Eduardo Kac Telepresence & Bio Art Networking Humans, Rabbits, of Robots Foreword by James Elkins I ^ 1/ J tens T.OO& Telepresence & Bio Art Studies in Literature and Science pubisbed in association with the Society for Literature and Science Editorial Board Co-Chairs: N. Katherine Hayles, University of California, Los Angeles, and Stephanie A. Smith, University of Florida James J. Bono, State University of New York at Buffalo Clifford Geertz, Institute for Advanced Study Mark L. Greenberg, Drexel University Evelyn Fox Keller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Bruno Latour, Ecole Nationale Superieur des Mines, Paris Stephen J. Weininger, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Titles in the series Transgressive Readings: The Texts of Franz Kafka and Max Planck by Valerie D. Greenberg A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos by Alexander J. Argyros Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics by Michael Joyce The Artificial Paradise: Science Fiction and American Reality by Sharona Ben-Tov Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time by Michel Serres with Bruno Latour Genesis by Michel Serres The Natural Contract by Michel Serres Dora Marsden and Early Modernism: Gender, Individualism, Science by Bruce Clarke The Meaning of Consciousness by Andrew Lohrey The Troubadour of Knowledge by Michel Serres Simplicity and Complexity: Pondering Literature, Science, and Painting by Floyd Merrell Othermindedness: The Emergence of Network Culture by Michael Joyce Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing by Mark Hansen Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics, and Water in the Desert Southwest by David N. Cassuto Networking: Communicating with Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century by Laura Otis Rethinking Reality: Lucretius and the Textualization of Nature by Duncan F. Kennedy The Knowable and the Unknowable: Modern Science, Nonclassical Thought, and the “Two Cultures” by David N. Cassuto Telepresence and Bio Art: Networking Humans, Rabbits, and Robots by Eduardo Kac Telepresence & Bio Art Networking Humans, Rabbits, & Robots Eduardo Kac ^OVE C0^ The University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor For Ruth & Miriam Copyright © by the University of Michigan zoo 5 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America © Printed on acid-free paper 2008 zoo 7 zoo6 Z005 4 3 z 1 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kac, Eduardo. Telepresence and bio art: networking humans, rabbits, and robots / Eduardo Kac. p. cm. — (Studies in literature and science) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-472-09810-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-472-06810-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Telecommunication in art. 2. Technology in art. 3. Biology in art. 4. Kac, Eduardo. I. Title. II. Series. N74.T45K33 2005 701'.05—dc22 2004015061 Foreword James Elkins A reviewer once said that Eduardo Kac’s work is six degrees of sepa¬ ration from every important issue of our time. It is an accurate remark. I imagine some readers will have picked up this book because they know Kac’s work, and others will be hoping to learn something about bioart or telepresence, but there will also be readers for whom this book’s subtitle is a red flag, a warning that indicates the book is meant for people with a special interest in technology. Wariness of new me¬ dia is a traditional accompaniment of modernism, and in some respects it’s even a necessary element of modernism. Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, modernist wariness about new media has largely evaporated (which is not the same as saying it leaves no un¬ solved problems in its wake or that it’s been done away with once and for all), and yet suspicion about technology remains. Those who are convinced of the importance of film, video, performance, and concep¬ tual art may still resist work that depends on code, pixels, or genes. I suspect the current slight but pervasive mistrust of digital media is a ghostly aftereffect of modernism’s dislike of technology. If you find yourself agreeing with Heidegger’s critique of technology, then this book may indeed have little to say to you. If you feel, like Heidegger, that technology masks fuller senses of experience, then the subjects covered in this book may seem like attempts to conceal, or escape from, life and art in a broader sense. But I wonder how many people who avoid electronic arts exhibitions actually read Heidegger and how many people have managed to keep the digital portions of their life se¬ questered from the artistic parts. I think, in other words, that the mis- James Elkins, an art historian, is the author of The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (Simon & Schuster, 1996), The Domain of Images (Cornell University Press, What Painting Is (Routledge, 2.000), What Happened to Art Criticism? (Prickly Paradigm Press/University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Six Stories from the End of Rep¬ resentation (Stanford University Press, 2005). VI Foreword trust of digital arts is sometimes—not always—a matter of old and un examined habits. Given all that, I’d like to use this foreword to address readers who might have some lingering skepticism about the potential relevance of technologically oriented media. Readers who already accept such art may find something of use here as well, especially those who feel that the question of relevance is asked and answered and there are effec¬ tively no divides between the digital and the rest of art—what the digi¬ tal calls the analog. I’ll mention three fields of crucial interest to contemporary theoriz¬ ing on fine art that apply just as well—and in most cases better to the work Kac discusses than they do to the media with which they are nor¬ mally associated. These are three reasons why mainstream art theory, criticism, and history should take notice of the developments in this book as if they did not require a separate book of their own—as if they were simply and immediately examples of art. History This is an unusual book, because Kac has participated in the move¬ ments he discusses. He is an artist and also, at times, a historian. The combination is rare. A comparison might be made to Robert Mother- well, except that as a historian he was more concerned with surrealism than the art of his own generation: he separated documentation from creation in a way that Kac does not. Eugene Fromentin might be an¬ other example, and among near contemporaries there are Meyer Schapiro, Leo Steinberg, and David Summers. It’s a short list. The clos¬ est comparisons may be to Laszlo Moholy-Nagy; or to Paul Signac, who wrote a history of French painting up to and including his own generation; or—though he’s not much of a historian—Frank Stella. (I thank Margaret MacNamidhe for suggesting Fromentin and Signac.) Kac does not consider himself a historian, but it might be more ac¬ curate to say that his practice includes the making of art as well as its discussion: research into what other people do and have done is part of his working process. At the same time, Kac has a perspective on this material that isn’t quite what scholars might have. Rachel Greene’s book on Internet art, for example, is oriented partly to politicals and partly to formal innovation. Similar emphases can be found in books by Julian Stallabrass, Oliver Grau, Christiane Paul, Noah Wardrip- Fruin, Nick Montfort, and Stephen Wilson. This book has an interest, too: a theory, a common thread that binds the narrative. That interest is, in one word, communication. Kac is concerned to find new forms Foreword vii of communication, and that takes him into semiotics; linguistics; com¬ munication theory; and, especially, what he calls dialogism. Dialogism In his art and writing, Kac is singularly uninterested in one-way com¬ munication of the sort in which the work “speaks” to the silent viewer. (I imagine he is also disapproving of the classical music scene, where nothing more articulate than clapping is required of an audience.) The works described in this book share its author’s concern with the elab¬ oration of new communities, new kinds of collaboration, new dialog¬ ical interactions. Those interests become radical when the thing being communicated with is not another person but a software code, a ro¬ bot, or something that’s alive but isn’t human. For Kac the theorist (of his own work and that of others) there is a necessary progression from one-directional work like academic painting (in which meaning seems to flow to a silent viewer), through bidirectional work like some per¬ formance, telepresence, and telerobotics (where the audience becomes a participant and the performers can become the audience), to bi¬ directional work that reaches outside the human. It’s a genealogy whose sturdiness has yet to be tested: the link between the second and third is a historical hypothesis, a proposal for a genealogy of art. The three parts of this book rehearse the genealogy, and it will be up to each reader to decide if the theme of dialogism finds its logical end in works that explore the boundaries of the living and nonliving or incorporate “dialogic” animals like the dog. One question, then, is whether the investigation of new forms of di¬ alogical understanding inevitably leads toward the investigation of new forms of life. Another is the link between dialogism, as Kac explores it, and similar concepts used outside telepresence, telerobotics, and bioart.