It is difficult to determine if Eduardo Kac uses science to make art or if he uses art to make science. Regardless, he has always interested himself in creating a dialogue that facilitates communication between scientific and philosophical research. His beginnings were invested in creating art with electronic and photonic media, including robotics and telematic networking prior to the World Wide Web. Later, he applied his interest in systems of communication to his investigation of the biological sciences. Kac understands systems of communication as any "process that brings discreet entities into contact enabling change and transformation." Produced from his philosophical approach to science is his transgenic art, "a form of artistic creation based in genetic engineering for transference of genes (either natural or synthetic) to a living organism, so as to create new forms of life." 

Kac's first transgenic artwork Genesis, 1999, facilitates an intimate encounter with the basic building blocks of biological identity, as if stumbling upon the beginning of the universe to find that all has been made in a laboratory. The work centers on a synthetic "artist's gene", which Kac engineered by choosing a quote from the Old Testament and translating it, first into Morse Code and then into DNA base pairs according to a specially tailored conversion principle. Genesis includes bacteria in a Petri dish into which Kac's gene is incorporated, projected in grand scale on the gallery wall. Participants in this creation story are invited to turn on an ultraviolet light over the specimen, causing the cells to mutate and disorder the biblical quote that makes up their genetic structure. Kac explains in his statements about Genesis that, "The ability to change the sentence is a symbolic gesture: it means that we do not accept its meaning in the form we inherited it, and that new meanings emerge as we seek to change it." For Kac, art is "philosophy in the wild, an inquiry about the world that takes the form of perceptible phenomena." Perhaps the same can be said for science, as it shares with art a reliance on the physical manifestation of concepts to evidence the nature of the universe.

By Jennifer Eberbach

Sources:

Eduardo Kac, The Eight Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac, eds. Sheilah Britton and Dan Collins (Arizona State University, 2003).

Arlindo Machado, "Toward a Transgenic Art," The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac, eds. Sheilah Britton and Dan Collins (Arizona State University, 2003), 89.

Eduardo Kac, "Artist's Statement."

Eduardo Kac, "Picturing DNA: An Interview with Eduardo Kac," www.genomicart/genome-Kac.htm