Kac began his art career in 1980 as a performance artist in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In 1982 he created his first digital work and in 1983 he invented Holopoetry, exploring holography as an interactive art form. In 1985 he began creating animated poetic works on the French Minitel platform. Throughout the 1980s Kac created telecommunications artworks, using media such as fax, television, and slow scan TV. In 1986 Kac created his first work of
telepresence art, in which he used robots to bridge two or more physical locations. During the 1990s he continued to produce these works, expanding his practice with works of interspecies communications. Early notable works include "Genesis" (1999), where Kac translated a Genesis line into morse code and subsequently into DNA
base pair and "GFP Bunny" (2000), where an albino rabbit was genetically altered with a jellyfish gene, causing it to emit a green glow under specific light conditions. This piece ignited extensive debates on the ethical implications of altering life forms for artistic purposes. Kac's focus on space art encompasses decades-long effort to complete "Ágora" (1986–2023), a project designed for deep space. Over the years, he has collaborated with both NASA and SpaceX. His collaboration with French astronaut
Thomas Pesquet in "Inner Telescope" (2017) led to the creation of a sculpture in space. Another of his artworks, "Adsum", made its journey to the International Space Station in 2022, in preparation for its final flight to the Moon. Kac has been an active participant in events promoting the convergence of art and space exploration, such as those organized by the
Space Observatory, an office of France's National Center for Space Studies. Beginning in 1982, Kac started to create digital works. In 1983 Kac invented holographic poetry (which he also called Holopoetry), the first of which was
HOLO/OLHO, named after the Portuguese word for "eye". 23 holographic poems followed this first work, including
Quando? (When?) (1987), a cylindrical work that could be read in two directions. Around the same time, and drawing on his interest in experimental poetry forms, Kac began making animated poetry works with the French
Minitel system that was then in use in Brazil. In 1985 he contributed one such work,
Reabracadabra, to the
Arte On Line exhibition, organized by the Livraria Nobel bookstore in São Paulo. Other Minitel animated poems by Kac include
Recaos (1986),
Tesão (1985/86) and
D/eu/s (1986). In 1986, with Flavio Ferraz, Kac organized the
Brasil High-Tech exhibition at the Galeria de Arte Centro Empresarial Rio in Rio de Janeiro. From 1985 to as late as 1994, Kac did a number of telecommunications artworks that used
Slow-scan television (SSTV),
FAX, and
live television, to create interactive exchanges between separate locations. In 1986 Kac created his first telepresence artwork, using a robot to connect distant audiences. In 1988 he began work on his
Ornitorrinco project, a telepresence artwork completed in Chicago, in 1989, in collaboration with Ed Bennett. The work brought together robotics, telecommunications technologies and interactivity to create a robot that was controlled remotely. The piece allowed viewers in one location to control the robot's camera and motion, creating a telepresent work and effecting the experience of viewers in the other location. In 1989 Kac moved from Rio de Janeiro to Chicago, where he would complete his MFA at the Art Institute of Chicago the following year. and
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1994) both using networks to explore the viewer experience of an artwork mediated between two sites in real time. In the latter case, the artwork joined a plant in New York city and a live canary in Kentucky in conversation. The inclusion of a bird and a plant as part of an interactive system is an early example of what Kac called interspecies communications. In December 10,1990 Kac was work on a Telecommunications and a interactive Art call Interfaces. "Interfaces established a visual dialogue between the participants in a way that was purposefully similar to a verbal exchange between two people -- bringing the improvised and spontaneous feed-back loop of a personal conversation to the realm of video." Kac created Interfaces to have a conversation like is social media and Interfaces is visual dialogue displayed at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago between a group of artists in Chicago and another group of artists at Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh. "With telepresence, one subjects oneself to a remote robotic body and finds oneself inside that body, able to make decisions wirelessly through the network" from the two group artists it looks like they have conversations but instead of words they use pictures to share emotion by mixing the two pictures. as I'm look at telecommunication the technology coupon moving forward "telecommunicate technologies are no exception. In fact, one of the most important aesthetic implications of remoteness is making evident that multiple processes always filter or shape one's experience" In 1996, Kac's space artwork
Monogram was included in the
DVD that flew to Saturn mounted to the side of the Cassini spacecraft. Kac coined the term "bio art" with his 1997 performance work
Time Capsule. In
Time Capsule, Kac implanted himself with an RFID chip originally designed for use in pets. A participant in Chicago then triggered the RFID scanned in the Brazilian gallery where Kac was performing, causing the scanner to display a unique code for the implant. Kac then registered himself on the pet database associated with the implant, becoming the first human to do so.
Time Capsule was simultaneously live on television and the Internet. ,
Richard Kriesche,
Mario Costa and Eduardo Kac,
Artmedia VII (1999) By the late 90s Kac defined himself either as a "transgenic artist" or a "bio artist", and was using
biotechnology and
genetics to create works that used scientific techniques and simultaneously critiqued them. Kac's next transgenic artwork, created in 1998/99 and titled
Genesis, involved him taking a quote from the
Bible (
Genesis 1:26 – "Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth"), transferring it into
Morse code, and finally, translating that Morse code (by a conversion principle specially developed by the artist for this work) into the base pairs of genetics. The new DNA sequence was introduced into bacteria. Participants were then able to shine ultraviolet lights onto the bacteria containing the new DNA, thus altering it. So when Kac translated it back to English, it said something completely different. Through this work, Kac encourages audiences to consider the new interconnectedness between biology, technology, and meaning.
2000s In one of his best known works,
GFP Bunny, presented in 2000 in Avignon, France, Kac claimed to have commissioned a French laboratory to create a green-fluorescent
rabbit; a rabbit born with a
Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP)
gene from a type of
jellyfish. Kac named the rabbit Alba. Other works would follow, focused on celebrating her life. In reality, Kac had only met Alba on his visit to the French lab. And while he had the consent of Houdebine to go in debate, the institution never agreed to public appearance of their GFP rabbits. When Kac's plea to get Alba was denied he went on to publish the artificially green photos, and declared it was his commission, and accused the institute of censorship. GFP Bunny appeared in Big Bang Theory, Sherlock, and Simpsons, and in novels such as
Oryx and Crake, by
Margaret Atwood, and
Next, by
Michael Crichton. His work
Natural History of the Enigma (2003–2008) continued in the theme of bio art by merging his DNA with that of a petunia, creating a hybrid organism that Kac called a "plantimal". The plant, also given the name Edunia (from Eduardo and Petunia), mimicked the flow of blood through human veins by mixing Kac's DNA only with the plant's genetic components that made the veins in its leaves red. an artwork conceived for zero gravity and made aboard the
International Space Station. Kac worked with the French Space Observatory office, from the French Space Agency, to have this work made in space by the astronaut Thomas Pesquet. Following Kac's instructions, Pesquet cut and folded two pieces of paper into a sculptural form. Floating in zero gravity, the form could be read as the three letters forming the French word for me, M-O-I, or a stylized human figure with the umbilical cord cut. ==Controversy==