Art

Telepresence and Bio Art by Eduardo Kac

Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots

Eduardo Kac

Rights: World
For more info, contact Mary Bisbee-Beek at bisbeeb@umich.edu

For nearly two decades Eduardo Kac has been at the cutting edge of media art, inventing new possibilities and developing it in exciting directions. In the mid-1980s, when few had heard of the Internet and online art was far into the distant future, Eduardo Kac was already creating online artworks using a precursor to the Web, the French Minitel system. Since then, Kac has continually developed new artforms and pioneered numerous concepts, some of which only now are starting to become more common. In 1986 Kac created the first in a long series of telepresence artworks, merging telecommunications and robotics as a new platform for art. Telepresence, also known as telerobotics, saw an explosion of interest and development with the Web in the mid-1990s which continues into the present. Kac has increasingly moved his domain of research and creativity to biology and biotechnology. At the dawn of the twenty-first century Kac shocked the world with his transgenic art—first with a groundbreaking net installation entitled Genesis (1999), which included an "artist's gene" he invented, and then with his fluorescent rabbit called Alba (2000).

In this interdisciplinary book Kac offers original research in and a new theoretical framework for the analysis of the evolution of telecommunications, robotics and molecular biology in art. Kac states that the process of "dematerialization" that culminated in the 1960s has come to a close and that a new "immaterial" art has emerged with the rise of digital telecommunications networks. In his exploration of the poetics of evolution, Kac forges a new synthesis between art, philosophy, natural history, cognitive ethology, and molecular biology. The book is full of innovative and provocative ideas and accomplished works that will enlighten and excite the imagination of the reader. Addressing new and complex topics, and written with great clarity, the book will be essential to general readers interested in contemporary art as well as specialized scholars, students, and professionals of the following areas: Visual Arts, Design, Arts Administration, Art History, Theory and Criticism, Philosophy, Media Arts, Cultural Studies, English and Contemporary Theory, Telecommunications, Robotics and Biology.

Eduardo Kac is an artist and Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Spring 2005
330 pages