‘Transgenic Art’: The Biopoetry of Eduardo Kac

Abstract

The various forms of ‘New Media Poetry’ documented and theorized in 1996 in an issue of Visible Language edited by Eduardo Kac¹ included such forms as digital poetry in a number of forms and genres (some of it interactive), other forms of cyberliterature, videopoetry and holographic poetry (or holopo-etry). The concept of ‘poetry’ involved in this practice and its theorization expanded the convention of considering as ‘poetry’ all forms of manipulation of and experimentation with the verbal medium and its written and aural representations which dated back to the beginning of the twentieth century and had come to be labelled as visual, concrete or sound poetry, respectively. The Brazilian poet and artist Eduardo Kac (b. 1962) first gained international recognition in the early 1980s with his computer-generated holopoetry. Over the past 20 years, he has more radically explored the possibilities of contemporary media technology for artmaking, a development documented in Telepresence & Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, & Robots (2005), a collection of Kac’s essays published between 1992 and 2002,² with the essays grouped under the headings ‘Telecommunications, Dialogism and Internet Art’, ‘Telepresence Art and Robotics’ and ‘Bio Art’. The most notorious of his ‘bio art’ creations is the GFP Bunny (2000), the green fluorescent rabbit Alba, a product of what Kac calls ‘transgenic art’ — ‘a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering to create unique living beings’.³