Kac-Eduardo

Eduardo Kac

Oak Park, IL

Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his telepresence and bio art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web ’80s, Eduardo Kac  emerged in the early 1990s with his radical works combining telerobotics and living organisms. His visionary integration of robotics, biology and networking explores the fluidity of subject positions in the post-digital world. His work deals with issues that range from the mythopoetics of online experience to the cultural impact of biotechnology; from the changing condition of memory in the digital age to distributed collective agency; from the problematic notion of the “exotic” to the creation of life and evolution. At the dawn of the twenty-first century Kac opened a new direction for contemporary art with his “transgenic art”—first with a groundbreaking transgenic work entitled Genesis, which included an “artist’s gene” he invented, and then with his fluorescent rabbit called Alba

MOVE 36


Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his telepresence and bio art.

Artist Bio

MOVE 36 investigates the shifting boundaries among humans, non-humans, and machines. Inspired by the computer that beat chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, the piece is constructed of a large chess board made of earth (dark squares) and sand (light squares). The only piece on the board is a plant, which has been genetically engineered by the artist for this project. This plant uses basic ASCII computer text to translate the Descartes statement “Cogito Ergo Sum” into genetic code. Exploring both the foundations of rationalist philosophy and new frontiers in artificial intelligence, MOVE 36 includes video projections of a chess game played by invisible opponents.


Award Year
2002
Status

Completed