Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies

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We are never alone: a conversation on bio art with

Eduardo Kac

Jens Andermann & Gabriel Giorgi

To cite this article: Jens Andermann & Gabriel Giorgi (2017) We are never alone: a conversation
on bio art with Eduardo Kac, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 26:2, 279-297, DOI:
10.1080/13569325.2016.1274646

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2016.1274646

Published online: 17 Feb 2017.

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Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 2017
Vol. 26, No. 2, 279–297, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2016.1274646

Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi

WE ARE NEVER ALONE: A CONVERSATION

ON BIO ART WITH EDUARDO KAC

Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) work has raised eyebrows
especially for his ‘transgenic art’ projects, among others: Genesis, 1999; GFP
Bunny, 2000; The Eight Day, 2001; Natural History of the Enigma, 2003/
08. In all of these, Kac and his scientific collaborators realize genetic interventions
into living organisms at the same time as they trigger audience reactions to these from
playful kinds of interaction that is integrated into the works’ open and dynamic cre-
ative process. Yet whereas the ethical and political challenges Kac’s work poses have
sparked lively debates within and beyond the realm of the arts – can and must art
engage with the ‘creative’ potentials of biotechnology and genetics? Do these not in
fact (as Vilém Flusser and others have suggested) hold the key to realizing the van-
guardist dream of merging art and life? Or should the artist, from the vantage point
of his own creative practice, not rather warn us against the ethical and political risks
involved in genetic engineering? – much less attention has been paid to the way Kac’s
art also continues and transforms a particular legacy of post-concretist, ambient and
performance art in Latin America.
Kac himself has referred to Brazilian artists Flávio de Carvalho, Hélio Oiticica and
Lygia Clark as informing his interest in open, participative forms, which characterize
both his transgenic and his earlier ‘tele-presence’ art projects. Other Latin American
artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been producing intrigu-
ing engagements with living materials, multispecies habitats and organic remains,
including such diverse names as Luis Fernando Benedit, Nicola Constantino, Nuno
Ramos, or Teresa Margolles. In a conversation with Jens Andermann and Gabriel
Giorgi at the University of Zurich’s Center of Latin American Studies on March 12,
2015, Kac addressed the way in which his work might be seen as continuing or chal-
lenging long-standing representations of the New World as a repository of ‘nature’,
from colonial chronicles of discovery to contemporary discourses of biodiversity and
conservation. To what extent is bio art – and the questions it raises about the
Anthropocene as a threshold of radical biopolitical convergence between ‘history’ and
‘nature’ – necessarily ‘transcultural’ and planetary in its extension?

Keywords: Bio art; anthropocene; biotechnology; transgenesis; postnaturalism;

interspecies communication

Ó 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

280 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Figure 1 Eduardo Kac, ‘Oblivion’, from Specimen of Secrecy About Marvelous Discoveries
(2006). ‘Biotope’ painting based on microbial forms living in a medium of earth, water and
other materials.

Jens Andermann (JA): Gabriel, in your book, Formas comunes, you suggest that
animal life has abandoned the framework of nature that once made it intelligible,
so that this life today becomes immediately a political sign – not least because it
converges at the level of the living itself with the human life that becomes progres-
sively insignificant, threatened with precariousness, with abandonment. Would this
idea of ‘the exhaustion of nature as a framework of reference for the animal within
culture’ also be a useful way of thinking about Eduardo’s art and probably about
bio art more generally? And as a follow-up question to you, Eduardo: Gabriel’s
book traces the idea of the animal no longer being contained within the natural
framework in the realm of Latin-American culture. Do you see your own artwork
as dialoguing with the New World’s natural history? Including, of course, the his-
tory of an art that invented a certain idea of nature for the West?
Eduardo Kac (EK): By ‘New World’ you mean …?
JA: The Americas.
 WE ARE NEVER ALONE 281

