Originally published in the catalogueof "Genesis", published by O.K. Center for Contemporary Art,Linz, 1999, pp. 41-43.

UPRISING

Gerfried Stocker

"It is less a question of the artist interpretingthe world than of allowing existing or hypothetical biological processes,mathematical structures, social or collective dynamics, to speak directly.In this sense art no longer involves the composition of a 'message' butthe creation of a mechanism..." Pierre Levy

Eduardo Kac could be described as a prototypical representative of thenew art that has emerged as a direct analogy to the digital revolutionand the information theories and technologies, on which it is based.

Like a researcher, he is constantly in search of new methods and tools,scanning the territories of technical science with in-depth analysis tofind new forms of expression for his artistic intentions and to expandhis stores of artistic material. Now, following holography, teleroboticsand the Internet, molecular biology is the new field of natural science,in which his artistic work is located.

Rather than limiting himself to the role of interpreting or commenting,he intervenes directly in the technical-systemic and social-structuralconstituents, not merely to change traditional artistic patterns and behavioralschemata, but rather to re-invent them. His strategy for this is to approachthe topic with ever new premises from constantly changed perspectives.

Even in his holographic works in the early eighties, which he characterizedas "holopoetry", he was not so much concerned with the possibilityof the three-dimensional representation of objects as with the use of temporalprocesses in an image medium. He dissolved the linearity of the work presentationin favor of an almost hypertextual presentation, in which the role of theobserver is expanded into that of an active recipient. These holographiclanguage montages are among the few attempts to develop new directionsfor experimental poetry with the technical possibilities of new media.

The greatest part of his previous work has involved telecommunicationand telepresence, and in this the perception of reality, the communicationof presence, is his central concern. Consequently, even in his early teleroboticprojects the body, its sensorial potential, has always been the focal point.

The human-machine interface, taken in a broader sense as a context forexperience, is also seen in works such as "Ornitorrinco" (1989),developed with Ed Bennett, or even more elaborately in "Rara Avis"(1996), an interactive telepresence installation, in which a teleroboticbird-machine is put together with real birds and artificial plants in anenclosure. Using data glasses or via Internet, visitors are not only ableto control the head of the cybernetic bird, but also to assume its perspective,observe themselves with its camera eyes.

In addition to his work "A-Positive" at ISEA 97 in Chicago,also with Bennett, Eduardo Kac has opened up a new artistic terrain inparticular with his "Time Capsule."

As part of an exhibition project, on November 11, 1997, he implantedan identification microchip (like those used to find and identify lostor stolen animals) in his ankle and registered the code stored in thischip in an international database. What this work questions, in additionto the issue of the unremitting surveillance of the visible human, whois made so through information and genetic technologies, is primarily theincreasingly more complex and far-reaching processes of connecting livingbeings with machines.

Eduardo Kac calls "transgenic art" the new artistic terrainthat he traverses with genetic engineering, and with his project "Genesis",shown for the first time at Ars Electronica 99, he demonstrates how thisis to be understood.

Artists such as Eduardo Kac are working on proposals for our immediatefuture, in which the traditional differentiation between natural and artificial,which has been constructed along the lines of the concepts organic andself-organized for living beings and externally determined for machines,will no longer be valid. This is a development that challenges us to anew self-comprehension as human beings not only at a philosophical level,but also and as least as much at the level of so-called ordinary commonsense.

If we go on from the representation and simulation of life to the creationand shaping of life, then this is an area, from which art cannot abstain.

Gerfried Stocker is an artist and since 1995 he has been the artisticdirector of the Ars Electronica Festival and the managing director of theArs Electronica Center.

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