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.