Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac [ɛdwardoʊ kæts; ĕd·wâr′·dō kăts] (1962) is a Brazilian-American contemporary artist and professor whose artworks span a wide range of practices, including performance art, poetry, holography, interactive art, telematic art and transgenic art. He is particularly well known for his works that integrate biotechnology, politics and aesthetics.

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.

Kac is perhaps best known for his transgenic artworks that use biotechnology to intervene on the natural genetic structure of plants and animals. His works Time Capsule, GFP Bunny and Natural History of the Enigma in particular are recognized as notable works for having joined biotechnology, art and bioethics together into politically charged artworks.

In 2017 Kac collaborated with the French Space Observatory office to have a sculpture made aboard the International Space Station.

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