Paulo Herkenhoff, “The Dazzle of Light & Letters”, foreword to : Kac, Eduardo. Light & Letter. Essays in art, literature and communication (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Contra Capa, 2004). First publication in English in: Anomalie_digital arts n°5, Annick Bureaud and Kean-Luc Soret, editors, Paris, 2005, pp. 156-167.

The Dazzle of Light & Letters

Paulo Herkenhoff

The following excerpt is from the foreword to the book Luz & Letra. Ensaios de arte, literatura e comunicação (Light & Letter. Essays in art, literature and communication), a selection of articles by Eduardo Kac originally published in Brazil between 1982 and 1988.
The book was published in Portuguese by Editora Contra Capa, Rio de Janeiro, in 2004, with a foreword by Abraham Palatnik.

[...]
The material assembled in Luz e Letra demonstrates that throughout the emerging process of media art forms, there was among us a critical thinker, the author of well-crafted texts that shed light on the precise moment of passage towards a culture of images undergoing accelerated technological transformation. [...]

Kac writes clearly, skilfully using and weaving past the hermetic jargon of semiology of new media, while unpretentiously laying the foundations of his own thinking. His texts, straightforward and simple, reveals a generous approach to the common reader, through which Luz & Letra provides an insight into the invention of a new field.

This book is a document of Brazil in the 1980s, a period thought of as being dominated by painting, but which was in fact a time of gestation of ideas. Luz & Letra also reveals a way of thinking about contemporary practice coexisting with the traditional processes of artistic production. It in fact uncovers a dual status of culture: the level of discussion of media art in Brazil and the ability of an artist to absorb and provide a critical interpretation of the possibilities offered by technology.

The practice of Eduardo Kac focuses on certain aspects of the economics of technology. In his Manifesto Estética do Terceiro Mundo (Aesthetic Manifesto of the Third World, 1969), Barrio states that "due to a series of circumstances, the visual arts sector is marked by increasing use of materials considered expensive, for our/my situation, reflecting a socioeconomic aspect of the Third World (including Latin America), since industrial products are not within our/my reach". He proposes the use of inexpensive, perishable materials to set out the role of artistic production within the economy, "since creation cannot be conditioned but must be free". Kac, however, is open to an ideal dialogue with current technologies, without renouncing advances in knowledge and new techniques at an opportune moment. The Manifesto of Barrio, together with Mário Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, Glauber Rocha and Haroldo de Campos, fuels discussions on the production of autonomous language in the underdeveloped countries; certain texts by Kac demonstrate the practical attainment of this goal. The phenomenon of Kac and this book Luz & Letra clearly show that it was in fact possible to reflect on the relationship between art, science and technology in Brazil in the 80's, in the light of the conditions prevailing in the country. Kac's production, however, suggests that for an artist, the fullest experimental exploration was perhaps not a possibility at that time in Brazil. This of course raises the question of whether such activity is possible today. Are we perhaps living a certain technological indigence? We have made much progress, but in spite of recent expansion in production, it is nevertheless necessary to open up a political space. In the 1960s, the controversial Waldemar Cordeiro, perplexed by Pop Art, wrote that it was not enough simply to make the means of production available to all, but that the means of communication must also be placed in these same hands. Kac's generation demanded that the existing scientific and technological means be available to all artists, and it was perhaps for this very reason that Eduardo Kac was unable to function as an artist in Brazil since his needs were so closely associated with cutting-edge technologies.

In the 1980s, Kac clearly stated that the central issue was not to transpose poetry into holography, but to invent a new syntax that could only exist due to the intrinsic possibilities offered by holography. Holography must not be confused with three-dimensionality. In Imagem, espaço (Image, space), Eduardo Kac establishes the vector linking space and perspective in the work of Paul Cézanne. For him, however, the study of space cannot be reduced to recognition of Cézanne or of Piet Mondrian. It implies action in a temporal medium evoking the 4th dimension. As the artist himself told me in an interview: "In 4D, the clash of 3D occurs. You must read a holopoem with your whole body, not just with your eyes. The only possible way of negating the holopoem is to stand still. The reader has to engage in a kind of dance. The syntax of each work varies, and it is discontinuous and space-temporal. Each work, however, requires a vector, a rhythm of movement. It is the reader who breathes life into the work. The holopoem breaks Gestalt since holography places everything in transit, dismantling spatial hierarchies and denying privileged viewing points. Digital holopoems provide even more radical possibilities of movement, direction and reading".

