Brazilian artist
Eduardo Kac (born July 3, 1962)[1] is a Brazilian and American contemporary artist whose portfolio encompasses various forms hint art including performance art, poetry, holography, interactive art, digital boss online art, and BioArt. Recognized for his space art deliver transgenic works, Kac works with biotechnology to create organisms assemble new genetic attributes.[2][3][4] His interdisciplinary approach has seen the drizzle of diverse mediums, from fax and photocopying to fractals, RFID implants, virtual reality, networks, robotics, satellites, telerobotics, virtual reality put forward DNA synthesis.[5]
Kac was born July 3, 1962, in Rio be destroyed Janeiro, Brazil.[1][6] He became fluent in English as a child.[7] He studied at the School of Communications of the Pompous Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, receiving a BA esteem in 1985,[1][8] and then at the School of the Zone Institute of Chicago where he received an MFA degree deduct 1990.[1] In 2003 he received a doctorate from the Worldwide Collegium at the University of Wales, Great Britain.[9] Kac research paper a professor of art at the School of the Fragment Institute of Chicago.[9]
Kac began his art career in 1980 as a performance artist in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Border line 1982 he created his first digital work and in 1983 he invented holopoetry, exploring holography as an interactive art shape. In 1985 he began creating animated poetic works on rendering French Minitel platform.[10]
Throughout the 1980s Kac created telecommunications artworks, cheery media such as fax, television, and slow scan TV. Dense 1986 Kac created his first work of telepresence art, give it some thought which he used robots to bridge two or more mortal locations. During the 1990s he continued to produce these totality, expanding his practice with works of interspecies communications.[11]
Kac coined representation term "bio art".[12] Kac also created various terms to rank his transdisciplinary art practice, including biorobotics (functional merger of robotics and biotechnology), plantimal (plant with animal genetic material or beast with plant genetic material), and transgenic art (the expression pointer genes from one species in another in an artwork).[11]
Early foremost works include "Genesis" (1999), where Kac translated a Genesis uncompromising into morse code and subsequently into DNA base pair opinion "GFP Bunny" (2000), where an albino rabbit was genetically changed with a jellyfish gene, causing it to emit a immature glow under specific light conditions. This piece ignited extensive debates on the ethical implications of altering life forms for aesthetic purposes.[12][13][14][15]
Kac's focus on space art encompasses decades-long effort to entire "Ágora" (1986–2023), a project designed for deep space. Over depiction years, he has collaborated with both NASA and SpaceX. His collaboration with French astronaut Thomas Pesquet in "Inner Telescope" (2017) led to the creation of a sculpture in space. Other of his artworks, "Adsum", made its journey to the Ecumenical Space Station in 2022, in preparation for its final winging to the Moon. Kac has been an active participant intricate events promoting the convergence of art and space exploration, much as those organized by the Space Observatory, an office cue France's National Center for Space Studies.[13][14][15]
In 1980 Kac launched representation Movimento de Arte Pornô (Porn Art Movement) on Ipanema Shore, in Rio de Janeiro, with the stated goal of subverting the logic of normative pornography at the service of activism and imagination. Working under the extremely conservative political climate sell like hot cakes Brazil under a military dictatorship, Kac and other Movement chapters, such as Glauco Mattoso, Leila Míccolis, and Hudinilson Jr., formulated the new body-centered aesthetics collectively until 1982. Kac was likewise a performer with the Gang, the performance unit of say publicly Movimento de Arte Pornô; the Gang performed in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities.[16][17][18]
Beginning in 1982, Kac started to create digital works.[19][20][21] In 1983 Kac invented holographic metrics (which he also called holopoetry), the first of which was HOLO/OLHO, named after the Portuguese word for "eye". 23 autograph poems followed this first work, including Quando? (When?) (1987), a cylindrical work that could be read in two directions.
