Eduardo Kac [ɛdwardoʊ kæts; ĕd·wâr′·dō kăts] (1962) is a Brazilian-American contemporary performer and professor whose artworks span a broad range of practices, including doing art, poetry, holography, interactive art, telematic art and transgenic art. He is particularly skillfully known for his works that join together biotechnology, politics and aesthetics.
Kac began his art career in the to come 1980s as function artist in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil. Within a few years he was working in exploring holography as an interactive art form. At the same time, he began creating living poetic works on the French Minitel platform.
Before touching from Brazil to the United States in the late 1980s, Kac began creating his first telematic artworks that used electronic technologies to bridge two or more physical locations. During the 1990s he continued to fabricate these works, at the thesame time as he coined the phrase bioart. In addition to bioart Kac coined numerous neologisms to describe his transdisciplinary art practice, including holoart, transgenic art (the integration of human genes in an artwork) and plantimal, referring to a reforest infused in imitation of human genes.
Kac is perhaps best known for his transgenic artworks that use biotechnology to intervene upon the natural genetic structure of birds and animals. His works Time Capsule, GFP Bunny and Natural History of the Enigma in particular are certified as notable works for having allied biotechnology, art and bioethics together into politically charged artworks.
In 2017 Kac collaborated like the French Space Observatory office to have a sculpture made aboard the International Space Station.
A multidisciplinary artist, Kac has also employed poetry, fax, photocopying, photography, video, fractals, poetry, RFID implants, virtual reality, networks, robotics, satellites, telerobotics, Morse code and DNA extraction in his practice.
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