EK: Okay, because I think bio artists are also in a sense creating a new world. Bio
art is not based on allegory, metaphor, or representation. Bio art is – as much as
all of us are – alive. Bio artworks are as alive as you and I. Exactly in the same
way. So, in that sense, bio art participates in evolution. It contributes a smaller
role, because we are not talking about such a large scale as the industry operates,
but in any case, when you bring new life into the world, it is an event. It forces a
reconfiguration, it forces a displacement, it produces new types of relationships in
a very tangible manner. That is why I asked. We participate in forging – in a sense
– a world in that way.
Gabriel Giorgi (GG): I have to make a double comment, and I think it also goes
back to previous conversations yesterday with Eduardo. On the one hand, one of
the critical tasks we face is to really dismantle, step by step, the distinction between
nature and culture that was so decisively foundational for modernity. And I think
that the work by Eduardo is a huge step in that direction. How do we dismantle,
dis-organize and re-organize the relationship, the tensions, in what we’ve been call-
ing ‘nature’ over the last two centuries? How do we rethink that dimension? I think
that one part is through technology. How do we situate the notion of technology
within that divide? On the other hand, I frame this question in the context of the
Latin American tradition, because there, perhaps more emphatically than in other
traditions, the question about nature – the distance and the relationship with nature
– was so foundational, so critical for the very thinking of modernity, in the sense of
how Latin-American nations enter modernity, enter capitalism, through the process-
ing of natural resources. Therefore the distinction between the urban and the rural,
the city and the outside of the city. That was critical to the way in which modernity
took place. I think that this is the other important task in dismantling, and that the
question of the animal is key, precisely, to that work. So, Eduardo, how do you see
your intervention within a Latin American ‘frame’? How does it dialogue with the
Latin American tradition, or not? How do you frame your conversation/discussion
about the biological/natural and the technological?
EK: To be plain and honest, I really do not see any relationship in particular with
Latin America or any particular geographical reference. I am interested in what I
see as a truly cosmopolitan issue. It is a contemporary issue. It is an issue that
affects everyone, because it speaks about the changing condition of what it means to
be human, independently of geography. Also, it points to a double movement and
gesture in the sense that we are experiencing a profound shift that reconfigures our
notion of the human, but it also reconfigures our notion of the non-human. In other
words, I am interested in the philosophical insights that we gain through the materi-
ality of the process. Let me explain what I mean by that. On the one hand, in
regards to the human, in the last ten, fifteen years, we have learned a lot that we
did not know. The human genome project, for example, has revealed that we have
sequences that come from bacteria and viruses. This means that we humans have
DNA from non-humans. What do you call creatures that have DNA from a different
species? Transgenic. Transgenesis is generally considered a non-natural process,
which is incorrect. Not only have we acquired DNA from other species throughout
our history of evolution, but transgenesis continues to be a dynamic process in other
species. The agrobacterium, for example, communicates its DNA to plants, without
human intervention, and it is precisely for this characteristic that it has become a
282 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

workhorse in molecular biology laboratories all over the world. Now we modify
the agrobacterium. We put what we want in it, but we do so, because it does this
by itself. So it becomes a kind of FedEx carrier. You put the package there and it
knows how to deliver it to the organization. It does this by itself. So transgenesis
has always been part of evolution, and we have experienced that ourselves. We have
construed culturally a notion of transgenesis as monstrous, only to find out that we
have always been transgenic. So, you are calling someone else a monster, and all of
a sudden you look at yourself in the mirror, and you realize that all of us, we have
always been transgenic. And according to conversations I have had with scientists,
this seems to be a universal phenomenon. It seems that other mammals also have
DNA from other creatures. If it does not kill us, it just gets incorporated. That is
one aspect, a very small aspect, about the materiality of the human body, and I
think there are philosophical insights to be gained from that.
Another interesting aspect of this materiality is that we have also learned that
we humans are all what scientists call ‘microchimeras’. In science, unlike mythol-
ogy, a chimera is a creature that has cells from another creature. So, we think that
we have cells that are ours only, and that in these cells, we have DNA from mum
and dad. But in fact, most of us have cells that come from another human being,
and those cells have DNA from the parents of this creature. It happens to be our
mother, but our mother is not ourselves, it is another person. So we have cells
from our mother in our bodies, and those cells do not have the DNA from our
parents and DNA from her parents. This makes us microchimeras. In a few peo-
ple, this is helpful, for others, this can cause disease, because your body does not
recognize those cells as yours. We are now beginning to understand this mecha-
nism: all of a sudden, we are microchimeras, we are transgenic, and this story of
reconfiguration of the materiality of the human body continues. There is a lot of
emphasis now in thinking not just the human genome but what scientists call the
‘hologenome’. What does this mean? Well, you will say, ‘We are human. We
have a genome. We sequence it. We understand how the human body works’. But
it is not exactly like that. There is a construct, a phantasy of the human body, but
then there is the actual physical reality of the human body. The physical reality of
the human body, for everyone, is that you have ten times more bacterial cells than
you have human cells. We have ten trillion human cells, a hundred trillion bacte-
rial cells. As a physical mass you are more bacterial than human, which is pretty
incredible, but it is a fact. You are mostly bacterial, and you are a transgenic
microchimera. Tomorrow morning when you look in the mirror, and you think
about this, you will say ‘Hello! You are never alone!’ Basically, you are a walking
ecological niche. To really understand what happens to you in every sense, you
would have to sequence not only what is in your chromosome but the chromo-
some of all of you, everything that is you, and understand how these things inter-
act. And once you understand that, then you begin to really understand the
functionality of this thing that you call the body. That is a very different way of
understanding the body from what we had ten years ago. So Rimbaud was right.
‘Je suis un autre’. In reality, we are never alone. This speaks about the human.
Now, there is the other side, which is the non-human. In regards to the non-
human, we are talking about the divide between culture and nature. We used to
think that only humans have language, that only humans have culture, but fields like
 WE ARE NEVER ALONE 283

