Originally published in the art magazine World Art, N. 1, 1996,pp. 18-23

by Simone Osthoff


"I don't see myself as an 'American artist' or a 'Brazilian artist,'a 'Holography artist' or a
'Computer artist,' a 'Language artist' or an 'Installation artist,'"Eduardo Kac insists. "Labels are
not very helpful and are often used to marginalize people. I prefer notto be bound by any particular
nationality or geography. I work with telecommunications, trying to breakup these boundaries."
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1962, Kac (pronounced Katz) moved to the US in1989 to study fine art
at the Art Institute of Chicago. With a characteristic disregard for nationalboundaries, he went on to
represent both the US and Brazil in international exhibitions.

Kac belongs to the '80s generation who fought to reclaim political freedomin Brazil after 15 years
of military dictatorship. His work continues to explore the issues of informationcensorship and
freedom of speech that so obsessed Brazilian social life at this time.However, Kac is among the
few artists from that generation to continue charting new territory, usingnew technologies and
exploring the cultural problems they raise.

Currently assistant professor of new media in the department of art atthe University of Kentucky,
Lexington, Kac is documenting the unrecorded history of electronic artin Brazil. A member of the
editorial board of Leonardo, he is also guest editor for the American journalVisible Language of an
international issue on the relationship between experimental poetry andnew media. Although he
lives in Lexington, he uses the Internet to work all over the world.

Back in 1983, it was language that drew Kac to holography, or 'holopoetry'as he describes it. "I
am not interested in holography as a 3-dimensional form. I am really interestedin holography as a
time-based medium. In many of my holograms, time flows back and forth,in non-linear ways. I
just don't think in terms of one word after another, as we normally speakand write. I'm less
interested in conveying the result of my thought than in conveying theprocess of my thought.
That's why the language in my holograms fluctuates, oscillates, changesand disappears. By not
having a linear sequence, you can explore the image in any direction youwant. You have a
time-reversal possibility. You orchestrate time structures in space. You'rereally dealing with a
space-time continuum and breaking it into orchestrated discontinuities."The holographic medium
allows me to work with language floating in space and time, breaking down,melting and
dissolving, and recombining itself to produce new meanings. This work revealsa distrust, a
disbelief in the idea that we can simply use language to communicate amessage, as the slave of
meaning. I'm more interested in suggestion and evocation."

The intersection of word and image has always been of interest to artistsand poets, and was a
central concern of the Brazilian Neoconcrete movement of the late '50s.Regardless of the level of
ambiguity found in their work, most postconceptual artists, such as JennyHolzer, Barbara Kruger
and Lorna Simpson, have used language in a very direct way. By contrast,Kac's use of language is
an equivocal one.

"Words are not containers that hold meaning, like a cup contains coffee,"he explains. "I don't think
one can fully understand anything or anyone. There will always be a tensionbetween what one tries
to communicate and what one tries to understand, and this tension oscillateswith the dynamic
pattern of language.

"I am interested in proposing alternatives to the unidirectionalityof the system of art; we have come
to realize that language is truly unstable and absolutely turbulent. Wewould like to be in control of
language and arrest this flux of events that surrounds us. I believe inthe negotiation of meaning,
not the communication of meaning. When we use language in a linear way,in art and poetry, we
are in danger of by-passing the fundamental problem of our own medium,which is language itself.
What about language's role in shaping our perception of the world?"

In much contemporary art, words are immediately legible, as they are inthe mass media. In Kac's
series of still images Erratum, however, he created a visual amalgam thatmakes the words less
readily perceptable. "I would like the viewer to spend some time withthe work, to explore his or
her own readings. The series is very painterly, so it plays with certainexpectations the viewer might
bring to the experience. But the seduction of color and surface is fullyintegrated with the suggested
semantic resonations, which brings the viewing - or reading - experiencemuch closer to literature.
In Erratum, pairs of words are seen in a field in which layers of colorsembed and dissolve the
verbal forms. It is as if the semantic tensions created between the wordswere rendered visually,
translated into the perceptual tension created between the word fragmentsand the surrounding
field." Like many of Kac's works, Erratum can be seen on the Internet.

The emphasis on experience and process is central to Kac's telepresenceinstallations, as it was to
his public performances in Rio in the early '80s. "In my work in theearly '80s the body was
everything. The body was the tool I used to question conventions, dogmasand taboos - patriarchy,
religion, heterosexuality, politics, puritanism. The body became my writingmedium ultimately."
In such performances Kac would use props such as 'object poems' (seen onpages 18-19) and
provoke the audience to participate. If a member of the audience couldanswer his questions they
could take the prop home. On February 13, 1982, Kac celebrated the 60thanniversary of the Week
of Modern Art of 1922, which launched modern art in Brazil, with a performanceat Ipanema. "The
whole beach was energized," Kac recalls. "It concluded with acall for everybody on the beach to
undress (which is absolutely illegal) and enjoy themselves. Several peopledid. This was followed
by a naked demonstration along the beach. We carried banners and posters,and distributed
pamphlets calling for a new art, a new society and a new life. The verylast action of the
performance was a symbolic dive into the Atlantic Ocean. We all came outof the water together -
wet and reborn."

