Telepresence Bio Art

"Eduardo Kac's work represents a turning point. What it questions is our current attitudes to creativity, taking that word in its most fundamental sense." -Edward Lucie-Smith, author of Visual Arts in the 20th Century "His works introduce a vital new meaning into what had been known as the creative process while at the same time investing the notion of the artist-inventor with an original social and ethical responsibility." -Frank Popper, author of Origins and Development of Kinetic Art "Kac's radical approach to the creation and presentation of the body as a wet host for artificial memory and 'site-specific' work raises a variety of important questions that range from the status of memory in digital culture to the ethical dilemmas we are facing in the age of bioengineering and tracking technology." -Christiane Paul, Whitney Museum of Art For nearly two decades Eduardo Kac has been at the cutting edge of media art, first inventing early online artworks for the web and continuously developing new art forms that involve telecommunications and robotics as a new platform for art. Interest in telepresence, also known as telerobotics, exploded in the 1990s, and remains an important development in media art. Since that time, Kac has increasingly moved into the fields of biology and biotechnology. Telepresence and Bio Art is the first book to document the evolution of bio art and the aesthetic development of Kac, the creator of the "artist's gene" as well as the controversial glow-in-the-dark, genetically engineered rabbit Alba. Kac covers a broad range of topics within media art, including telecommunications media, interactive systems and the Internet, telematics and robotics, and the contact between electronic art and biotechnology. Addressing emerging and complex topics, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary art.

This book presents results of an international conference which addressed the interaction of aesthetical and technological dimensions within the formation of contemporary society. The contributions discuss the production of time and space, self and nature, individual and society in the image of technology. They focus on the productive tensions and convergences between aesthetic and technological concepts when implemented in everyday life. The volume contains - among others - texts about technologies of visualisation, the aesthetics of warfare and the design of technological lifeworlds.

Humankind has imagined and depicted fantastical creatures since the formation of the first societies. Beasts such as the Chimera, the Golem, the Minotaur and Galatea could be said to be culturally symptomatic. Today, in the twenty-first century, we witness the emergence of a new class of beings: organisms that are first imagined and then--through the agency of biotechnologies--brought to life. What once was myth is today a medium. In Eduardo Kac: Life Extreme, Kac, the pioneer of "bio art" who is internationally recognized for celebrated works such as "Genesis" and the fluorescent green "GFP Bunny," has selected 36 new organisms and invited the prominent philosopher Avital Ronell to discover these new beings. The book, published in Dis Voir's new Encounters series, is prefaced by Kac's "Anthroduction" and includes a whimsical taxonomy of taxonomies, offering a unique classification method for future species.

Science and art are increasingly interconnected in the activities of the study and conservation of works of art. Science plays a key role in cultural heritage, from developing new analytical techniques for studying the art, to investigating new ways of preserving the materials for the future. Following on from the 2014 title Science and Art: The Painted Surface, this book consists of a series of chapters written together by scientists, art historians, conservators, curators and artists dedicated to conservation, execution techniques, languages and conceptual topics. Science and Art: The Contemporary Painted Surface largely covers execution techniques, material’s conservation and languages of artists, representative of twelve different countries, all protagonists of the development of innovative significant techniques and methodologies. The book opens with a focus on widely historicized artists, such as Jackson Pollock, Lucio Fontana, Enrico Baj, Piero Manzoni and Joseph Albers. Its core is dedicated to the work of major worldwide renowned living artists, in a perspective that, while considering the Sixties as the historical starting point of contemporaneity, does not neglect to offer a view on the work done in the immediately preceding years. Several interviews with artists are included. Final chapters are dedicated to contemporary design, net art, and painted surfaces in contemporary architecture. Presented in an easily readable form for a large audience, the book guides readers into new areas uncovered by the link between science and art, and will be of interest to artists, art historians and curators, as well as those who appreciate art. Reviews of Science and Art: The Painted Surface 'Science and Art provides an excellent read for art historians, who will instantly recognise the famous pieces that have been studied, while giving them insight into how a painting was constructed, what it is made from, or how the colours would have looked when they were freshly painted.' Chemistry World, 6 November 2014 'Science and Art is recommended for students, teachers, and the general public who are interested in chemistry or other sciences and art, as well as applications of the former to the latter.' J. Chem. Educ., 2016, 93(5), 810–810

An examination of telepresence technologies through the lens of contemporary artistic experiments, from early video art through current “drone vision” works. "Telepresence” allows us to feel present—through vision, hearing, and even touch—at a remote location by means of real-time communication technology. Networked devices such as video cameras and telerobots extend our corporeal agency into distant spaces. In Here/There, Kris Paulsen examines telepresence technologies through the lens of contemporary artistic experiments, from early video art through current “drone vision” works. Paulsen traces an arc of increasing interactivity, as video screens became spaces for communication and physical, tactile intervention. She explores the work of artists who took up these technological tools and questioned the aesthetic, social, and ethical stakes of media that allow us to manipulate and affect far-off environments and other people—to touch, metaphorically and literally, those who cannot touch us back. Paulsen examines 1970s video artworks by Vito Acconci and Joan Jonas, live satellite performance projects by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, and CCTV installations by Chris Burden. These early works, she argues, can help us make sense of the expansion of our senses by technologies that privilege real time over real space and model strategies for engagement and interaction with mediated others. They establish a political, aesthetic, and technological history for later works using cable TV infrastructures and the World Wide Web, including telerobotic works by Ken Goldberg and Wafaa Bilal and artworks about military drones by Trevor Paglen, Omar Fast, Hito Steyerl, and others. These works become a meeting place for here and there.

A groundbreaking collection of essays looking at the concepts of 'intermediality' and 'multimodality' - the relationship between various forms of art and new media - and including case studies ranging from music, film and architecture to medieval ballads, biopoetry and Lettrism.