cognitive ethology – with Donald Griffin in the 1940s, or Jakob von Uexküll in the
20s or Jane Goodall more recently – have come to understand that many species have
an incipient language. For, what do we do? We make these sounds, and we associate
these sounds to something in the physical world. We call this meaning. There are
other primates that have the rudiments of exactly the same thing. They make a sound
to designate a threat from the air. They make a sound to designate a threat coming
from the ground. These are basic words, because it is the same logic. In other words,
we have come to understand that the non-human has rudiments of language. The
non-human has technology, as when a chimpanzee breaks a stick and puts it in a tree,
that is technology, right? And that they teach the young, so it is not genetically deter-
mined. The same species separated by a geographic chasm, one half does not teach,
the other one does. So it is really a question of individuality and culture. They
develop cultural habits. Non-humans have the language that suits them: they have
technology, they have culture. So the reconfiguration goes both ways. And, I think,
bio art is very invested in these philosophical insights through art, not through
science. We partake, we bring these insights to bear in a very different way, but we
are part of the same historical moment, we participate in this reconfiguration.
JA: Let’s bring back to the table Eduardo Kac the artist rather than the scientist,
although the impossibility of distinguishing between the two is something we can
probably address in a moment. In your writing as well as in your artistic practice,
you are interested in the dialogical – you sometimes call it ‘intersubjectivity’ with
reference to Bakhtin or ‘consensual domains’ with reference to Varela and Maturana.
That is, you attempt to forge environments where the participation of the audience
is actually co-productive of the work, which has not been fully realized in the
moment of its exhibition, but rather demands a co-authoring process. Now, how
does this relate to the idea of bio art as a creation of life? Because, with the audience
you can have a horizontal, eye-to-eye conversation where you, the artist, propose a
setup, in which the audience – as in ‘Genesis’ – can decide whether or not to switch
on the light and set in motion a process of mutation. But is the way in which bio art
intervenes into the living really in the same sense ‘dialogical’ or ‘intersubjective’ as
the interaction between artist and audience? Or are there not rather two different
levels of dialogic intersubjectivity, let us say, intra- and interspecies?
EK: The challenge here lies with the different materiality of bio art. I come back
to this because I think it is central. Life is a material event, life is not an idea, life
is something that happens. Life functions, moves. In other words, bio art is
unique, is a departing point, it is different from everything that has preceded it his-
torically. Duchamp’s urinal does not help explain bio art. The ‘Burning Giraffes’
by Dalı́ – that does not help explain bio art. The colorful floating forms of Kandin-
sky – you do not get to bio art from there. Even though Kandinsky was interested
in microscopes, his compositions influenced by the new visions of microscopy were
still in the domain of abstraction and representation. The idea of art and life from
the 1960s, with Fluxus and everything – you do not get to bio art from there
either. Bio art is a breakthrough, a paradigm shift. And as a result of it not having
a precedent, it is very difficult to recognize its mode, its modality. It is very diffi-
cult to talk about it, to get to the core issues. And it is difficult to recognize it,
because in this process, for you to recognize something as art, first you have to
cognize it, and we are in the historical moment of cognizing bio art.
284 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Figure 2 Eduardo Kac, Teleporting an Unknown State, interactive telematic work

involving photosynthesis and vegetal growth through Internet-based remote signals
(1994).

