Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac (born July 3, 1962) is a Brazilian and American contemporary artist whose portfolio encompasses various forms of art including performance art, poetry, holography, interactive art, digital and online art, and BioArt.

Recognized for his space art and transgenic works, Kac works with biotechnology to create organisms with new genetic attributes.

His interdisciplinary approach has seen the use of diverse mediums, from fax and photocopying to fractals, RFID implants, virtual reality, networks, robotics, satellites, telerobotics, virtual reality and DNA synthesis.

Kac was born July 3, 1962, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Kac began his art career in 1980 as a performance artist in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Throughout the 1980s Kac created telecommunications artworks, using media such as fax, television, and slow scan TV.

In 1980 Kac launched the Movimento de Arte Pornô (Porn Art Movement) on Ipanema Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, with the stated goal of subverting the logic of normative pornography at the service of activism and imagination.

In 1982 he created his first digital work and in 1983 he invented holopoetry, exploring holography as an interactive art form.

Working under the extremely conservative political climate of Brazil under a military dictatorship, Kac and other Movement members, such as Glauco Mattoso, Leila Míccolis, and Hudinilson Jr., developed the new body-centered aesthetics collectively until 1982.

Kac was also a performer with the Gang, the performance unit of the Movimento de Arte Pornô; the Gang performed in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities.

Beginning in 1982, Kac started to create digital works.

In 1983 Kac invented holographic poetry (which he also called holopoetry), the first of which was HOLO/OLHO, named after the Portuguese word for "eye".

He studied at the School of Communications of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, receiving a BA degree in 1985, and then at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he received an MFA degree in 1990.

In 1985 he began creating animated poetic works on the French Minitel platform.

In 1985 he contributed one such work, Reabracadabra, to the Arte On Line exhibition, organized by the Livraria Nobel bookstore in São Paulo.

From 1985 to as late as 1994, Kac did a number of telecommunications artworks that used Slow-scan television (SSTV), FAX, and live television, to create interactive exchanges between separate locations.

In 1986 Kac created his first work of telepresence art, in which he used robots to bridge two or more physical locations.

Kac's focus on space art encompasses decades-long effort to complete "Ágora" (1986–2023), a project designed for deep space.

Over the years, he has collaborated with both NASA and SpaceX.

Other Minitel animated poems by Kac include Recaos (1986), Tesão (1985/86) and D/eu/s (1986).

In 1986, with Flavio Ferraz, Kac organized the Brasil High-Tech exhibition at the Galeria de Arte Centro Empresarial Rio in Rio de Janeiro.

In 1986 Kac created his first telepresence artwork, using a robot to connect distant audiences.

23 holographic 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 experimental poetry forms, Kac began making animated poetry works with the French Minitel system that was then in use in Brazil.

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 to control the robot's camera and motion, creating a telepresent work and effecting the experience of viewers in the other location.

In 1989 Kac moved from Rio de Janeiro to Chicago, where he would complete his MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago the following year.

During the 1990s he continued to produce these works, expanding his practice with works of interspecies communications.

Kac coined the term "bio art".

Kac also created various terms to describe his transdisciplinary art practice, including biorobotics (functional merger of robotics and biotechnology), plantimal (plant with animal genetic material or animal with plant genetic material), and transgenic art (the expression of genes from one species in another in an artwork).

In the 1990s, Kac continued creating telematic works, with Dialogical Drawing (1994) and Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1994) both using networks to explore the viewer experience of an artwork mediated between two sites in real time.

In the latter case, the artwork joined a plant in New York city and a live canary in Kentucky in conversation.

Early notable works include "Genesis" (1999), where Kac translated a Genesis line into morse code and subsequently into DNA base pair and "GFP Bunny" (2000), where an albino rabbit was genetically altered with a jellyfish gene, causing it to emit a green glow under specific light conditions.

This piece ignited extensive debates on the ethical implications of altering life forms for artistic purposes.

In 2003 he received a doctorate from the Planetary Collegium at the University of Wales, Great Britain.

Kac is a professor of art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

His collaboration with French astronaut Thomas Pesquet in "Inner Telescope" (2017) led to the creation of a sculpture in space.

Another of his artworks, "Adsum", made its journey to the International Space Station in 2022, in preparation for its final flight to the Moon.

Kac has been an active participant in events promoting the convergence of art and space exploration, such as those organized by the Space Observatory, an office of France’s National Center for Space Studies.