal singulier (Seuil, 2004) and Les amis de mes amis (Seuil, 2007).
Barbara Maria Stafford is an Art History Professor at The University of Chicago. She is the author of Good Looking, Artful Science, Body Criticism, and Voyage into Substance (all published by MIT Press).
Marvin Heiferman, independent curator, New York.
Back to Kac Web