Bio art is distinct in its engagement with life from interactive art as it has
been codified in history. In the 1980s, for example, I was using fax machines
to create dialogical interactions or even put a fax inside a television program,
so inside a monological system, I would put a dialogical system to operate
from within. I worked with slow scan television, which is a precursor to what
we call Skype now. It is a video-phone system. You could use the logic of lan-
guage but without language. You could exchange and transform images in the
same way that you do when you talk, but without language. So images gain
the plasticity of a conversation, dialogical in that sense. All these systems were
monological, and I worked with them to produce dialogical situations. That
was in the 80s. And that led me to telepresence, in which I projected physical-
ity out of a system that was designed for the exchange and transformation of
signs – text, image and sound. So, now there was a body attached to telecom-
munication systems, a body that I had to build. So you see, there is dialogical-
ity. If you can see the screen, and you can see something popping out of the
screen, you see how, through this undoing of language – preserving the logic
of language but in its absence – and this desire to reach out and the embodi-
ment in these robots, how you now are present in these robots remotely. You
find yourself in another body, you displace your cognitive system into an
invented body. You see how that eventually leads to bio art. And when I
begin to make these robots co-exist with living systems, like birds and other
creatures, you progressively see how I go from undoing language in human
interaction, and from projecting subjectivity onto an invented body, towards
 WE ARE NEVER ALONE 285

creating situations of coexistence between these tele-robots that have human

subjectivity in a non-human body with other non-human living beings, thus,
coexistence.
This coexistence becomes more intertwined when, in a piece called Teleporting
an Unknown State, the life of the living being depends on human remote action.
Here we are all caught up in one network – the living and the non-living, the local
and the remote, the biological and the technological – where you take out one,
and the whole system dissolves. To the point where it makes no sense to use these
two words ‘the technological’ and ‘the biological’, as in Genesis, for example,
because the gene is designed and synthesized, but it is no different from a gene
that is not. It operates in the same way, and so the distinction between biological
and technological, from a foundational, cognitive point of view, is completely use-
less. And that speaks to a contemporary situation. But you see how, in the course
of 30 years, one thing leads to another. This is why it is more difficult to see pro-
cesses of dialogicality in bio art, because they escape the recognizable device – that
is, the robot, the screen, something that looks technological, because the distinc-
tion between the technological and the biological has disappeared. It is more diffi-
cult to place dialogicality, because you talk on the phone, and here is the device.
So there is you, there is me, and there is a device in the middle. Now you think
the device away, and it is difficult to place it. So, what I am interested in, with
Genesis, with The Eighth Day, but especially with GFP Bunny and the Biotopes and
Natural History of the Enigma, is the notion of the encounter. What I have been pur-
suing as intersubjectivity involves not only the processes that I described but also
the creation of the subject with whom you are going to have the encounter. So,
with bio art the project comes full circle. The simplicity and beauty of the encoun-
ter with Natural History of the Enigma is that there is a flower in a museum or a gal-
lery, and that is it. You come, microchimeric, transgenic, diverse, ecological niche
that you are, and you meet another transgenic creature. It is an encounter between
two hybrid beings. It is as simple as that.
GG: I was thinking about the extent to which bio art represents a challenge to
received notions of subjectivity and personhood. In the sense that you are working
on a tele-robotic creature, and then through the living being – through the animal –
you are placing, expanding, bringing into tension, the notions of subjectivity and
dialogue, because you bring in this non-human techno/animal creature, right into
the realm of subjectivity. There is also a philosophical dimension here, of what is a
subject, what is it we call personhood? This is also part of the animal rights debate:
what is an animal person, what is animal subjectivity; the question of the gaze, the
animal gaze. And thinking of that, I was also struck by one of your pieces, Rara
Avis, where you place a camera into a bird, so as to bring into the dialogue the
perspective of the animal. I wonder if you could tell us about the extent to which,
in these pieces from the 1990s, the animal perspective was part of the process and
the reflection of bio art. And then you also have the transgenic pieces themselves:
there is a sequence here, and maybe you could tell us about your reflections on
the animal, on the animal’s perspective, about bringing the animal into the encoun-
ter? Because you also have another piece, Time Capsule, where you work with a
digital register that usually is placed on animal bodies – but you put it on yourself,
286 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

