http://www.artzine-journal.com/3rd_Issue/Source/inkacen.html.

Yiannis Melanitis interviews Eduardo Kac, creator of the transgenic GFP Bunny, on "post-digital analogue", trangenic art, his artworks "GFP Bunny" and "The Eighth Day" and the role of the artist nowadays.

Yiannis Melanitis: In a conversation we had at an interval of your speech in the Performative Site Conference 1999, which took place at Penn State University, we discussed some lacunas in the contemporary version of postmodernity. Have we reached a stage where an artwork regains its analogue characteristics after its dematerialization by digital information?

Eduardo Kac: Now that the digital revolution has achieved closure, we are seeing the beginning of what the English critic Mike Punt has called the "post-digital analogue". Let me clarify this: when I say that "the digital revolution has achieved closure" I'm not saying that there will not be new digital developments in the future. Clearly, new technologies will be developed. What I mean is that for many decades these new digital technologies will not be a radical departure like the Web was in the early 1990s. These new technologies will simply expand the digital revolution of the last two decades. In the near future, for example, we'll have broadband global wireless access from small portable devices. Now that the digital revolution has completed its main cycle, it is the field of biotechnology that is bringing unprecedented social change and prompting renewed philosophical reflection on profound issues about what is life, about evolution, about our relationship to other members of the community of life, about what it means to be human. Naturally, artists are tuned to this accelerated process and seek to participate in it, intervening critically but also creating real biotechnological works that are alive and demand response on the part of the viewer. Anything that is alive is analogue. Biotechnological art is alive, even if it has been designed digitally, like some of my transgenic artworks. So, transgenic art is analogue; an analogue that can emerge from a computer screen into the physical world and that, in certain cases, can also be part of the digital network through a digital-biological interface.

Do you think there are differences in the way an artefact of the GFP Bunny variety has been received in Europe and the United States?


"GFP Bunny", Alba
(Julia Friedman Gallery, Chicago) Yes, no doubt. The differences can be seen among European countries and among different areas of the United States as well. Cultural differences always play a role in the reception of any work of art. In the case of "GFP Bunny", as you may recall, one key element was for my transgenic rabbit, called Alba, to come to Chicago and live with me and my family. My goal was to take personal responsibility for Alba's wellbeing, introduce the transgenic animal to a social setting and experience dialogical interaction with our transgenic Other on a daily basis. So, in this case, probably the most outstanding example of cultural difference is the fact that in the United States rabbits are traditionally house pets. You can find rabbits served as food in the United States, but it is not very common. In France, on the other hand, the concept of a rabbit as a house pet does not exist. Rabbits are part of the French imaginary primarily as food. So, in France, the idea of bringing a rabbit home as a pet sounds as strange as the idea of bringing a chicken as a pet to an apartment in the United States. This gives the work a very different resonance, particularly because part of my goal is to create semantic tension between something that sounds unfamiliar and potentially frightening ("transgenic") and something familiar and cuddly ("rabbit").

Time seems to be a decisive factor in the way an artwork is received by the public. Viewers respond to the artwork (in terms of feedback) and realize some important parameters pertaining to it long after their initial contact with it. Was this the case with the GFP Bunny?

Yes, absolutely. If one looks at the "Alba Guestbook" http://sprocket.telab.artic.edu/ekac/bunnyadd.html, for example, or at the transgenic bibliography http://www.ekac.org/transartbiblio.html, one sees the multitude of responses to the work. The work continues to generate debate, interest, fear, fascination, curiosity, and many other emotional and intellectual responses, both among art audiences and the general public. As biotechnology becomes part of popular culture, the reception of "GFP Bunny" will continue to change.

You are Associate Professor at the Art Institute of Chicago. What exactly do you include in your lectures on art history?

I teach many classes on a variety of topics. Two examples: "History of Art and Technology" and "Art and Biotechnology". In the first class I offer an overview of media art in the twentieth century, from radio in the 1920s to the emergence of biotechnology in the late 1990s. In the second one, I focus on biotechnology, examining "biopolitics", the question of genetics in art, aspects of biopop, and questions of information, context and meaning in biotechnology.

Could you analyze your latest work "The Eighth Day" for us?


"The Eighth Day", GFP Fish

"The Eighth Day", GFP Mice

"The Eighth Day", Jelly Fish
(Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University, Tempe) "The Eighth Day" is a transgenic artwork that investigates the new ecology of fluorescent creatures that is evolving worldwide. I developed this work between 2000 and 2001 at the Institute for Studies in the Arts, Arizona State University, Tempe. The piece brings together living transgenic life forms and a biological robot (biobot) in an environment enclosed under a clear 4-foot diameter Plexiglas dome, thus making visible what it would be like if these creatures would in fact coexist in the world at large. All creatures express the GFP gene through bioluminescence visible with a naked eye. The transgenic creatures in "The Eighth Day" are GFP plants, GFP amoebae, GFP fish, and GFP mice. A biobot is a robot with an active biological element within its body, which is responsible for aspects of its behavior. The biobot created for "The Eighth Day" has a colony of GFP amoebae called Dyctiostelium discoideum as its "brain cells". These "brain cells" form a network within a bioreactor that constitutes the "brain structure" of the biobot. When amoebas divide the biobot exhibits dynamic behavior inside the enclosed environment. Participants on the Internet can take the point of view of the biobot and actively control it. "The Eighth Day" creates a context in which participants can reflect on the meaning of a transgenic ecology from a first-person perspective.

What is the role of the artist nowadays according to Eduardo Kac?

The idea of the artist laboring in isolation in his studio and crafting an individual ornate object for detachedcontemplation is as anachronistic as the idea of the scientist sitting under a tree and being hit by an apple. The artist is not a decorator. The artist is a philosopher (not with a hammer, but with a wireless computer and a cloning toolkit). I feel that art must overcome the anesthetic condition and the state of inertia we live in, and awake our cognition and sensoriality. Why? While other fields have similar goals (literary philosophy, for example), art can reach out to a larger audience (potentially a global audience, as in GFP Bunny) and accomplish this goal. Art is philosophy in the wild.

How could one define the measure of novelty in an artwork so as to distill a methodology of art strategy?

Clearly, novelty per se is meaningless. It is important to consider the level of inventiveness of the work itself, the seriousness of the artist, the context created by the work, its resonance in its time, and its life beyond its time. There are many other factors that play a role in the successful reception of a work of art. Sometimes, even though the work is revolutionary, it may take about 50 years for the art audience to fully realize this, as in the case of Duchamp's "Fountain", from 1917. In other cases, 50 years pass and the public still does not realize the true importance of a groundbreaking artwork, as is still the case of Moholy-Nagy's "Light-Space Modulator" (1930). At the same time, as Joseph Kosuth (Art After Philosophy, 1969) once put it: "The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art; which is another way of saying "what they added to the conception of art" or what wasn't there before they started. Artists question the nature of art by presenting new propositions as to art's nature. And to do this, one cannot concern oneself with the handed-down "language" of traditional art, as this activity is based on the assumption that there is only one way of framing art propositions."

In your opinion, does every novel artwork elicit a political reaction from the viewers?

No. In fact, many novel works elicit indifference from viewers. Again, many factors play a role, but the level of inventiveness of the work itself, the seriousness of the artist, and of how a work is contextualized, are critical for the realization of the work.


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Melanitis Yiannis is an artist (MA in Digital Art) and Phd candidate at the Athens School of Fine Arts.

E-mail: melanitis@hotmail.com
URL: http://www.geocities.com/melanitis2001

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