New Arts of Being

JùKrica Aesthetics New Arts of Being Steve Tomasula Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits and Robots Eduardo Kac University of Michigan Press http://www.press.umich.edu 325 pages; paperback, $27.95 Though internationally known for being the first artist to genetically alter a mammal with the explicit aim of making it a work of art, Eduardo Kac is also a historian and critic of this field, writing insightfully about the vast array of human and artificial bodies—genetically redesigned plants and animals, web cams, robots, switching circuits, and the like— that he and other artists have been offering as works of art for over twenty years. Now, Kac has gathered a number of these essays into Telepresence and Bio Art, a book that recasts the trajectory of art by tracing the development of his work from its modernist antecedents, through the computer-nerd-as-artist days of teletype art, to his latest biological art works. That is, one way to read "The Aesthetics of Telecommunications," "The Origin and Development of Robotic Art," "Transgenic Art," and the other (heavily-footnoted) essays of this book is as an apology for an art form whose reception often seems to range between sheer incomprehension and outrage—creating non-art, or Frankensteins. But it's all in a day's work for an artist who adopts phone lines or genetic code as his medium. Seen against the "fine" art aesthetics of the museum and commercial gallery scene, Kac's project reinvigorates art in ways reminiscent of the futurists by insisting that art participate in the "circulation of ideas" cycling through a culture that has come a long way from the days when cave paintings were the. supreme expression of an artist in tune with his culture, and his survival. For experience in the first world is no longer shaped by the terror ofthe hunt, or modernist alienation, but, as Kac points out, by globalization, digital culture, multiplicity of online relationships and identities—one for the boss, another for potential lovers—and integration of organic and artificial life. People no longer have to live with the nose they were born with—or the organs, or the body chemistry. But they do have to live in the world that results from these possibilities. Thus, Kac strives to engage viewers as "participants in situations involving biological elements, telerobotics [robots operated from a distance], interspecies interaction, light, language, distant places, time zones, video conferences, and the exchange and transformation of information via networks." If all art is representation, what Kac hopes to represent are the largely invisible networks we navigate in our interactions with one another— from a child's touch, to speech—but especially those that are mediated by a host of "new technologies. . .from cash stations to. . .surveillance systems." The medium may not be the entire message, but it is part of it. And the part that interests Kac contributes to who we think we are and how we relate to one another. Kac's influences are wide-ranging and the history he writes of his field is also a bildungsroman focusing on his aesthetics: Orson Welles's 1938 radio staging of War ofthe Worlds, and Gene Cooper's Thundervolt (1994), in which lightning strikes from around the US were networked through wiring worn by the artist. Mark Pauline's Rabot (1981-1982), a work that features a dead rabbit fitted with a mechanical exoskeleton so that it could be made to walk backwards, is also relevant here; as is Nam June Paik's Robot-456 (1965), a robot that Paik remotely controlled to walk out into Manhattan traffic, where it was promptly hit by a car, causing one observer to acclaim it as "the first accident of the twenty-first century." The early history Kac maps out is replete with NASA-mission-control-like photos of artists creating the Pong of network art, and Kac goes on to relate those heady days when "[t]he appearance of a new [web] site was a novel event," and artists were discovering the Internet as a space for social and aesthetic practice, a "conflation of medium and exhibition venue." Ifall art is representation, what Kac hopes...