14,400 baud, Internet, RAM, world-wide cellular telephony, virtual environments,FTP, CD-ROM, interactive television, bitmaps, digital video . . . . Thelist of terms continues which references new technologies being incorporatedinto our lives today. Against such terms we measure our familiarity orignorance, curiosity or indifference toward the communications technologieswhich restructure the character and quality of contemporary experience.For a limited time, the installation of "Dialogues" within (andbeyond) these gallery walls provides opportunity to examine questions germaneto the current status of art, communication, and politics. Supported byfamiliar hardware, Kac's artworks are comprised of elements as immaterialas light, distant places, video conferences, robotic navigation, differenttime zones, human/machine interactions, animal/plant interaction, and theexchange of digital information. They each make a critical gesture whichexposes the hierarchical and highly controlled communications networks,prompting participants to rethink potential alternatives to the existingforms of social intercourse.
Kac takes cues from the practices of the historical European avant-gardesfollowing World War I. Then, as now, technology was making dramatic interventionsinto everyday life, culture, and politics. Experimental artists embracednew technologies to make work which underscored audience members' rolesin the completion of the artwork and thereby undermined precious notionsof art's autonomy, and also dispelled romantic notions of authorial subjectivity.Kac also draws upon the radicalization of artistic activity and receptionof the late sixties which moved art outside the commercial gallery systemtoward more immaterial practices and cultural propositions keyed to theinvestigation of language now safely termed conceptual art. Like artistsduring these earlier periods, Kac is attuned to the quantum adjustmentsrestructuring private and public communicative exchange by responding withboth symbolic and interventionist counter-propositions to the situation.
Since the end of the Cold War, new hopes and anxieties have emergedin the face of the new electronic international public sphere which knowsno national boundaries. The viability of a political art now appears moreplausible and urgent than before. Legislation is now pending and legalcases are before courts which may well regulate the shape, structure, andrules of behavior for the emergent global public sphere. Beyond issuespertaining to ownership and control, a key matter subtending these deliberationsis the unprecedented level of self-abstraction which has introduced pressingquestions regarding human agency, identity, interaction and responsibility.
It is within this actually existing communications situation that Kac's"Dialogues" intervene. Each of Kac's pieces is premised, if notreliant, upon individual, internationally dispersed participants contributingand thereby unleashing the potential significations of each artwork. Ifnot linked to remote places via direct telephone lines, Kac's artworksare simultaneously available to participants on the Internet just as theyare to gallery visitors. Their ongoing continuation (no closure or completionhere) by participants actuate an expanded environment wherein the possibility(or impossibility) of qualitative symbolic exchange within the currenttechnological context can be probed.
The telepresencing pieces also prompt reflection upon one's status asan active member of an imagined -- technologically constituted -- community.Through the creation of simple and complex hybrids of existing communicationstechnologies, Kac demystifies their conventional operations and arrangementsand encourages participants to consider how the slippages and gaps betweendiscretely conceived media, when modulated together, might offer emancipatoryalternatives to such codified usages typified by unidirectional media formsas television. Similarly, the settings created by Kac's hybrids also encourageresistance to impoverished notions like "transmission" or "input/output,"and instead promote negotiation between participants (while questioningthe very possibility of communication). Considered from these perspectives,Kac's current work is directed at the enablement of a system of symbolicexchange which establishes a radically democratic public sphere. In thisnew environment, where public and private meet, participants remain alertto their potential agency and responsibilities, as they learn to defineand negotiate them within the emerging global context.
Keith Holz
Originally published in the pamphlet published by the Center of ContemporaryArt (University of Kentucky, Lexington) on the occasion of Eduardo Kac'ssolo exhibition Dialogues (October 21-November 11, 1994). Also publishedon the Web in Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 2, No.12, December 1994, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA; and in YLEM,Volume 15, No. 2, April 1995, Orinda, CA, p. 7.