Telepresence & Bio Art

Book excerpt: Eduardo Kac's work represents a turning point. What it questions is our current attitudes to creativity, taking that word in its most fundamental sense. -Edward Lucie-Smith, author of Visual Arts in the 20th Century His works introduce a vital new meaning into what had been known as the creative process while at the same time investing the notion of the artist-inventor with an original social and ethical responsibility. -Frank Popper, author of Origins and Development of Kinetic Art Kac's radical approach to the creation and presentation of the body as a wet host for artificial memory and 'site-specific' work raises a variety of important questions that range from the status of memory in digital culture to the ethical dilemmas we are facing in the age of bioengineering and tracking technology. -Christiane Paul, Whitney Museum of Art For nearly two decades Eduardo Kac has been at the cutting edge of media art, first inventing early online artworks for the web and continuously developing new art forms that involve telecommunications and robotics as a new platform for art. Interest in telepresence, also known as telerobotics, exploded in the 1990s, and remains an important development in media art. Since that time, Kac has increasingly moved into the fields of biology and biotechnology. Telepresence and Bio Art is the first book to document the evolution of bio art and the aesthetic development of Kac, the creator of the artist's gene as well as the controversial glow-in-the-dark, genetically engineered rabbit Alba. Kac covers a broad range of topics within media art, including telecommunications media, interactive systems and the Internet, telematicsand robotics, and the contact between electronic art and biotechnology. Addressing emerging and complex topics, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary art.