Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac (born 1962) is a contemporary artist of dual nationality (American and Brazilian) whose artworks span a wide range of practices, including performance art, poetry, holography, interactive art, digital and online art, and bio art. He is particularly well known for his works of space art.

Kac began his art career in 1980 as a performance artist in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 1982 he created his first digital work and in 1983 he invented holopoetry, exploring holography as an interactive art form. In 1985 he began creating animated poetic works on the French Minitel platform.

Throughout the 1980s Kac created telecommunications artworks, using media such as fax, television, and slow scan TV. In 1986 Kac created his first work of telepresence art, in which he used robots to bridge two or more physical locations. During the 1990s he continued to produce these works, expanding his practice with works of interspecies communications. In 1997 he coined the phrase bio art. Throughout his career, Kac has coined numerous neologisms 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).

Kac is well known for his transgenic artworks that use biotechnology to create plants and animals with new genetic characteristics. His works Time Capsule (1997), Genesis (1999), GFP Bunny (2000) and Natural History of the Enigma (2003-2009), in particular, are recognized as notable works for having joined biotechnology, art and bioethics together into artworks that are at once political and philosophical.

In 2017 Kac created Inner Telescope, an artwork conceived for zero gravity and made aboard the International Space Station. Kac worked with the French Space Observatory office, from the French Space Agency, to have this work made in space by the astronaut Thomas Pesquet.

Since 2019, Kac has been developing Adsum, an artwork for the Moon. Conceived in five phases, as of 2022 Kac had completed the first three parts. "Adsum" is a glass artwork with four visual symbols internally laser-engraved in three dimensions and is meant to exist in the lunar environment.

A multidisciplinary artist, Kac has also employed poetry, fax, photocopying, photography, video, fractals, RFID implants, virtual reality, networks, robotics, satellites, telerobotics, Morse code and DNA extraction in his practice.