Eduardo Kac Explores New Frontier In Art

By Kevin Nance

We used to know what art was, or at least we thought we did. It waspainting and sculpture, shape and line, color and texture. It was madewith pens, paint brushes, chisels, molten metal poured into casts. It wasfor sale.

But the work of Eduardo Kac is none of these things.

His is a world of "telepresence" installations, in which people,robots and sometimes animals and plants interact mysteriously, separatedby thousands of miles yet brought together by computer networks, the Internet,telephones, video and audio equipment and high-tech virtual-reality gear.

He creates "holopoems," three-dimensional pools of light inwhich words and letters appear and disappear in shifting, turbulent patterns,signifying first one thing, then another. He makes computer images thatcombine his backgrounds in linguistics and semiotics with his history asa billboard and graffiti artist.

Space, it turns out, isn't the final frontier. New-media art is, andKac is one of its leading pioneers.

Kac (pronounced "cats") is part of "Out of Bounds: NewWork by Eight Southeast Artists," a high-profile avant-garde exhibitopening this week at Atlanta's Nexus Contemporary Art Center in collaborationwith the Committee for the Olympic Games' Cultural Olympiad.

If Kac's tools and methods are unconventional, so are his goals. Hehas ideas he wants to communicate, but so what? Far more important, hesays, is the exchange between artist and audience. The traditional artistsays, "Listen to me"; Kac says, "Let's have a chat."

"In my work, what is there is negotiation of meaning, not communicationof meaning," he said recently. "There isn't a message that isso important that I have the right to speak, and you have only to listen.There's no hierarchy. There's no pre-coded message or previously determinedcontent. Whatever we do, whatever we say, is the result of our negotiation."

But for all his newfangled notions and techno-trendiness, Kac is morethan a hacker with a taste for dabbling in art. His central impulse isstraight out E.M. Forster: "Only connect ..."

Three of Kac's favorite words are "loop," "link"and "network." His need to bring people throughout the worldtogether in community, virtual or otherwise, is all-consuming. In his vision,we're separated from each other, tragically segregated, sealed off. Tobridge our gaps of space, time, class and culture is Kac's mission. Todo so in ways that are beautiful -- "I see beauty in computer networking,"he said without a trace of irony and with no small amount of tenderness-- is his heaven.

"There are a lot of artists now working in these new cutting-edgemedia, but Ed is one of the few with a soul that shines through the circuitboards," said Julia Fenton, who helped select Kac's work for the Atlantaexhibit from more than 1,500 nominations and 150 studio visits in 12 states.

"He has a real content that comes through, a contemporary contentthat springs from the kind of philosophical and technological base thatwe're all living with now," she said. "But it's also an emotional,interpersonal content. He's presenting the human tragedy as it always hasbeen: We're lonely voyagers on this planet, struggling for connection."

'Either/or doesn't work'

Kac grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, under a repressive military regimethat used intimidation, torture and even killing to maintain power. Itwas only when he was in his late teens -- he's now 33 -- that the processof democratization began, allowing artists to begin to pursue their visionwithout fear of government reprisals.

In retrospect, he concedes, growing up in a totalitarian society probablyplayed a significant role in forming his radically democratic aestheticsensibility. Deeply suspicious of hierarchical and rigidly linear waysof thinking, Kac pursued an artistic career in which responsibility forcreating meaning was always shared with the viewer/participant.

He began in the early 1980s as a performance artist interested in bodypolitics, the joyful reclaiming of physicality and sexuality that had beenrepressed by the government. He also wrote and performed poetry, much ofit using the sort of slang and humor that had previously been frowned upon.

While pursuing his studies in linguistics and semiology at Rio's PontificiaUniversidade Católica (and reading voraciously in several languagesabout contemporary art and philosophy), Kac began experimenting with multimediaart, including graffiti, billboards, copy and fax machines, "booksculpture" and so on.

Finally, he began to investigate the possibilities of holography --three-dimensional images created with lasers and white light projectedthrough photographic film or computer-generated transparencies -- and developedhis own brand of what he calls "holopoetry."

In Kac's view, the printed word was too rigid and confining. Holographywas the perfect means to create the more fluid, unstable environment hewanted -- an environment in which letters and words could appear and disappear,configure and reconfigure, cohering or not, all dependent on the perspectiveof the viewer. As Kac wrote in an essay, it's all an expression of "avision of the word, and the world, as malleable."

In the holopoem "Adhuc," for example, it's possible to seethe words "never," "forever" and "whenever"at different times. In "Astray in Deimos," the words "mist"and "eerie" sometimes combine to suggest "mystery."

"The holopoems are about the dissolution of the rigidity of thepoetic space," Kac said. "We have offered challenges to a lotof people since Gutenberg, but it's time to look at other storage mediathan the book."

He compared the experience of viewing his holopoems with floating inspace.