In addition, Eduardo Kac is a key protagonist in the historical vocation of Rio de Janeiro for experimental relations between art and technology. In the 19th Century, daguerreotypes were in circulation only six months after their initial launch in Paris and were on show in the General Exhibitions of the Academy of Fine Arts. In terms of the development of photography, Marc Ferrez became known for the qualitative effect of his images and for his audacious experimentation with technique. Writers Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade lacked this disposition for the plasticity of photography in their first chapter of modernism in the early 1920s. But the main historical break with the canon of photography came at the beginning of the 20th Century with the experiments of Valério Vieira. The only comparable phenomenon was the monumental documentation of the Federal Capital made by Augusto Malta, whose production also indicates the extremely advanced modernity of Rio de Janeiro. Vieira and Malta were two modernists predating modernism. In 1939, the Exposição de Televisão (Television Exhibition) took place in Rio de Janeiro; it was the first of its kind in Brazil, and during the demonstration of the process, a poster could be seen bearing the invitation: "Would you like to make a videotelephone call?". The second half of the 20th Century brought the outstanding photography of José Oiticica Filho, the most radically concretist of Brazilian photographers, as well as the kinetic experiments of Abraham Palatnik. The present book shows Kac as already attentive to this worldwide precursor engaged in the difficult task of inventing a new art form. The 1960s saw an explosion of artists's films with Antonio Dias, Lygia Pape, Antonio Manuel and many others. In the following decade in Rio, the precursors of Brazilian video art emerged: Sonia Andrade, Fernando Cocchiarale, Anna Bella Geiger and Ivens Machado. In the years preceding the fire at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro in 1978, the Experimental Room was the principal exhibition center for video art in Brazil. And if the generation of the 80s existed, Eduardo Kac, who took part in the historic Parque Lage exhibition in 1984, was swimming against the tide. During the 1980s, Kac acted simultaneously as avatar and catalyst of media art, with his texts in the Brazilian press and his presence at events such as Brasil High Tech in Rio de Janeiro in 1986. Shortly afterwards, he made the cover of the the Arts & Leisure supplement to the New York Times (26 May 2002), with an article by Steven Henry Madoff entitled "The Wonders of Genetics Breed a New Art". The world star of this new art was the Rio artist Eduardo Kac. Nevertheless, he was almost unknown as an artist on the Brazilian cultural scene. Although an admirer of Cézanne, Kac was at the opposite pole of praise for the manual aspect of production so prominent in Brazilian art. In reality, he frequently works like a high-tech agriculturalist reluctant to produce without recourse to the latest advances in science and technology. For example, he uses satellite technology to perform photosynthesis. In France, he worked with a group of geneticists to produce GFP Bunny, the creation of a rabbit whose DNA was spliced with that of a Pacific jellyfish. He used a fluorescent green protein to produce a luminous rabbit; one could see here a pictorial intervention, similar to the work of Palatnik in his cinechromatic apparatus. The result, however, cannot be reduced to a mere transgenic operation. With GFP Bunny, Kac did not in fact alter but rather invented a rabbit. He invented the creature starting from biological point zero. The task he set himself, in other words, was to transform the imaginary into reality. This challenge may be equated with the discussion in concrete art of previsualisation of the orthodox form, with its theoretical foundations in the visibilism of Konrad Fiedler. It is thus better to think of Kac as an inventor of natures. Or as an inventor of bodies, and here, of the robotic body. In this field, the artist has always taken risks.

Part of Eduardo Kac's production would appear to be immersed in the conversion into poetry of what has been defined as "post-human nature". GFP Bunny, however, emerges from extreme scientificism, appearing as a political symbol of the significance of knowledge of the genome. For Matt Ridley, genome mapping goes so far as to affect the notion of free will. Today, we are aware of the extreme degree of proximity between different ethnic traits. GFP Bunny indicates that the path of alterities is now blurred. At the moralist (but not necessarily moral) core lie questions of ethics. An excessively "politically correct" ideology could call into question works such as GFP Bunny, whose position remains similar to that of Tiradentes by Cildo Meireles, a totem-monument to the political prisoner involving the sacrifice of live chickens. In the effervescent process of dematerialization of art and of the incorporation of digital media, some say that video was awaiting its Turner. It may equally well be said that advanced and popular technology was waiting to be converted into a sublime image. Eduardo Kac fully understood that advanced science was waiting for a body, for someone to push it beyond a set of instruments. It is in fact necessary to confront the field of logos with the phenomenological experience of the lived body, and at this nerve center Kac proposes his Time Capsule with the implantation of an electronic chip in his own body. What are the promises of mimetico-analogic multiplication not yet fulfilled by new technologies? Will they negate the modern rush towards necroscopic triumph, the announcement of the death of the world? In Baudelaire's conception of modernity, this death of the world was announced by photography. Will the new digital technologies resist this melancholy tendency? During a period of ever-increasing expansion in the scientific and technological fields, the sweep of Kac's interests since the 1980s, when the computer became a portable studio, demonstrated in his texts and works in media art, is complex and embraces biotechnology, biotelematics, microchips, Morse code, "digitalness", DNA, fax, experimental photography, fractals, genomes, holography, laser, virtual reality, network, robotics, satellites, digital technologies, teletransportation, telepresence, telerobotics, transgenics, video, virtuality, web, webscanning. Creating lists is an infallible way of producing gaps. In the face of technocratic excess and despite the headlong rush of certain artists to assume the mantle of precursor, Eduardo Kac wishes to define the poetics of the new technologies as a bridge between advanced knowledge in a period of transition and instruments undergoing accelerated change.

The introduction of technological methods into aesthetic discourse is not without side effects. The rapidity with which advanced technological means appear, in the race to become a pioneer, allows for the simulation of an easy inscription in art history. In a country like Brazil, rife with university semiology that is self-centered and self-perpetuating as a result of the needs of the country's academia, there may be a lack of concordance between critical rhetoric and aesthetic production. In short, there may be more chatter than language. Reading Luz & Letra is a preparatory experience. It endowes us with an experimental gaze over the solid edifices to be found here and there along the paths of invention and risk.



Translation from Portuguese : Novatrad (Melanie Guedenet)

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