ABSTRACT
This final chapter, dedicated to the work of Brazilian-American bioartist Eduardo Kac, shows how a certain zone of contemporary art seeks to challenge traditionally conceived boundaries between the human and the non-human, the living and the non-living, the local and the remote, as well as aesthetics and technology. It also registers a key paradigm shift in thinking about posthumanism, insofar as Kac’s telerobotic and transgenic projects mark the passage from a digital posthumanism to a biocybernetic one, following a terminological and methodological turn proposed by critic W. J. T. Mitchell. The techno-poetic approach I employ in this chapter focuses on Kac’s installations, including the following pieces: “Time Capsule” (1997), “A Positive” (1997), and “Genesis” (1999). My reading of Kac’s telematic works from 1997 elaborates a technophenomenological approach to what I call a poetics of skin. The analysis of Kac’s transgenic work “Genesis,” on the other hand, takes a multifarious (science and technology studies, digital humanities, and media studies) approach to the question of poetic-genetic translation and translatability in this groundbreaking artwork.