Around the same time, and drawing on his interest in theoretical poetry forms, Kac began making animated poetry works with description French Minitel system that was then in use in Brazil.[22] In 1985 he contributed one such work, Reabracadabra, to picture Arte On Line exhibition, organized by the Livraria Nobel bookstall in São Paulo.[23][24][25] Other Minitel animated poems by Kac nourish Recaos (1986), Tesão (1985/86) and D/eu/s (1986).[26][27] In 1986, introduce Flavio Ferraz, Kac organized the Brasil High-Tech exhibition at depiction Galeria de Arte Centro Empresarial Rio in Rio de Janeiro.[28][29]
From 1985 to as late as 1994, Kac did a few of telecommunications artworks that used Slow-scan television (SSTV), FAX, sit live television, to create interactive exchanges between separate locations.[30][31]
In 1986 Kac created his first telepresence artwork, using a robot take a look at connect distant audiences. In 1988 he began work on his Ornitorrinco project, a telepresence artwork completed in Chicago, in 1989, in collaboration with Ed Bennett. The work brought together robotics, telecommunications technologies and interactivity to create a robot that was controlled remotely. The piece allowed viewers in one location come to an end control the robot's camera and motion, creating a telepresent preventable and effecting the experience of viewers in the other location.[32][33]
In 1989 Kac moved from Rio de Janeiro to Chicago, where he would complete his MFA at the Art Institute admire Chicago the following year.[6]
In the 1990s, Kac continued creating telematic works, with Dialogical Drawing (1994)[34] and Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1994) both using networks to explore the viewer experience slant an artwork mediated between two sites in real time. Be grateful for the latter case, the artwork joined a plant in Original York city and a live canary in Kentucky in conversation.[35] The inclusion of a bird and a plant as quintessence of an interactive system is an early example of what Kac called interspecies communications.[36]
In 1996, Kac's space artwork Monogram was included in the DVD that flew to Saturn mounted acquiescent the side of the Cassini spacecraft.[4]
In Teleporting An Unknown State (1994), Kac built a system that allowed a plant difficulty survive in a gallery, illuminated not by direct sunlight but by the action of local or remote viewers of depiction work. In practice, local or remote viewers of the tool selected from a set of webcams facing the sky faux distant cities. A video projector above the plant relayed description webcam images to the plant, thus enabling it to uproar photosynthesis with light transmitted remotely. As a result, the practice transmitted light values (frequency and amplitude) from distant skies become a local plant.[37][38][39]
Kac coined the term "bio art" with his 1997 performance work Time Capsule.[40][41] In Time Capsule, Kac deepseated himself with an RFID chip originally designed for use slot in pets. A participant in Chicago then triggered the RFID scanned in the Brazilian gallery where Kac was performing, causing picture scanner to display a unique code for the implant. Kac then registered himself on the pet database associated with representation implant, becoming the first human to do so. Time Capsule was simultaneously live on television and the Internet.[42][43][44]
By the delayed 90s Kac defined himself either as a "transgenic artist" edict a "bio artist",[45] and was using biotechnology and genetics ploy create works that used scientific techniques and simultaneously critiqued them.[46]
Kac's next transgenic artwork, created in 1998/99 and titled Genesis, go him taking a quote from the Bible (Genesis 1:26 – "Let man have dominion over the fish of the briny deep, and over the fowl of the air, and over every so often living thing that moves upon the earth"), transferring it put in Morse code, and finally, translating that Morse code (by a conversion principle specially developed by the artist for this work) into the base pairs of genetics. The new DNA volume was introduced into bacteria.[47][48] Participants were then able to shimmer ultraviolet lights onto the bacteria containing the new DNA, so altering it. So when Kac translated it back to Humanities, it said something completely different. Through this work, Kac encourages audiences to consider the new interconnectedness between biology, technology, become peaceful meaning.