"I saw once a video of a frog that they let loose inside a spaceshuttle -- oh boy, what would I give to be that frog? -- and the frog didnot know what to do. Swimming in zero gravity, the creature was like, 'Whatis this? Where am I? What's going on?'

"This is what the holopoems do. We have this binary mode of mentaloperation. It's either/or, black or white. But in the holopoems, languageis not fixed. It's not stable. Either/or doesn't work. For you it may be'either,' for me it may be 'or.' But these are reversible, and as we reversethem, we find things along the way. So this pendular motion, this instability,is not something that you can ignore. I'm asking you not to ignore it,because that is my contribution."

Most people looking at the holopoems try to reduce them "to a common,familiar experience," Kac said. "They just try to read the words.But sometimes it's just not there for them to read. Because if they neverturn their heads a little bit to the right or left to look at it from adifferent angle, they'll never see it."

'Rara Avis'

Kac still makes holopoems, although recently he's begun to create "hyperpoems,"open-ended poems using hypertext technology available on the World WideWeb. In hypertext, viewers are given a document piecemeal; they mouse-clickon a word or phrase of their choice to get to a new word or series of words,thus determining the sequence -- and therefore the meaning -- of the overalltext.

Kac also continues a series of computer-generated images called "Erratum,"which combines colorful abstract backgrounds with pairs of words, mostof them near-homophones (such as "knife/night") which invitesubtle leaps of intuition and connection. (These and other examples ofKac's work are available for viewing on his Web page)

In recent years, Kac has increasingly concentrated on "telepresence"projects involving various combinations of computer networks, telecommunications,robotics, videoconferencing, remote participants and spaces and the Internet.

Beginning in 1989, while Kac was finishing his studies at the Schoolof the Art Institute of Chicago, he and his friend Ed Bennett collaboratedon a series of telepresence installations involving "Ornitorrinco"("platypus" in Portuguese). This was a mobile, wireless robotcontrolled simultaneously by remote participants in various cities acrossthe country (including Chicago, Seattle and Lexington) and broadcast onthe Internet.

The fleeting, tantalizing subtext? A vision of global community.

"We are living in a mediascape, in a forest of electrons, if youwill, which shape everything: who we are, our identity, how we talk, thewords we use, the way we think, everything," Kac said. "Partof what I do is remodulate the mediascape, make it do things that it'snot supposed to, to show there are alternative ways of thinking, doing,interacting, collaborating, dialoguing -- ways that hopefully expand ourperception of ourselves, that show us that things don't have to be theway they are, that there are networks that promote a more collaborative,participatory, caring experience."

Kac is working "in an area that the majority of people don't evenknow exists," said Jack Gron, chairman of the Art Department at theUniversity of Kentucky. "He combines the best of electronics and scienceas well as conceptual exploration in his work. It has the ability to reacha broad range of people simultaneously, in real time, across continents,which is not available in any other medium. He's really one of the leadersin the field. As time goes on, he'll be identified as one of the peoplewho's made strong contributions to making art on this new frontier."

Kac's latest contribution may be his most ambitious so far. "RaraAvis," his telepresence installation opening Friday through Aug. 24in Atlanta, is a complex system of networked components that form a metaphorof human connection through a shared body and vision.

When viewers enter the gallery in Atlanta, they will see a 21-feet-by-22-feetaviary containing a telerobotic macaw (a South American parrotlike bird),about 10 live finches and some plants.

Using a virtual-reality headset, the viewer will see what the macawsees with its high-tech videocamera eyes (one of which is recording inlow-resolution black-and-white, the other in high-resolution color). Infact, the viewer will have the sense of becoming the macaw; when the viewerturns to the right or left, the macaw will do likewise.

The video images recorded by the macaw will be transmitted to a computerat UK, which will then reflect the images onto theproject's Web page and onto the M-Bone, an elite subset of the Internet.(Kac said this is to point up the hierarchies of Internet access.)

Anyone with Internet access will be able to view the black-and-whitevideo by downloading free software (a link will be provided on the Webpage) or the color video by downloading a different program for a fee (anotherhierarchy metaphor). Frame grabs from the video also will be uploaded every10 seconds to the Web page.

A loop will be established when people accessing the Web page speakinto their videoconferencing microphones. Back in Atlanta, this will causethe macaw, and perhaps the live finches in response, to sing.

"If you say 'I love you' or 'I hate you,' it will be the same,"Kac said. "All the macaw knows is that somebody somewhere -- Johannesburg,Kiev, Rio, London -- is out there on the network. When you are in the gallerylistening, you and the birds, all of you inside and outside the cage, metaphoricallyand literally, will know that somebody somewhere, maybe than one person,maybe hundreds of people, are at that moment, on the Net, all togetherin that body, all at the same time. That body becomes a shared space. Thatbody becomes everything."

Originally published in the daily newspaper Herald-Leader, June23, 1996.