Originally published in CIRCA - Ireland's leading magazine for thevisual arts, N. 89, Autumn 1999.
Part installation, part memory, part spectacle, Time Capsule was realizedon Brazilian television and over the Internet in 1997 by the living artistEduardo Kac and by the dead, living before 1939 in Poland.
September 1, 1939: Nazi troops invade Poland. The war annihilates millionsfor an identity that is their body; millions of others flee, before andafter, one at a time and in great anonymous waves, Eduardo Kac's grandmotheramong them.
November 11, 1997. São Paulo. On hospital-white walls erectedinside the baroque Casa das Rosas Cultural Center hang photos of Kac'sgrandmother: posing in a kayak, sitting on a motorcycle, smiling in themidst of family and friends�. These sepia-toned photos are some of thefew possessions she managed to escape with, passed on to Kac. An inheritance.He calls them time capsules for the memories they hold.
10:05 p.m. Viewers at home see Kac before the photos, sitting on a medicalexamination table, his bare leg waiting to receive a bio-implant that willallow him to be registered with an American company as the owner of himself.TV cameras crowd in, their lights bright as the halogen noon above an operatingtable. The moment passes.
Time is always a division. Assign a number to it, 1939, 1997, and thatdivision is sharpened, each moment distinguished from those that followthe way we in our present always look upon photos of the dead with knowledgethat is distinct from what they could ever know in their present. Yet thepresence of the photo exists within our moment as well, and serves to knitthe two times together. When we look at the sepia-toned photos in TimeCapsule, we enter a world that no longer exists, its pre-war technologyalien, the close-knit family and friends pictured intimating a social structurethat is anachronistic. The people are posed too formally, grandmother wearsher best dress even as she straddles a motorcycle, one leg exposed. Yetat the same time, looking at that leg, we can't help but see a family resemblanceto the leg of the artist exposed on the table. Looking from the face ofthe sepia-toned woman to the living face of the artist, we see continuation.Another inheritance. And we realize that if, as Heraclitus noted, no mancan step in the same river twice, it is equally impossible to be whollyoriginal. This dual nature allows us to read time capsule as "time/capsule,"emphasizing the separation or as "time-capsule," emphasizingthe union. To read it as "Me/Not Me," or as "Us"; toread it as "Then/Now" or as "Then-in-Now." The momentpasses.
10:13 p.m. "So the question of memory in the digital age is centralto this work, correct?" asks Celso Zucatelli, the Canal 21 reporterholding a microphone for Kac's answer. The television broadcast of TimeCapsule is nested within the nightly news so Luciana, the anchorwoman inthe studio, keeps throwing it back to Casa das Rosas for updates. Duringthis one, Kac describes the capsule that will be implanted in his body,a bio-compatible transponder. When energized by a scanner, it emits a low-powerradio signal bearing a unique identification number that can be read bythe scanner. It is this number that the company back in the States willwarehouse as Kac's personal I.D. Whenever the station shows him, the wordVIVO (LIVE) is superimposed on the scene.
It's impossible to leach Time from our bodies, cultures, or identityfor it inheres in us even before the single cell we begin as divides intwo. By the age of three days, infants are flexing muscles in rhythm tothe speech around them. The beating of our hearts, turning of the earth,and other natural rhythms agglutinate with the rhythms of our society intoa sense of time, which in turn informs our sense of self. Indeed, we initiallylearn "duration" from the delay between our first cry and itssatisfaction. Infinite desire bounded by mortal finitude, as Dante hadit. Or sex and death, according to Freud. Time speeds up naturally as weage. But it is also altered by artificial factors. The technological orchestrationof procreation, for example, or of death, or of the intervening duration.It is this vehicle of change that Time Capsule addresses. What, for example,happens to our sense of time if technology increases life span to 150 years?Or 500 years, if researchers at the Geron Corporation learn to operatethe genetic switch to aging that they have recently discovered? What happensto our sense of self if longevity becomes, like so many other things aboutour bodies, a matter of choice? Time Capsule serves as a hinge betweenthat future and our past by inviting us to reflect on a present where communicationis global and instantaneous, where surveillance is increasingly pervasive,commercial and fine-grained. Time Capsule asks us to reflect upon a landscapewhere the divide between body and machine is blurred and their interactionmore common than the resetting of clocks.