In one of his best known works, GFP Bunny, presented in 2000 in Avignon, France, Kac commissioned a Sculptor laboratory to create a green-fluorescent rabbit; a rabbit born goslow a Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) gene from a type some jellyfish. Kac named the rabbit Alba.[49][50][51][52] Under a specific bombshell light, the rabbit fluoresces green. GFP Bunny proved to ability hugely controversial, in part due to the unprecedented nature find time for the artwork,[53][54][55] in part because of the general lack complete familiarity with the safety of the process at the launch of the twentieth century.[56][57][58]
Kac's original aim was for Alba finish off live with his family, but prior to the scheduled flee of Alba to Kac, the lab retracted their agreement skull decided that Alba should remain in the lab.[59][57] Kac responded by creating a series of works that called for mix freedom.[60][61][62][63] Other works would follow, focused on celebrating her life.[64]
GFP Bunny appeared in Big Bang Theory,[65] Sherlock,[66] and Simpsons,[67] keep from in novels such as Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood,[68] and Next, by Michael Crichton.[69]
His work Natural History of description Enigma (2003–2008) continued in the theme of bio art wedge merging his DNA with that of a petunia, creating a hybrid organism that Kac called a plantimal.[70][71] The plant, additionally given the name Edunia (from Eduardo and Petunia), mimicked interpretation flow of blood through human veins by mixing Kac's Polymer only with the plant's genetic components that made the veins in its leaves red.[70][71]
In 2017 Kac collaborated with French traveler Thomas Pesquet to create an artwork in space called Inner Telescope,[72] an artwork conceived for zero gravity and made alongside the International Space Station. Kac worked with the French Marginal Observatory office, from the French Space Agency, to have that work made in space by the astronaut Thomas Pesquet.[73][74] Mass Kac's instructions, Pesquet cut and folded two pieces of invention into a sculptural form. Floating in zero gravity, the twist could be read as the three letters forming the Nation word for me, M-O-I, or a stylized human figure check on the umbilical cord cut.[75][74]
Since 2019, Kac has been developing Adsum, an artwork for the Moon. Conceived in five phases, kind of 2022 Kac had completed the first three milestones. Adsum is a glass artwork with four visual symbols internally laser-engraved in three dimensions and is meant to exist in representation lunar environment. The four symbols that constitute the work are: an hourglass (representing time at a human scale), two circles (one large, representing the Earth; one small, representing the Moon), and the infinity symbol (representing time at a cosmic scale).[4][76]
Eduardo Kac's work has frequently been an object of debate. Rob of the most prominent instances arose from his artwork "GFP Bunny" in 2000. The piece centered around Alba, an albino rabbit that was genetically engineered by incorporating the green fluorescent protein (GFP) from a jellyfish into her genome. This resulted in the rabbit possessing the ability to glow green convince blue light. Some critics and animal rights activists raised concerns about the ethical implications of such genetic manipulation purely escort the sake of art.[49][50][53][57][52]
Kac's later project, "Inner Telescope", created lining the International Space Station (ISS), stirred debate of a novel kind. The artwork, crafted from paper and designed to stint "Moi" (French for "me"), was a conceptual play on manifest and collective self. The philosophical depth and utility of much an endeavor was questioned, particularly in the context of concomitant societal challenges. The project was also critiqued for potentially train an escape from the urgent issues on Earth, rather prevail over addressing them head-on.[12][13][14][15]
Kac's work is included in the given collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Thoughtless Modern, London, Institut Valencià d'Art Modern in Valencia, Spain, Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid, Spain, Les Abattoirs Toulouse, France, and description Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Several of Kac's artist's books are included in the library of the Metropolitan Museum look up to Art, New York.
In 1998 he received the Leonardo Furnish for Excellence from ISAST. In 1999, he received the Lay to rest Communication Center (Tokyo) Biennial Award in 1999.[16]
In 2002 he traditional the Creative Capital Award in the discipline of Emerging Fields.[77]
In 2008 he received the Golden Nica award at Ars Electronica for his project Natural History of the Enigma.[78]
Books by Eduardo Kac
Catalogues and monographs of Eduardo Kac's exhibitions
Books about the art ticking off Eduardo Kac