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Eduardo Kac

Eduardo Kac was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1962 and moved to the USA in 1989 to study Fine Art at the Art Institute of Chicago. He has represented Brazil and the USA in international exhibitions, but says that he "prefers not to be bound by any particular nationality or geography: I work with telecommunications, trying to break up these boundaries." Kac (pronounced 'Katz') is from the 1980s generation in Brazil who struggled to reclaim political freedom after years of military dictatorship, and his work using new technologies continues to explore issues of information censorship and freedom of speech - he investigates the philosophical and political dimensions of communication processes.

In 1983, Kac  began to work with holograms, and his 'holopoetry' explored the relationship between experimental poetry and new media - his main interest was in the possibilities of using holography as a time-based medium and in conveying "the process of my thought". He made his first experiments online in 1985, and became a pioneer of telecommunications art in the pre-Web 1980s. In the early 1990s, Kac attracted international attention with radical works that combined telerobotics and living organisms. His current practice brings together the digital and the biological, as he examines linguistic systems, dialogic exchanges, and interspecies communication.

Kac lectures and publishes worldwide, and his work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; Zendai Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai; Seoul Museum of Art, Korea; Yokohama Triennial, Japan; Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil; and International Triennial of New Media Art, National Art Museum of China, Beijing. Permanent collections holding his work include the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Museum of Modern Art of Valencia, Spain; the ZKM Museum, Karlsruhe, Germany; and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro.

Constructions & mixed media   Drawings & works on paper   

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