Originally published in Tema Celeste, N. 81 July-September 2000,Milan, pp. 76-81.

EDUARDO KAC: INTERVIEW

Daniele Perra

Daniele Perra: You started your exploration of art with a series ofperformances in the early '80s when you were still living in Brazil, yournative country. Since then you have experimented with several other media.What do you remember of those times?

Eduardo Kac: My performances, from 1980 to 1982, took place mostly inpublic spaces, such as Ipanema beach and the main square in Rio de Janeiro,called Cinelandia. The work evolved as a reaction to the very specificconditions of that time and place--a period of transition when a dictatorshipstill ruled the country. Those performances were very political, and theyemployed humor and colloquial language, as well as multiple media, as toolsto reach a larger audience. That work was part of an effort to regain asense of community, to establish a sense of public space, and to open upa discussion about a praxis of the body that was no longer centered onthe tortured body of political repression but on the pleasure of the bodyto move towards a new beginning. For these performances I wrote texts meantto be performed face to face with the public, often incorporating otherelements that added interactivity to the experience.

Daniele Perra: "Holopoetry", a term you coined in 1983, marksan important point in the development of your art. What are the basic elementsof that new artistic expression?

Eduardo Kac: A Holopoem, is a poem conceived and displayed holographically.This means, first of all, that such a poem is organized in an immaterialthree-dimensional space. Holopoetry began in 1983 by freeing words fromthe page. As distinguished from traditional visual poetry, its goal isto dynamically express the discontinuity of thought. In other words, theperception of a holopoem takes place neither linearly nor simultaneouslybut rather through fragments observed at random, depending on the observer'sposition relative to the poem. Perception in space of colors, volumes,degrees of transparency, changes in form, relative positions of lettersand words, animation, and the appearance and disappearance of forms isinseparable from the syntactic and semantic perception of the text.

Daniele Perra: On the landing of the Mars Pathfinder spacecraft youwrote: "Today, 4 July 1997, is an exciting day for art". Whatdid you mean? Is there any direct relationship between this event and newcontemporary art forms?

Eduardo Kac: I believe that in addition to works of art that use technologycreatively, there is a sphere of social production that I informally call"works of culture". These "works of culture" are objects,processes, systems, or events that--while certainly not works of art--havethe power to mobilize our cognitive or emotional response. To give a latenineteenth-century example: in 1896 an experiment was carried out to transmita telegram around the world, completing the global trip in fifty minutes.A late twentieth-century example: a wireless telerobot was sent to Mars,controlled from the earth, and its visual perspective was shown live ontelevision for all the world to see. I have been developing the aestheticsof telepresence since 1986; so this Mars event was a confirmation of myintuition that telepresence will become a part of daily life in the future.

Daniele Perra: In your work you have used many types of media, fromfaxes in Elasticfax to TV for Interfaces, from telepresence for The OrnitorrincoProject to Internet for Uirapuru for which you won an award at the ICCBiennial of Tokyo last year. How did you get so interested in new technologies?How do you use new media, such as Internet, in your artwork?

Eduardo Kac: We are witnessing a paradigm shift in the arts, in whicha self-centered approach--such as autobiographic performance, Abstract-Expressionism--isreplaced by dialogical situations. With the globalization of the economyand the expansion of networks, connectivity has becomes near-ubiquitous,where before, unidirectional discourse--as in painting or single-channelvideo--was predominant. My work responds to this characteristic of contemporarylife, and at the same time probes into and hopes to contribute to, ourpassage into a postbiological culture. I see my role as an artist, is notto give the public a fully finished piece, allowing them only to interpreteit, but as sharing the tools--the interface, the robotic body, the telecommunicationslink--that inform the work, and invite the public to explore it. As theyexplore the possibilities, they expand them. I have merged the notionsof event, performance, and installation into something new, incorporatingelements such as telerobotics. New concepts need a new vocabulary. That'swhy I use the words "telepresence", "biotelematics","transgenic art".

Uirapuru is an example of a work that combines telepresence, virtualreality and the Internet. A fishlike form floats over a forest createdinside the gallery and responds in real time to the commands of visitorsto the exhibition, as well as to those of people connected on the Internet,who interact with an electronic image of the fish. All around the gallerythere are sensors that detect the movements of the remote-controlled fishand create three-dimensional models, with the result that the movementsof the fish in the gallery dictate those of the digital image of Uirapuruin virtual space.

Daniele Perra: Interactive installations usually do not allow peopleto alter the way the artist has conceived them to run. How do you get aroundthat difficulty and let visitors truly interact and "live" itas an active experience through their individual contributions?

