Osthoff, Simone. "Elsewhere in Contemporary Art: Topologies of Artists’ Works, Writings, and Archives", Art Journal, Winter 2006, CAA, New York, pp. 6-17.

Kac’s second book with selected essays from 1992-2002 was published in 2005 by University of Michigan Press and titled Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots. In the foreword James Elkins points out:

This is an unusual book, because Kac has participated in the movements he discusses. He is an artist and also, at times, an historian. The combination is rare. A comparison might be made to Robert Motherwell, except that as an historian he was more concerned with surrealism than the art of his own generation: he separated documentation from creation in a way that Kac does not. Eugène Fromentin might be another example, and among near-contemporaries there are Meyer Schapiro, Leo Steinberg, and David Summers. It’s a short list. The closest comparisons may be to Moholy-Nagy, or to Paul Signac, who wrote a history of French painting up to and including his own generation, or, though he’s not much of an historian, Frank Stella.

Elkins is right in positioning Kac as a historian “at times,” because most of the time, the artist is a theoretician. In his writings the historical research is at the service of his theoretical argumentation. Kac’s book articulates several new concepts he introduced such as telepresence art, telempathy, and performative ethics. Kac’s work and essays about a new art based on the networking of humans, plants, animals, and machines examine not only current issues in science, technology, and culture, but also dialogue with other artists and radical thinkers, often across time and space, who like him sought art’s meaning elsewhere in nontraditional places and fields of knowledge.

The meaning Kac gives the word “aesthetics,” for instance, can be understood as both a topos (a theme) and also as a topology (either physical or logical). In the case of information networks, processes of communication can differ depending upon whether one is referring to a physical topology (eg. the shape of a local area network) or a logical topology (eg. the protocols that allow data flow within the networks). Kac’s topological esthetics emphasizes communication processes in real time events and, since his employment of biotechnology as a medium, in the creation and social integration of new life forms.

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