Figure 3 Eduardo Kac, Rara Avis, telepresence work (1996). Local and (via the Internet)
remote participants could experience life inside a large aviary from the vantage point of a
telerobotic macaw.

so you are also putting yourself in the place of the animal. Which part did the
question of animal and animality play in the sequence building up towards trans-
genic art?
EK: Time Capsule is a key piece for me. It is from 1997, and it was in the context
of Time Capsule that I created the term bio art. Because, with that piece, I wanted
to signal that, by the late 1990s, we were transitioning away from a purely digital
world. I created my first digital piece in 1982, so by 1997 I had been working dig-
itally for fifteen years. When the Web started to become better known, the Mosaic
browser was released, very late, in 1993. So, really, 1994 was the year that people
started getting used to it, and in 1995, the Web was on the cover of Newsweek and
Art in America, signalling the fact that in 1995, the world pretty much started to
talk about the Web. There was an interesting explosion of activity, a lot of fantasy
about this embodiment and uploading of consciousness – all these things that I do
not believe in at all – and a bit also of what I perceived as digital mannerism.
There was an exaggeration about digitality, and I thought it was time for a visceral
turn, away from this digital fantasy, but not going back to the body as we knew it.
It was time to turn the page.
So Time Capsule was a key piece for me for that reason. It signaled a conjunc-
tion. It signaled the emergence of this new body. What did I do? I implanted
 WE ARE NEVER ALONE 287

myself live on television and on the Internet with a digital microchip, while
projecting on a screen behind me seven sepia-tone photographs from my family in
Poland in 1939, the half that did not make it. This was a way of confronting
analog memory and digital memory, because analog memory is something that has
been internalized, that you externalize in the course of forming a narrative. This
digital memory was the opposite. It was initially externalized and I internalized it.
There is a cross between the two ideas, because the content of the digital micro-
chip is a sequence of numbers. What happens is that, once the microchip is inside,
tissue grows around it to hold it in place, so it produces, it unleashes a cellular
reaction around it, which holds it in place. This condition of memory then
becomes critical, because the body is the site where the two come together.
Because, obviously, you have internalized it, it is in you, you can recall, you can
dream about these photographs. Not just these in particular, but any one that
belongs to your personal history. You internalize them, and now you can external-
ize the content of the microchip, because you can read it with a scanner, which
we did live on television during the event. So, in reality, the body is crossed by
analog coming in and out, and digital coming in and out, and in fact the skin,
which we perceive to be a barrier that holds the body together and that separates
us from the environment, is really no barrier, because the signal goes through the
skin. The chip has no battery, it is a transponder, so it takes power from the sig-
nal. The signal goes in and powers the chip, and then the chip sends the signal out
and the scanner reads it. That is how it works.

Figure 4 Eduardo Kac, Time Capsule, microchip implant, seven sepia-toned photographs,
live television broadcast and webcast, interactive telerobotic webscanning of the implant,
and additional display elements, including an X-ray of the implant (1997).
288 L AT I N A M E R I C A N C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S

