Eduardo Kac: From Minitel to NFT

Jeffrey Kastner

Although the earliest of the remarkably prescient works in Eduardo Kac’s “From Minitel to NFT” date from the first part of the 1980s, to get a fuller sense of the socio-technological context from which they emerged, it’s useful to go back a few years further, to the mid-1970s. On April 1, 1976, two college dropouts—Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak—officially registered a new company, Apple Inc., on the strength of Wozniak’s design for a personal computer, a critical technical and commercial development in the emergence of our modern information society. Later that same year, Simon Nora, a senior official in the French Ministry of Finance, received a request from the nation’s president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, that he undertake a comprehensive study of the quickening technological upheaval represented by the early Apple machines—which, along with the kindred devices like the Tandy TRS-80 and the Commodore PET, heralded the increasingly widespread availability of the sort of computing power that had theretofore been available only to institutional entities like governments, corporations, and universities. In his letter to Nora, Giscard d’Estaing described the increasing democratization of computers as a paradigm shift likely to be transformative of “the economic and social organization of our society and our way of life.”

Just over a year later, in January 1978, Nora delivered his report—L’Informatisation de la société (“The Computerization of Society”), a groundbreaking 186-page deep dive (written with his colleague Alain Minc) into the future of computing and its potential consequences for economic, political, and social relations both in France and beyond.[1] “We are in a computer boom,” Nora and Minc wrote. “Countless small, efficient, and inexpensive machines are appearing on the market. They could be harbingers of freedom. A technology for the elite has given way to a way of life for the masses. Simultaneously, telematics is springing to life, born of the marriage between computers and communication networks, which will culminate in the arrival of universal satellites, transmitting images, data and sounds.”[2]

This notion of “telematics,” of the computer as a device with the potential to unify computation and communication in totally unprecedented ways, sits at the heart of the works included in “From Minitel to NFT.” Just one of the numerous strands of Kac’s searchingly curious and continually innovative practice, these “telecommunication works,” as he calls them, were created at the very dawn of the personal computer age, and constitute some of his first mature artistic endeavors. But even at this early date, one can already see the kinds of concerns that would come to characterize his entire oeuvre: a fascination with language, from its large-scale operations as a means to transmit complex information down to the nuances of its constituent syntactic and orthographic elements; a playful, unorthodox approach to often complexly technical material that at once embraces and distills its convolutions; and perhaps most vividly of all, the virtually sui generis admixture of art, science, poetry, and philosophy that has taken Kac’s work from street performance to telepresence, from the genome of a rabbit to the cosmic world of satellites and interplanetary spacecraft.

This last quality—a commitment to the idea that the technological and the numinous will always be found to interpenetrate, if you look in the right places, and with the right sort of eye—informs effectively every work on view. Consider the five earliest, which run, respectively, on an Apple III computer and on four Minitel terminals, a videotex system designed to deliver electronic data to phone users via a free screen and keyboard setup that was rolled out beginning in 1980 by the French governmental postal and telephone body as a direct result of the conclusions of the Nora-Minc report. Yet if each of these five works is grounded in an intricate network of highly technological phenomena, their subject matter—ecstasy, conjuring, chaos, individuality, sexual desire—seem as though they could hardly be further from the world of circuit boards, ASCII code, and telephone cables. Like all of Kac’s work, they hover productively between the finely specific tolerances of the laboratory and the liberatory open spaces of affect and imagination.

In other works here, Kac explores zones where technology, image, and language intersect and invite attention, via media like the telephone and television, in a looping hypertext poem controlled by the viewer, in an animated self-portrait GIF or a series of spiraling epistolary fragments whose twirling involutions mimic the shifting subjectivities represented by the text. And in a trio of the artist’s Lagoogleglyphs, the most recent of the works on view, Kac conflates one of the oldest human impulses—mark-making in the landscape—with one of the new aspects of our thoroughly mediated twenty-first-century existence, the diffusion of data by those universal, ever-transmitting satellites predicted by Nora and Minc. (All works in the show created by Kac in the twenty-first century are presented as NFTs.)

Part of an ongoing series of “space artworks” designed to be encountered both in person, literally on the ground, and via the scenes captured and relayed by the now ubiquitous online and app-based imaging services operated by Google, these inscriptions all take the form of a rabbit’s head, an homage to Alba, the bunny that Kac created in 2000 by introducing into its genome a synthetic form of the GFP (green fluorescent protein) found in Aequorea victoria, a bioluminescent species of jellyfish. Arguably Kac’s best known work—and certainly his most widely discussed and controversial—GFP Bunny was described by the artist as a project not concerned with the “creation of genetic objects” but rather “the invention of transgenic social subjects.”[3] “Alba is a participant in the ‘GFP Bunny’ transgenic artwork,” wrote Kac. “So is anyone who comes in contact with her, and anyone who gives any consideration to the project. A complex set of relationships between family life, social difference, scientific procedure, interspecies communication, public discussion, ethics, media interpretation, and art context is at work.” His contextualization of the work not as an objet d’art concerned with “a traditional aesthetics that privileges formal concerns, material stability, and hermeneutical isolation” but as a “complex social event” that places into productive tension the scientific and the artistic, provides a guide for reading these computer-based works as well—not simply as a series of interactions between code and circuitry, between data and devices, but rather as gestures that melt and spread beyond their immediately present materiality to engage questions about the way we think, communicate, and make in our irreversibly technologized world.