The Eighth
Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac
Edited by
Sheilah Britton and Dan Collins
Institute for Studies in the Arts, Herberger
College of Fine Arts, Arizona State University
Distributed Art Publishers Inc. D.A.P.
www.artbook.com
ISBN 0-9724291-0-7
Paperback, 188 pp., illustrated
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
<mosher@svsu.edu>, Saginaw Valley
State University, University Center MI 48710
USA.
Artist Francisco Goya warned us that "the
sleep of reason produces monsters", while
in the arctic Dr. Frankenstein lamented
his experimental transgressions that give
life to dead meat. Eduardo Kac's products
of his own artful scientific processes warn
us mutely of the issues between human and
animal that contemporary technologies inflame.
"Rara Avis" was his1996 installation in
which the viewer could see its budgie-filled
aviary through a video camera in the eyes
of a centrally-perched mechanical parrot.
In "Time Capsule" (1997) at the Casa de
Rojas in Sao Palo, Kac was videotaped as
he implanted an identity-tracking chip into
his ankle, machine-readable like the chip
on my packet of cigars to prevent me from
walking out of Walgreen's without paying
for them. Kac recognized that precise recording
of identity could be used against a citizen--as
it had been used to exterminate his Jewish
relatives in Poland sixty years ago, whose
images were displayed on the Casa de Rojas
gallery walls. In a piece called "The Book
of Mutations", the artist translated lines
from the Book of Genesis, about human dominion
over "every living thing that moves upon
the earth" into Morse Code, then overlaid
that code with DNA from a slime mold. Induced
mutations in the mold's genes soon resulted
in code that degraded the scriptural quote.
Texts and codes were all engraved upon granite
tablets, and the petri dish's spotty cultures
were reproduced as fine art giclée
prints. Kac's most famous creation or collaborator
is Alba, a white "GFP Bunny" who deserves
a place in cultural history alongside Dolly
the Sheep. Otherwise normal, under certain
wavelengths of light Alba glows an unearthly
radium green from a Green Flourescent Protein
(GFP) gene inserted into her cells before
birth. That laws prevented her travel over
international borders with Kac became subject
of another artwork.
These works are all discussed as predecessors
to the topic of this book, "The Eighth Day",
Kac's 2001 installation at Arizona State
University that continued his exploration
of GFP critters. Mice, fish, bacteria and
tobacco plants, whose genomes all included
the flourescent gene, were assembled in
a terrarium and lit so they would glow eerily.
The bacteria also served as the "brain"
of a contraption called the Biobot, which
raised or lowered upon its legs depending
on the bacteria's reaction to light. The
slim, elegant volume The Eighth Day
provides an illustrated introduction to
Eduardo Kac's work, and lists URLs of online
essays by Kac and others for further study.
The essays range from a game but somewhat
befuddled look by traditional art historian
Edward Lucie-Smith, to Arlindo Machado's
"Towards a Transgenic Art" which contextualizes
Kac among some of his philosophical influences.
With New Orleans-based William A. Rawls,
the two Arizona State scientists Alan Rawls
and Jeanne Wilson-Rawls instrumental in
the laboratory processes necessary to create
"The Eighth Day" review "Science in a Postmodern
World". ASU's Dan Collins provides a critique
of the "Eighth Day" piece and its video-fed
website. While I personally prefer my dinnertime
fish, fowl and foodstuffs to have only the
natural world's genetic diversity that evolution
has given them, Eduardo Kac's transgenic
efforts makes us realize that biotechnology
has its proper place in one singular, studied,
ironicized realm: the world of art.