Eduardo Kac: I design my works to incorporate the decisions made bythe participants, be they humans, plants, birds, mammals, insects, or bacteria.Every situation, in art as in life, has its own parameters and limitations.So the question is not how to eliminate these restrictions altogether--animpossibility--but how to keep it open enough so that what participantsexperience matters in a significant way. My answer is to remain truly opento the choices and behavior of those taking part to give up a substantialportion of control over the outcome of the work, to accept the experienceas it happens as being a changing field of possibilities, to learn fromit, to grow with it, to be transformed along the way. Interactivity isonly significant when it is structurally meaningful in the work. This changereflects equally profound changes in other fields. Physics acknowledgesuncertainty; anthropology becomes relativistic; philosophy denounces truth;literary criticism breaks away from hermeneutics. In other words, the activecognitive role traditionally played by viewers in interpreting an artworkis now physical, both through the open, rhizomatic paths of the work andtheir own kinesthetic intelligence of the participant. In interactive art,participation is not a metaphor; it is the very process through which theartwork comes into being. Interfaces, for example, was an interactive telecommunicationsproject created by two different groups of artists, one in Chicago andthe other in Pittsburgh, in 1990. The idea was to transmit and randomlyassemble, by television link in real time, images sent by members of thetwo groups. The images sent back and forth were projected onto one bigscreen at the School of the Chicago Art Institute. The group at each endof the link did not know what image the other group was sending becauseevery image took about eight seconds to be visualized ont the screen. Theresult, with the images superimposing on each other, was a kind of free-flowingvisual dialogue, full of surprises and improvisations.

Daniele Perra: You recently coined the term "Transgenic Art"and you created some works such as Genesis (1998-99)--shown for the firsttime at the last Ars Electronica in Linz­which investigate the fieldof genetic engineering. Could you explain to me this new phase of yourartistic development and the reasons why we should consider Genesis a transgenicartwork.

Eduardo Kac: Transgenic art, I propose, is a new art form based on theuse of genetic-engineering techniques to transfer synthetic genes to anorganism or to transfer natural genetic material from one species to another,to create living beings. Molecular genetics allows the artist to engineerplant and animal genome and create new life forms. The nature of this newart is defined not only by the growth of these new forms of life but aboveall by the relationship between artist, public, and transgenic organism.Transgenic artworks can be taken home by the public and grown in the backyardor raised as human companions. With at least one endangered species becomingextinct every day, I suggest that artists can contribute to increasingglobal biodiversity. Ethical concerns are paramount in any artwork, andthey become more crucial than ever in the context of biological art, whena living being is either the artwork itself or part of it. From the perspectiveof interspecies communication, transgenic art calls for a dialogue betweenartist, creature-artwork, and those who come in contact with it.

Genesis is a transgenic artwork that explores the intricate relationshipbetween biology, belief systems, information technology, dialogical interaction,ethics, and the Internet. The key element of the work is an "artist'sgene", a synthetic gene that was created by translating a sentencefrom the biblical book of Genesis into Morse Code, and converting the MorseCode into DNA base pairs according to a conversion principle speciallydeveloped for this work. The sentence reads: "Let man have dominionover the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over everyliving thing that moves upon the earth." It was chosen for what itimplies about the dubious notion--divinely sanctioned--of humanity's supremacyover nature. Morse code was chosen because, as the first example of theuse of radiotelegraphy, it represents the dawn of the information age--thegenesis of global communication. The Genesis gene was incorporated intobacteria, which were shown in the gallery. Participants on the Web couldturn on an ultraviolet light in the gallery, causing real, biological mutationsin the bacteria. This changed the biblical sentence in the bacteria. Afterthe show, the DNA of the bacteria was translated back into Morse code,and then back into English. The mutation that took place in the DNA hadchanged the original sentence from the Bible.

Daniele Perra: In your projects, which are always so complex, you oftenneed a team of assistants and the help of researchers in different fields.Are you working on a new project at the moment, or should I say, on a newdiscovery?

Eduardo Kac: Yes. My new transgenic artwork GFP Bunny was presentedin June in Avignon. It was created with the assistance and support of LouisBec, Louis-Marie Houdebine, and Patrick Prunnet and it consists of thecreation of a green fluorescent rabbit and its social integration. "Alba",the green fluorescent bunny, is an albino rabbit. This means that, sinceshe has no pigment, under ordinary environmental conditions she is completelywhite with pink eyes. Alba is not green all the time. She only glows whenilluminated with the correct light. When, and only when, she is illuminatedwith blue light, does she glow with a bright green light. She was createdwith EGFP, an enhanced version, i.e., a synthetic mutation, of the originalgreen fluorescent gene found naturally in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria.EGFP gives about two orders of magnitude greater fluorescence in mammaliancells--including human cells--than the original jellyfish gene. Alba'sname was mutually agreed by my wife, my daughter, and myself. The publicpresentation of Alba was projected for an environment designed to maximizeher comfort. The environment was planned as a normal living room, withchairs, furniture, and a television, where Alba and I could be seen togetherfor the entire duration of the show. My objective in proposing to livewith Alba in the gallery was to affirm our relationship and negate anyidea that she might have been seen and treated as an object.

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