10:18 p.m. "How's it going?" the anchorwoman asks, sendingit back to the reporter on the scene. "Luciana, the process is underway.Doctor Paulo Flavio Gouveia is standing next to me and I'll ask him totell us what is going on." The doctor's voice explains, "He isbreaking the resistance of the skin." A close-up shows a large hypodermicneedle puncturing flesh. A groan goes up from the crowded room. VIVO. Anambulance waits outside. The moment passes. "Now he's sliding theentire needle in subcutaneously parallel to the skin.î The needlewiggles, raising a large welt before a finger pushes the plunger of thehypodermic home, inserting the capsule. As it does, the camera pans back,revealing that Kac, dressed in black on the examination table, is the onewho is performing the injection while the doctor is merely a bystander,looking on over his shoulder, the distinction between medicine and artblurred as thoroughly as Time Capsule has blurred the line between artand news. More importantly, unlike Orwellian images of surveillance andcontrol, this dynamic is entered into voluntary in the way that a morepublic sense of self allows us to casually give our image over to surveillancecameras dozens of times a day. "He's applying pressure to the areato prevent bleeding and now he'll remove the needle. Excuse, me, I needto assist him now," the doctor says, returning from his role as artcommentator to active agent. Those present let out a cheer. But why? Outof relief that a moment of tension has passed? Out of recognition of themselvesin the work? As the doctor helps Kac apply gauze to the puncture, the reportersays, "In a few minutes, the chip will be read remotely via the Internet."
It's hard for us to imagine how disorienting talking on the telephoneoriginally was for people, unable as they were to grasp being in one placewhile their voice was in another. But of course our difficulty arises onlybecause time and repetition can make anything seem natural, even eatingand sleeping not when we are hungry or tired but when the clock says weshould. And just as technology made the disjunction of the body and voicecommon, just as technology made it natural for us to loosen time from theturning of the earth, so it is now loosening body from self. Cloning comesto mind, of course, but this is just the most dramatic landmark. More tellingly,our cultural landscape is composed of myriad moments that together shiftwhat we see when we look in the mirror, familiarity allowing most of themto pass unnoticed. The 46,000 heart transplants that take place each year,for example; the manipulation of genes before birth; the men who fatherchildren after death; or the transplant Matthew Scott recently received,inheriting from a cadaver a hand that had once signed another's name, thishand that had once trembled with another's prayers taking up new prayers,the signature of another's body.
Complementing this sea change from being our bodies to having our bodiesis the culture of surveillance and spectacle. Together they erode the distinctionbetween ourselves and our neighbors and Time Capsule calls attention tothis reconfiguration of the self by participating in it. Kac places hisbody and its voluntary invasion on display, using mass media to gatheras many witnesses as possible. Yet the more witnesses who tune in, themore dispersed Time Capsulethe site of memory and selfbecomes.
10:27 p.m. "We go back live to Casa das Rosas now," the anchorwomansays, apparently controlling the show though she herself is, of course,controlled through her ear piece by a director who is invisible to viewers."Celso Zucatelli, was it possible to read the chip through the Internet?"The ballet between the station and the artist has the odd air of an interviewbeing conducted with a surgeon who is also the patient on the status ofhis operation-in-progress. The glare of television and examination lightsis overwhelming. His face beaded by perspiration, Kac places his leg underthe gaze of lenses: a webcam, TV and still cameras, their automatic filmadvances whirring. VIVO. The reporter, in contact with the anchorwomanthrough his ear piece, relays her question and Kac explains what everyonehas just witnessed: an operator in Chicago remotely activated the scannerwhich read the number now stored in Kac's leg, Kac's body functioning asa node on the network between the U.S. and Brazil, his I.D. number travelingvia the Internet, allowing him to register himself with a company thatspecializes in the identification of lost animals.
Similiar services are increasingly under consideration by prisons, welater learn, as well as by corporations who plan on using it in the eventthat their executives are kidnapped. If only to be able to identify thebodies. For always there is the body. Kac's body has now been transformedinto a time capsulean icon for our time by virtue of the bio-compatiblecapsule buried within his flesh.
10:29 p.m. "Luciana, that is it, the conclusion of the live componentof Eduardo Kac's work entitled Time Capsule."
The moment passes.
Yet the I.D. number remains indefinitely in memory, another time capsule,as does the globally dispersed site of his work, indefinitely accessibleat http://www.ekac.org/timec.html.
Steve Tomasula's fiction has appeared most recently in Fiction International.Recent essays on art and culture can be found in Leonardo and the New ArtExaminer.
Back to Kac Web