31 Facts About Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac was born on July 3,1962 and is a Brazilian and American contemporary artist whose portfolio encompasses various forms of art including performance art, poetry, holography, interactive art, digital and online art, and BioArt.

Eduardo Kac was born July 3,1962, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Eduardo Kac studied at the School of Communications of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, receiving a BA degree in 1985, and then at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he received an MFA degree in 1990.

Eduardo Kac is a professor of art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Eduardo Kac began his art career in 1980 as a performance artist in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In 1986 Eduardo Kac created his first work of telepresence art, in which he used robots to bridge two or more physical locations.

Eduardo Kac created various terms to describe his transdisciplinary art practice, including biorobotics, plantimal, and transgenic art.

Early notable works include "Genesis", where Eduardo Kac translated a Genesis line into morse code and subsequently into DNA base pair and "GFP Bunny", where an albino rabbit was genetically altered with a jellyfish gene, causing it to emit a green glow under specific light conditions.

Eduardo Kac's focus on space art encompasses decades-long effort to complete "Agora", a project designed for deep space.

Eduardo Kac has been an active participant in events promoting the convergence of art and space exploration, such as those organized by the Space Observatory, an office of France's National Center for Space Studies.

In 1980 Eduardo Kac launched the Movimento de Arte Porno on Ipanema Beach, in Rio de Janeiro, with the stated goal of subverting the logic of normative pornography at the service of activism and imagination.

Eduardo Kac was a performer with the Gang, the performance unit of the Movimento de Arte Porno; the Gang performed in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and other cities.

Around the same time, and drawing on his interest in experimental poetry forms, Eduardo Kac began making animated poetry works with the French Minitel system that was then in use in Brazil.

In 1986, with Flavio Ferraz, Eduardo Kac organized the Brasil High-Tech exhibition at the Galeria de Arte Centro Empresarial Rio in Rio de Janeiro.

From 1985 to as late as 1994, Eduardo Kac did a number of telecommunications artworks that used Slow-scan television, FAX, and live television, to create interactive exchanges between separate locations.

In 1986 Eduardo Kac created his first telepresence artwork, using a robot to connect distant audiences.

In 1989 Eduardo Kac moved from Rio de Janeiro to Chicago, where he would complete his MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago the following year.

The inclusion of a bird and a plant as part of an interactive system is an early example of what Eduardo Kac called interspecies communications.

In Teleporting An Unknown State, Eduardo Kac built a system that allowed a plant to survive in a gallery, illuminated not by direct sunlight but by the action of local or remote viewers of the work.

Eduardo Kac coined the term "bio art" with his 1997 performance work Time Capsule.

In Time Capsule, Eduardo Kac implanted himself with an RFID chip originally designed for use in pets.

Eduardo Kac then registered himself on the pet database associated with the implant, becoming the first human to do so.

In one of his best known works, GFP Bunny, presented in 2000 in Avignon, France, Eduardo Kac claimed to have commissioned a French laboratory to create a green-fluorescent rabbit; a rabbit born with a Green Fluorescent Protein gene from a type of jellyfish.

Eduardo Kac's claimed that his original aim was for Alba to live with his family, but that prior to the scheduled release of Alba to Eduardo Kac, the lab retracted their agreement and decided that Alba should remain in the lab.

Eduardo Kac responded by creating a series of works that called for her freedom.

In reality, Eduardo Kac had only met Alba on his visit to the French lab.

In 2017 Eduardo Kac collaborated with French astronaut Thomas Pesquet to create an artwork in space called Inner Telescope, an artwork conceived for zero gravity and made aboard the International Space Station.

Eduardo Kac worked with the French Space Observatory office, from the French Space Agency, to have this work made in space by the astronaut Thomas Pesquet.

Since 2019, Eduardo Kac has been developing Adsum, an artwork for the Moon.

Eduardo Kac's work has frequently been an object of debate.

Eduardo Kac's work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, Institut Valencia d'Art Modern in Valencia, Spain, Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid, Spain, Les Abattoirs Toulouse, France, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.