Eduardo Kac: Transgenic Art and Other Living Works

 Eduardo Kac is Brazilian-American artist. Growing up in Brazil, he mostly staged performance art pieces, and also experiment with poetry, graffiti, and multimedia art. He earned is M.F.A in 1990 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and then began his collaborative work Ornitorrinco, or "Platypus".

Ornitorrico incorporated remote manipulation of a robot, first with telephone and eventually through the Internet. This paved his way for creating works integrating machines, animals, and other life forms into his art, analyzing their relationship with humans. He continued with other telepresence and performance/conceptual works, including Rara Avis and Time Capsule. Time Capsule included injecting a microchip for pets into Kac's leg and registering himself into the tracking database. That year, he became an assistant professor at the Art Institute.

He then went on to create Genesis in 1999. Kac wanted to simulate the relationship between biology, faith, and information technology of the "artist's gene" by translating the sentence, "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.", from the Bible's Genesis in morse code and from there into DNA base pairs. This synthetic gene was then incorporated into bacteria which were shown in a gallery, where the shining of ultraviolet light could cause biological mutations in the bacteria. This shows the relationship of humans with the physical world, creating meaning in the world how we, humans, want to change it.

In 2000, Kac rose to fame in his most controversial work, GFP Bunny, again mixing conceptual and performance art. This project involved genetically engineering a rabbit to express green fluorescent protein, a common tool in cellular and developmental biology research. The rabbit could then glow green when shown under blue light. 

This work involved three main components: 

1) the creation of the green fluorescent rabbit

2) the public dialogue generated by the project

3) the social integration of the rabbit back to its litter

Kac's controversial project of genetically engineering the rabbit caused debate surrounding the ethics of genetically modifying organisms for the sake of art.

Because of Kac's unique artworks, I would consider him a middle-C/big-C. He revolutionized the perception of art and what can be done. He challenged what people would normally consider what would classify as an artwork, refining the field of BioArt and essentially inventing genetic art and transgenic art. To him, art was more than just what is created-- the public's perception and discussion that results is the purpose and motivator of artwork.

Eduardo Kac's never limited himself to any particular medium, ranging his works from body-based performance, graffiti, poetry, literature, telerobotics, and even biotechnology. It is a beautiful marriage between art and science, challenging the perception or what art can do and the power behind its meaning.

Sources:

https://www.britannica.com/art/conceptual-art

http://www.ekac.org/transgenicindex.html

https://www.chicagohumanities.org/media/eduardo-kac-transgenic-artist/

https://www.vdb.org/titles/eduardo-kac-telepresence-bio-art-poetry-1980-2010