This study is on the possibility and validity of ‘new ecology’ of Eduardo Kac(1962~), an American artist from Brazil. His works from 1990 have been a search to express and manifest complexity, and have focused on communication, relationship, interpretation between different life forms(humans, animals, and hybrids) and robots or bio-telematics. Kac’s work is a search to express and manifest complexity, but his most recent pieces are based on the production of a new ecology where organic and technological systems cross-pollinate.
The works as Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1994), A-Positive (1997), Darker Than Night (1999), represent the convergence and communication among plants, animals, humans and machines(robots). Essay Concerning Human Understanding, a collaboration between Kac and Ikuo Nakamura, stands out as a rare artistic use of telerobotic devices to facilitate remote communication between non-humans, a canary in Kentucky and a philodendron plant in New York. This work can be seen as a allegory of the very possibility of communication and the human desire to overcome isolation by bridging the gap between self and other, subject and object. Darker Than Night was a profound attempt to investigate the possibility of empathy towards creatures that are different from us due to their specific sensory and motor system-the physical facts that determine their actions and experiences. In this work Kac addresses the human-machine-animal relationship with a complex interface, enabling humans and bats to become mutually aware of their presence in the cave through the exchange of sonar emmissions.
Kac said that transgenic art is a new art form based on the use of genetic engineering techniques to transfer synthetic genes to an organism or to transfer natural genetic material from one species into another, to create unique living beings. Molecular genetics allows the artist to engineer the plants and animal genome and create new life forms. Transgenic artworks like Genesis (1999), GFP Bunny (2000), The Eighth Day (2000-2001), are defined not only by the birth and growth of a new plant or animal but above all by the nature of the relationship between artist, public, and transgenic organism. In this sense, these works suggest the need to nurture a network ecology with humans and non-human creatures. From a social, political, and philosophical point of view, his art shows us a new ecology which harmonize carbon and silicon. In his article “Dialogical Telepresence Art and net Ecology”, he wrote that “As optical fibers thread the soil like worms, and digitally encoded waves cross the air as flocking birds, a new ecology emerges....Our synergy with telerobots, transgenics, nanobots, avatars, biobots, clones, digital biota, hybrids, webots and animats, and other material of immaterial intelligent agents will dictate our ability to endure fast-changing environmental conditions in a networked world.” According his statement, his ‘new ecology’ is the world that human, animal, plants, robot, and transgenic creatures have a symbiotic relationship together. It would be deserved to reconsider as a eco-system with dynamic balance and co-evolutions, and a possibility and validity for solving the ethical problems of bio-arts.