The Eighth Day: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac

If there is no eighth day in the biblical account of things, perhaps it's time to add another, now that we have the means. The transgenic art of Eduardo Kac does just that, raising often unanswerable questions about ethics, evolution, biogenetics, and animals' rights, to name but a few of the areas from which his work has raised controversy. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Kac shocked the world, first with a groundbreaking net installation entitled Genesis, and then with Alba, his fluorescent, genetically enginered rabbit. From his first experiments online in the mid-1980s to his current convergence of the digital and the biological, in the Eighth Day installation Kac has always investigated the philosophical and political dimensions of communication processes. Equally concerned with the aesthetic and the social aspects of verbal and nonverbal interaction, Kac has examined linguistic systems, dialogic exchanges and interspecies communication, combining robotics and networking to explore the fluidity of subject positions in the postdigital world.