Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac (born 1962) is a dual nationality (American and Brazilian) contemporary artist whose portfolio encompasses various forms of art including performance art, poetry, holography, interactive art, digital and online art, and BioArt. Recognized for his space art and transgenic works, Kac integrates biotechnology to create organisms with new genetic attributes. His interdisciplinary approach has seen the use of diverse mediums, from fax and photocopying to fractals, RFID implants, virtual reality, networks, robotics, satellites, telerobotics, virtual reality and DNA extraction. Kac was born July 3, 1962, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He 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. In 2003 he received a doctorate from the Planetary Collegium at the University of Wales, Great Britain. Kac is a professor of art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Kac began his art career in 1980 as a performance artist in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 1982 he created his first digital work and in 1983 he invented holopoetry, exploring holography as an interactive art form. In 1985 he began creating animated poetic works on the French Minitel platform. Throughout the 1980s Kac created telecommunications artworks, using media such as fax, television, and slow scan TV. In 1986 Kac created his first work of telepresence art, in which he used robots to bridge two or more physical locations. During the 1990s he continued to produce these works, expanding his practice with works of interspecies communications. Kac is credited with coining the term "BioArt". Kac coined various terms to describe his transdisciplinary art practice, including biorobotics (functional merger of robotics and biotechnology), plantimal (plant with animal genetic material or animal with plant genetic material), and transgenic art (the expression of genes from one species in another in an artwork).