22nd Aug 1998

Electronic Art: pushing the limits

Eduardo Kac's works can be seen as weird, or relevant and speaking to today's generation, says PARVATHI NARAYAN

HE works with computers and robots, holograms and digital photography. He is completely at ease with electronic and photonic (related to electro-magnetic radiation energy) media. He casually throws around words like telematic and telepresence (relating to the telephone network and the Internet) and discusses the co-existence of virtual and real spaces. Oh and by the way, he's an artist.

Meet Eduardo Kac from The Art Institute of Chicago, an established "electronic artist". He was in town recently to conduct workshops and seminars, and work especially with the Department of Multimedia Art (at LaSalle-SIA College of the Arts) with some of the art forms that are loosely clubbed under the term "electronic art".

Possibly the earliest aspect of Kac's work is "language art", where the nature of language and the written word are explored through a variety of media.

Kac, one of several Brazilian artists who protested against the country's military dictatorship in the 1970s, moved from oral poetry and performance art to graffiti, videotex (precursor to the Internet) and holography.

His work with language is less conceptual art and more visual writing, where form and content matter. Kac's latest works in this art form are being shown at Language Works, an ongoing exhibition in Chicago. One of the exhibits here is what he calls a holopoem. With holograms, it is not the 3-D aspect that fascinates him but the medium itself.

He says: "A hologram is a unique way of storing information, and its nature is such that two words can occupy the same space." Thus, depending on the viewer's actual physical point of view, he will see different images and messages.

A holopoem also feels like a powerful metaphor: Nothing is absolute, not even what you see, for everything is relative to the position you take.

Of his language works, Kac has said: "Without the active participation of the so-called viewer, many of my works do not exist."

This is a statement that could be applied to many other works by Kac. He plays a lot, for instance, with the notion of a person in one place interacting with a situation that is physically far away. Often the interaction is via a robot or the Internet, creating the aforementioned telepresence or telematic art.

Take Rara Avis, where an exotic red bird, which is actually a robot, was put into a large aviary filled with little birds. Outside this transparent structure was placed headgear; upon donning this, the viewer was immediately placed "on the body" of the robot-bird inside. He saw out of the robot eyes and from its viewpoint; when the viewer moved his head, the robot-bird's head moved as well.

Thus the viewer was both inside and outside the cage at the same time and was affecting events in the aviary by means of his actions outside it.

The whole event was transmitted live on the Internet, creating another dimension of participants.

A variation of this idea was used in Telepresence Garment. Here, two participants in different countries manipulated Kac (clothed in a restrictive garment that permitted no vision or speech) and a robot, both of whom were placed in a room.

In Teleporting An Unknown State, we start getting really esoteric. Kac planted a seed in soil in a completely black room fitted with a lens. He then e-mailed over 1,500 people and asked them to aim their digital cameras at the skies and send him the images of light. This light was then focused down on the seed, which used it to grow into a little sapling.

The event is thought-provoking: Light from different areas around the world was used to grow a seedling in yet another part of the globe. The Internet, a virtual and non-real world, here became one that was quite literally life supporting!

One of Kac's most recent works is A-Positive, which took place on Sept 24, 1997, at 3pm. The human body has always been a central consideration in art but Kac used it in a rather unusual way. In A-Positive, he "donated" blood from his body to a robot. This robot extracted the oxygen from the blood and used it to burn a flame - a life symbol - within itself. At a certain point in the proceedings, the robot offered nourishment to the artist by lowering a mechanical arm, and dextrose was fed intravenously into the artist's body.

The work is meant to get the viewer thinking about several aspects of today's "techie" culture. With emerging drugs and technologies, the manufactured or mechanical has penetrated human flesh in many ways. A-Positive also shows a symbiotic relationship between human and machine, which is very different from the popular notion of a master-slave relationship between man and robot.

Kac prefers not to call this "performance art"; he is the first one trying it out because he invented the event. But he sees it as being interactive and an experience that people can try out for themselves.

Kac's creations are very intellectualised approaches which require the latest technologies, and are carefully constructed events or happenings. But are they just elaborate paradoxes and mind puzzles or are they art?

Currently we are pushing the boundaries and the very definition of art so much, it is hard to offer an easy answer.

As with most works of art the response has to be subjective. Or as suggested by the concept of Kac's holopoem itself, the artist's work could be seen as weird and incomprehensible, or pretentious and over-intellectualised, or relevant and speaking to today's generation in today's language. It depends on your point of view.

If the article has whetted your appetite for travel along virtual art spaces, you can visit Kac's Web site at http://www.ekac.org.