Telepresence & Bio Art

Mon 4 June 2018

Alison Richard Building

After an introduction contextualizing his pioneering telepresence work, in progress since the mid-1980s, Kac will give examples and further discuss his current Bio Art. A pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web '80s, Eduardo Kac (pronounced "Katz") emerged in the early '90s 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. At the dawn of the twenty-first century Kac opened a new direction for contemporary art with his "transgenic art"—-first with a groundbreaking piece entitled Genesis (1999), which included an "artist's gene" he invented, and then with GFP Bunny, his fluorescent rabbit called Alba (2000), currently the focus of Kac's solo show in London. Kac will also discuss other transgenic works, such as Natural History of the Enigma, in which he created a flower with his own DNA.

Cost: Free