'Telepresence art,' according to Kac, occurs at the intersection of robotics,telecommunications and
computers, within a wider framework of electronic interactive art. "Itimplies less stress on form
and composition, and more emphasis on behavior - choice, action - and negotiationof meaning. It
highlights the public who, as participants, acquire an active role in shapingtheir experience. Instead
of the performance of the artist, members of the public now perform. Therole of the artist in this
case is not so much to encode messages unidirectionally, as to define parametersfrom which
experiences will unfold. Telepresence art also implies the primacy of realtime over real space."
This issue of real time over real space informs an ongoing collaborationwith Ed Bennett that began
in 1989. "I created installations to the scale of a telerobot, thatwe call 'Ornitorrinco,' or 'platypus'
in Portuguese." 'Ornitorrinco' - a 'hybrid' creature, an egg-layingmammal - is an apt title for the
heterogeneous mixtures that are represented by the telerobot. The resultingwork, Ornitorrinco in
Eden, took place on October 23, 1994, for approximately 5 hours. Kac believesthis to have been
the first telepresence art work on the Internet, explaining that "theword 'telepresence' here refers
specifically to our fully mobile, wireless telerobot. The piece bridgedthe placeless space of the
Internet to physical spaces in Seattle, Chicago and Lexington. It consistedof these three nodes of
active participation and multiple nodes of observation worldwide."

The telerobot in Chicago was controlled in real time, via a regular telephonelink, by participants in
Lexington and Seattle. "Communication took place not through any verbalor oral exchange but
through the rhythms that resulted from their engagement in what was a shared,a mediated,
experience. And as the piece was experienced through the Internet, anybodyin the world with Net
access could see it, dissolving gallery boundaries and making the workaccessible to larger
audiences. The theme of the installation was the accelerated decay of media.Ornitorrinco was
immersed in a garden of technological obsolescence made of old records,damaged computer
boards, broken mechanisms and erased tapes."

Viewers from various countries, including Finland, Canada, Germany andIreland, came on-line
and were able to see the remote installation in Chicago from the pointof view of Ornitorrinco as
controlled by anonymous participants in Lexington and Seattle. The ideaof looking at the world
from the perspective of the object is a fascinating one. "Klee oncewrote that objects in his studio
contemplated him," says Kac. "Lacan speaks of objects lookingback, in the sense that objects have
meaning not only because we can see them, but because they are part ofa much larger network of
meanings, which includes language. Ideas in art can't always be thoughtof literally. "What the
telepresence installation with the Ornitorrinco telerobot is all aboutis to metaphorically ask the
viewer to look at the world from someone else's point of view. It's a non-metaphysicalout-of-body
experience, if you will. You are asked, or provoked, to remove yourselffrom your direct sense of
the space that surrounds you and transport yourself, in space and time,to another body, to another
situation, to another identity. This unique situation raises the issueof whether this is even possible,
or desirable, and what its implications are."

This work creates a new communicative situation that has not been experiencedbefore.
"Ornitorrinco in Eden created a context in which anonymous participantsperceived that it is only
through their shared experience and non-hierarchical collaboration thatlittle by little, or almost
frame by frame, a new reality is constructed. In this new reality, spatio-temporaldistances become
irrelevant, virtual and real spaces become equivalent, and linguistic barriersare temporarily removed
in favor of a common empowering experience."

Kac's work implies that the fundamental relationship today is that betweenappearance and
disappearance rather than that between appearance and reality. "Welive in a world where our mental
images of places, cultures and people are no longer being acquired throughdirect observation. We
can all conjure up images of the Moon, we can dream and see ourselves onthe Moon. We have
memories of places we have never visited. We think of places and we havedeveloped concepts
about cultures that we have never seen, never experienced. In my telepresenceinstallations, I'm
making geographic displacements that reflect that. Nothing exists untilyou make it your own, until
you claim it, until you create your own narrative, until you constructit.

The linkage between physical spaces and computer and telephone networksappears in different
forms throughout his recent work. He cites Essay Concerning Human Understanding,a
collaboration with New York-based Japanese artist Ikuo Nakamura, in whicha bird in a cage in
Lexington had a sonic dialogue over a regular phone line with a plant locatedat the Science Hall in
New York City. "The bird's voice was sensed by the plant over thephone," says Kac. "The plant's
response, a fluctuating electric field, was converted to audible soundand sent back to the bird's
cage on a loop."

In another work, Dialogical Drawing, two identical pieces hang on a wall:one at the Museum of
Brazilian Art-FAAP, São Paulo, and one in the Center for ContemporaryArt, Lexington. As people
look at them, and make comments to each other, they hear sounds comingfrom the piece on the
wall. The 'drawing' on the wall (a 3-dimensional piece created with mahogany,wires, speakers,
microphones and circuit boards) enables a live, two-directional sonic bridgelinking strangers in
remote countries, in two time zones. "The work is about surprise;the interaction of foreigners, their
cultural references, and the conversations that result from these interactions."
While optimistic about the Net's potential as a venue for artistic investigation,Kac remains
cautious. "There are a number of problems," he says. "Oneis a new kind of 'digital colonialism,'
so to speak, because the language of the Internet is English. The otherproblems are censorship and
access. If you look at the map of the Internet, you see that Africa andSouth America do not have
the same density of nodes you see in Europe and North America. People thatlive in these continents
are being underprivileged, left behind. This is another very importantproblem, because you're
talking about new technologies and communication media on a global scale.Ironically, the distances
between different cultures shrink on a physical level but remain largelyuntouched on a social and
political level. The perpetuation of distance becomes an impediment toknowledge of different
cultures and viewpoints. And in this sense, the simulated experience ofa new and temporary
identity in my telepresence work points to the need for a qualitative changein the use of
communications technology."

In many underdeveloped countries, even a basic thing like the telephoneis a very complex problem.
Technology has layers and levels of meaning in our lives that really haven'tbeen addressed; that's
true from a political view - technology has the potential to empower peoplein many ways. If we
leave technology behind in art, if we don't question how technology affectsour lives, if we don't
take charge, if we don't use these technological media to raise questionsabout contemporary life,
who is going to do that?"