[essay from: "The Eighth Day"; exhibition catalogue, Institute for Studies in the Arts,  (forthcoming 2002)]

The importance of Eduardo Kac’s work with transgenic art is that, like any proponents of the avant-garde, citing the likes of Marcel Duchamp who “created” in 1917 the ready-made “Fountain” (urinal), and called it “Art”, he puts into question notions of “artistic practise“ and “authorship”. “GFP Bunny“, a transgenetic artwork that began to appear in 2000 [1] on the front page of newspapers such as Le Monde and the Boston Globe, was comprised of the creation of a green fluorescent rabbit named “Alba“, the ensuing public debate generated by the project, and the attempts at social integration of the rabbit.  In the artist’s latest work, “Free Alba” [2], Kac throws the work outside of the hermetic white box of the gallery or museum, and into the orbit of the global news media, generating multiples stories simultaneously, crossing myriad languages and cultures, to offer an open-ended work which requires the intervention of the reader / spectator as an active participant in the “creative act”:  “All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.“ [3]

Eduardo Kac‘s recent work, “The Eighth Day” is a transgenic net installation, which brings together living transgenic life forms and a biological robot (biobot) in an environment enclosed under a clear 4 foot diameter Plexiglas dome, where the visitor, upon entering the gallery hears the recurring sounds of waves, and walks over the projected video image of water. The title derives from the addition of one day to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, where “...on the 7th Day, god created man“, and posits, what if the day after, we have a world inhabited by creatures whose genetic code has been altered. Live specimens are chosen, representing three major kingdoms: that of plant, protozoa, amphibian, and mammal, so we have live tobacco plants, slime mold, zebra fish, and mice which all express the green fluorescent protein (GFP) through bioluminescence visible with the naked eye. The biobot--is a robot, which has as its brains, a living, active biological element: a petri dish containing a colony of GFP amoeba called Dyctiostelium discoideum. Changes in the activity of the biobot’s brain cause the motion of the mechanical legs to ascend and descend, so we see the relation of amoebal activity to the bioreactor’s dynamic behavior. The biobot also functions as the avatar of Web participants inside the environment. Independent of the ascent and descent of the biobot, Web participants are able to control its audiovisual system with a pan-tilt actuator. The autonomous ascent and descent motion provide Web participants with a new perspective of the environment. In the gallery, visitors are able to see the terrarium with transgenic creatures from outside and inside the dome, as a computer in the gallery gives local visitors an exact sense of what the experience is like on the Internet. Remote global participants entering into the networked space of the Internet became the controlling “eyes” so to speak, as they actively manipulated the webcam components within the physical installation. The biobot becomes a wet-site host for the human-amoebal network, creating a feedback loop of cause and effect. The subjective and objective visions coalesce, through the telematic actions of the viewers / participants. Selections by one online visitor were viewable by all (both in the physical installation, as well as by all in the global online community). Through a webcam stationed high above the room, one could surveill the visitors, rendering them simultaneously both as “subjects” and “objects” of the enclosed system of “The Eighth Day”. Within the networked space of the internet, wherein the elements of time delay and fluctuations in transmission” make evident the presence of the other in a live, networked, performative matrix; rising out to the fore, a displacement of time and space, a sense of dislocation / disjuncture. When the camera zooms out, panning across the room, we see ourselves within; we are “inside” the fishbowl, so to speak. There is motion in the room, the biobot’s eye moves, we wonder who is actualising this? Someone in the room, or is it an online visitor, half way around the globe? Movements without a trace of the person who made it... The action of each remote participant in the creation of what is being seen by all, broadcast through the world wide web, no longer the paradigm of a one-way broadcast medium (such as television), but rather one where interaction and dialogue are key. For the www, one of the most popular of internet protocols, can be seen in “The Eighth Day” as a two-way medium, a network topology of connectivity and social interaction.

In "Negotiating Meaning: The Dialogic Imagination in Electronic Art" [4],  Eduardo Kac speaks about how it is of paramount importance to have active forms of communication between two living entities. That social interaction, interrelationship, and connectivity is the basis of life.

Machine Breeds Machine. Duchamp's futuristic vision of allegorical machines is one of the true marriages between matter and spirit, art and technology; "the spirit is the bride". Duchamp invented a new physics of his own, a fourth dimension engineering that goes beyond the rational axiomatic rigidity of scientific law. One of Duchamp's greatest works, _The Large Glass or the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even_ (1915-23) represents the most difficult and mysterious of all domains, the fourth dimensional phenomenon of sex. These theoretical suggestions isolate and demonstrate a tangible biological energy generated by the human body (particularly during sexual activity).

These discoveries can only enhance yet even more new possibilities in the future exploration of the man machine symbiosis in all levels of creation. As technology accelerates and new knowledge formulates so does the spirit in its needs to expand its own awareness, for only in the pursuit of knowledge of all things can we discover ourselves.

Eduardo Kac’s work “The Eighth Day” does just this; it expands our awareness of the technology + issues surrounding “transgenics”; the study + practise of genetic modification (or GM, as it is commonly referred to). A transgenic being contains a gene or genes which have been artificially inserted instead of naturally occurring. The inserted gene sequence (known as the transgene) may come from another of the same species, or from a completely different species.

We have seen studies into DNA sequencing, with the human genome project. DNA molecules store an organism's genetic information and orchestrates the metabolic processes of life. If DNA is the source code of life, or the operating system (if you will), then it is not unlike the operating system (OS) of computers. So if we argue that we should make the source code available, in order that it may be understood, is it not the case with DNA, the source code of life? The “Eighth Day” brings to light these questions.

In conclusion, I posit that, while it is unclear why genetic engineering performed in the name of science is more acceptable than the same process carried out in the name of art, Eduardo Kac's "Eighth Day" makes an invaluable contribution to the understanding of the changing realm of biotechnology and its consequent social + cultural ramifications.

NOTES:

1 - First publicly in Avignon, France, then as a series of "GFP Bunny-Paris Intervention" posters which were posted by the artist all over Paris in 2000, as well as in two gallery exhibitions: “Dystopia + Identity in the Age of Global Communications“, curated by Cristine Wang, Tribes Gallery, New York, 2000; and “Under the Skin“, curated by Sške Dinkla, Renate Heidt Heller and Cornelia Brueninghaus-Knubel, Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, 2001.

2 - A series of large-scale photographs commissioned by the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, appearing as part of a city-wide public art project that presented artworks inside large shipping containers scattered throughout the city of Kaohsiung.

3 - Duchamp, Marcel. "The Creative Act" lecture, given at the "Rethinking the Creative Act" Convention of the American Federation of Arts, Houston, Texas, April 1957, also in:  Kepes, Gyorgy. The Visual Arts Today (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan, 1960), pp.111-112.

4 - Kac, Eduardo.  “Negotiating Meaning: The Dialogic Imagination in Electronic Art”, Proceedings of Computers in Art and Design Education Conference, University of Teesside, UK, 1999, n.p.n.