Eduardo Kac

In 2017 Kac collaborated with the French Space Observatory office to have a sculpture made aboard the international space station.

In 2017 Kac collaborated with the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet to create an artwork in space called Inner Telescope. Following Kac's instructions, Pesquet cut and folded a piece of paper into a sculptural form that could be read as the three letters forming the French word for me, M-O-I.

In 2008 he received the Golden Nica award at Ars Electronica for his project Natural History of the Enigma.

His work Natural History of the Enigma (2003-8) continued in the theme of bio art by merging his DNA with that of a petunia, creating a hybrid organism that Kac called a plantimal. The plant, also given the name Eudinia (from Eduardo and Petunia), mimicked the flow of blood through human veins by mixing Kac's DNA only with the plant's genetic components that made the veins in its leaves red.

In 2002 he received the Creative Capital Award in the discipline of Emerging Fields.

In one of his best known works, Alba, presented in 2000 in Avignon, France, Kac claimed to have commissioned a French laboratory to create a green-fluorescent rabbit; a rabbit implanted with a Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) gene from a type of jellyfish. Under a specific blue light, the rabbit fluoresces green. The work proved to be hugely controversial, which was later mitigated by the revelation that the GFP process was not new but was, rather, already in use on rabbits at the lab in question. Kac's original aim was for Alba to live with his family, but prior to the scheduled release of Alba to Kac, the lab retracted their agreement and decided that Alba should remain in the lab.

Kac's next transgenic artwork, created in 1998/99 and titled "Genesis," involved him taking a quote from the Bible (Genesis 1:26 - "And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth"), transferring it into Morse code, and finally, translating that Morse code (by a conversion principle specially developed by the artist for this work) into the base pairs of genetics.

In 1998 he received the Leonardo Award for Excellence from ISAST. In 1999, he received the Inter Communication Center (Tokyo) Biennial Award in 1999.

Notably, Kac coined the term "bioart" with his 1997 performance work Time Capsule. In Time Capsule, Kac implanted himself with an RFID chip originally designed for use in pets. A participant in Chicago then triggered the RFID scanned in the Brazilian Gallery where Kac was performing, casing the scanner to display a unique code for the implant. Kac then registered himself on the pet database associated with the implant, becoming the first human to do so.

In Teleporting An Unknown State (1994–96), Kac built a system that allowed a plant to survive in a gallery, illuminated not by sunlight but by the internet viewers of the work. In practice, online viewers of the work triggered a video projection onto the plant of an image representing the sky in the viewer's home location.

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 site in real time. In the latter case, the artwork joined a plant in New York city and a live canary in Kentucky in conversation. The inclusion of a bird as part of its system, making it an early example of what Kac called transgenic art.

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

Around the same time, and drawing on his interest in experimental poetry forms, Kac began making animated poetry works with the French Minitel videotext terminals that were then in use in Rio. In 1985 he contributed one such work, Reabracadabra, to the Arte On Line exhibition, organized by the Livraria Nobel bookstore in São Paulo. Other videotext 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.

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

Beginning in 1983, Kac created holographic poetry works, the first of which was HOLO/OLHO, named after the Portuguese word for "eye". 24 holographic poems followed this first work, including Quando (When?) (1987), a moebius-like work that could be read in two directions.

Kac began his art career in the early 1980s as performance artist in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Within a few years he was involved in exploring holography as an interactive art form. At the same time, he began creating animated poetic works on the French Minitel platform.

Before moving from Brazil to the United States in the late 1980s, Kac began creating his first telematic artworks that used electronic technologies to bridge two or more physical locations. During the 1990s he continued to produce these works, at the same time as he coined the phrase bioart. In addition to bioart Kac coined numerous neologisms to describe his transdisciplinary art practice, including holoart, transgenic art (the integration of human genes in an artwork) and plantimal, referring to a plant infused with human genes.

Between 1980 and 1982, Kac belonged to a group that did performance art in the Cinelandia area of Rio de Janeiro. The performances, a response to the extreme conservative political climate of Brazil under military dictatorship, became known as Movimento de Arte Pornô (Porn Art Movement).

Kac was born July 3, 1962 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 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 2003 he received a doctorate from the University of Wales, Great Britain. Kac is a professor of art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.