Akademickie Centrum Designu, Lodz, Poland, "Lagoglyphs: The Bunny Variations" (July 03 to September 01, 2024)
Magdalena Komborska-Łączna, Curator
In 2000, with the use of genetic engineering, Eduardo Kac created the artwork GFP Bunny. The rabbit Alba began her life when a fluorescent gene from a jellyfish was implanted into a rabbit egg. The albino rabbit with pink eyes glowed fluorescent green in the corresponding blue light. With Alba, Kac also created the Lagoglyph series — a "rabbitographic" form of communication. For his 2024 solo show at the Academic Design Center in Lodz, Kac premiered a new set of Lagoglyph Lux sculptures as well as the fifth in his Lagoogleglyph series of works conceived to be seen via satellite.
The first in the Lagoglyph series was a "leporimorphic" work (another neologism coined by Kac) entitled Lagoglyphs: The Bunny Variations (2007). The lagoglyphs form an invented script with ever-changing characters. Lagoglyph Animation (2009) takes this script and generates a parametric animation in real time. Never repeating, it ensures viewers are always seeing something new. The event of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption that paralyzed Europe in 2010 inspired Kac, who began work on the Volcano Paintings (2010). The hybrid lagoglyphs took the shape of an explosive, destructive form and translated the Alba "rabbit" into a new, generative and molten matter. The fourth (but not the last) permutation of the Lagoglyph series is Lagoglyph Porcelain (2011), through which the series emerges in three-dimensional space. Composed of black and hand-mixed green layers that form the outline of the Alba rabbit, it was rendered in very fine porcelain.
The Lagoglyph series, according to critic Brian Droitcour, is a vivid and "liquid poetry," defined as a language that "appears online in time as a flow (...)."
Kac’s new Lagoglyph set on display at Lodz consists of two laser-cut module elements, with one in green (transparent) and one in black (opaque). The 21 sculptures, set in a flowing wavy structure, create new pathways for the light in the gallery space. Spreading around the viewers, light rays in bright green color communicate through luminous variations, as both natural and artificial light interact through reflection, diffraction, absorption, and diffusion. The flash of light was interestingly defined by French sociologist Paulo Virillio, who proposed that in place of chronological systems (time taken as a linear succession of moments), the rhythm of the elements (past, present and future) has entered a chronophotographic system with a new rhythm constituted by underlighting, illumination, and overlighting. The Lagoglyphs can thus be associated with a new time system. When viewed from the perspective of the artist, the Lagoglyphs give shape to Kac's personal and natural means of expression (according to Władysław Strzemiński's "Theory of Vision", each type of consciousness pattern uses a specific means of expression). "Every new set of means of expression is at the same time a new set of formal means. Thus, changes in formal means result from a change in the visual base, from a change in the type of vision that defines the relationship between humans and nature."
The new, laser-cut Lagoglyphs are somewhere between natural and stimulated light. They can be perceived individually, but taken together they form a compact concert of diffused rays against which the viewer can walk in a luminous composition of "receptio luminum" or, after Virillio, a spatial "luminous image.” Viewers move smoothly along, unleashing an experience that is comparable to an escape from the prison of their own bodily senses, surrendering to the artist’s extraordinary vision of light.
Kac’s exhibition includes a new video work (Lagoogleglyph #5). It is one of the five on display, from a series that captures the scale of not only light but mainly the cosmic dimension of Alba's "eye". The Lagoogleglyphs are physical works installed in different locations to be seen via satellite and easily accessible online. They offer a panoramic view of the Universe from human and non-human positions, having the Earth as the point of reference while living and non-living matter float in the direction of the zooming eye.
Back to Kac's Lagoglyph Lux