Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac’s work lies at the intersection of Art and Science - a place where art is both technically sound and self-expressive. This has been an growing trend in the Contemporary Art world, where the public seeks to find a balance between understanding and enjoyment of life.

The synthesized translation of a Bible quote is shown above, aptly named Genesis. The key element of the work is an "artist's gene", a synthetic gene that was created by Kac by translating a sentence from the biblical book of Genesis into Morse Code, and converting the Morse Code into DNA base pairs according to a conversion principle specially developed by the artist for this work. By equating two usually opposing forces, science and religion, Kac deals with the ideas of two belief systems and what it really means to believe in anything.

These pieces give some historical context to the making of Alba, Eduardo Kac’s fluorescent bunny.

This is considered one of Kac’s ultimate pieces and is very consistent with his work on the whole.

The man himself, Eduardo Kac. Born in Brazil in 1962, he has pioneered the creative use of many technologies in the art world, including work in fractals, experimental photography, holography, and many more disciplines. He continues to inspire as a professor of Art and Technology Studies at School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kac proposes that poetry has left the constraints of the written page and should now be explored through a variety of media. He writes of the use of biotechnology and living organisms as a new realm of poetic expression known as biopoetry. This piece is an example of the subset of biopoetry known as transgenic poetry, the idea being that these sequences could be incorporated into living genomes who would (after the natural loss and exchange of DNA material) then pass on similar sequences to their offspring, effectively creating new art.