What I am saying is: this phone here has a lot of digital information, like my
phone book, my photographs … there is digital content in this device. Now there is
digital content inside your body that I can retrieve. So now, the body is a hub,
because it has digital content, is mobile, and it can be retrieved. Now the body has
digital content, with cells growing around it. This is another instance of reconfigura-
tion of the body. Therefore, Time Capsule was key for me, because it brought every-
thing together that I had done before and became a departure point for what I would
do later. The remote reading of the microchip was done through telepresence, Rara
Avis had been telepresence, everything else we were talking about was telepresence,
because telepresence is this convergence between physicality and telecommunica-
tions, which had been two things existing separately. By physicality I mean physical
presence in actual space. Time Capsule for all these reasons is a key piece.
JA: There seems to be a shared structure or sequence in your transgenic works,
with something like a bio-engineered or transgenic core at the heart of the work
(the artist’s DNA in Genesis or the humanoid flower in Natural History of the Enigma,
the bio-luminescent rabbit in GFP Bunny). But these are part of a larger process: they
are first of all planned or projected, and then inserted into what I think you call ‘the
artistic habitat’, which is the communicational and performative environment where
this transgenic being is then subjected to the indeterminacy of dialogical relation-
ships. I am trying to understand how this works as an integrated, continuous process
where the transgenic materiality of the organism would be on the same level or of
the same order as what you call the ‘shared spheres of perception, cognition and
agency’ into which this being is subsequently assembled. We might say there is a lab-
oratory phase, then there is an exhibition phase, which is different in terms of the
processes that go on in the exhibition, say, of Genesis, from what goes on while
working in the lab with the scientists. And then, again, there are these secondary
pieces, like the Transcription Jewels, your own writings or the visual images of the
exhibitions, which add yet another layer to the process. So, I wonder if you could
talk a bit about this idea of process in your work? Is the organism at the core of each
piece in the same sense processual as the work itself? Or is there something that is
different, because it is material, it is there, it is irrefutable? My question, I guess, is
about the relation between work, in the sense of an artistic performative sequence
or event, and in that of the being, the organism, the life that it creates.
EK: For some artists, the process is part of the work, is key, and for some, the
process is the work. I do not really think about it that way. I am interested,
rather, in the new life, in the creation of the new life, in the emergence of this
new life in the world. I am very interested in the fact that this new life has an
Umwelt of its own, has a perception, a sensory world of its own. And I am inter-
ested in producing these spheres of consensuality not in the sense of agreement,
but in the sense of sharing sensory perception, that we partake. This takes us back
to questions of personhood and subjectivity, because to me, the notion of person-
hood can be applied to even microorganisms, in the sense that to me, personhood
is really fundamentally individuality. I do not think that we need consciousness to
be able to think of personhood. Consciousness is great for us, that we have it, we
like it, we use it, we enjoy it, but I think consciousness is overrated. There are
many creatures that do not have it, and they are fun. In fact, the world belongs to
them. If we all died, the bacteria would continue thriving, continue to dominate
 WE ARE NEVER ALONE 289

the world as they do now, and they do not have consciousness, as we know it.
They do not have a brain, but to locate consciousness in a brain is problematic.
Microorganisms communicate, they form communities, they communicate through
molecules. They have other ways of interacting and responding to the world.
So, I am interested in this phenomenon. If you were to simplify it, you would
have to say that really at the core of it for me is the question of communication.
Communication – not in the sense of persuasion or the transmission of a message
– but as a fundamental condition that enables everything to be and become,
because if microorganisms did not communicate with one another, multicellular
organisms could not have evolved. It is a precondition. And when I say communi-
cation, I do not exclusively mean biological communication. I am talking about all
modes of communication; you open this window, and the cold air comes in. That
is communication. This possibility of opening a passage where things or signs come
and go …. A molecule is a thing and a sign, there is no agent saying ‘cold’ when
the cold air comes in, it is agency, consciousness, and not just preconditions for
communication or preconditions for personhood, in my worldview. Philosophi-
cally, I am interested in these issues, but I do not make art to talk about issues.
Art is not a speech generator. Art is there for you to experience, and have an
emotion, a sensation, insights, and feel the way you want to feel. If, after you have
experienced the work, you want to talk about it, write about it, that is one
response. If you just want to think about it, cry – I have had this experience –
whichever way you respond … I am interested in these issues and we talk about
these issues, because here is a forum for conversation, but it is important to be
clear and not to confuse the artwork with the speech generator. The function of
the work is not to talk about something. It is to, again, communicate, not neces-
sarily through words and ideas, but through light and sound and smell and touch
and presence and other factors, which are unique to the artwork.
GG: Following up on this, I am interested in this question of individuality and
individuation as a philosophical, formal problem, and I think it resonates with
Jens’s earlier question. On the one hand, you just mentioned the idea that person-
hood is individuality. You understand personhood as individuality. Yet at the same
time, we were talking about the fact that we are this hub of different forms of life,
and we have to somehow develop forms of thinking about it and of perceiving this
complexity, this multiplicity that we are. How do you reconcile, think or process
this tension between individuality and individuation and then this multiplicity at
work that you so provocatively bring to the fore?
EK: I think the challenge, the difficulty in grasping this comes from modes of
thinking, that is, structures of thought. It has been very difficult for us – and we
are talking Western culture, hundreds of years – not to think through oppositions.
Humanity was articulated through the otherness of the non-human animal or the
living was articulated through the oppositionality vis-à-vis technology. We seem to
have structured thought around oppositionality, and this binary mode of thinking, I
think, is at the heart of the problem. So instead of thinking ‘either or’, if we think
‘and both’, the apparent paradox disappears, because why is it that we do not
think ‘and both’, and we think ‘either or’ instead? It is because it is very difficult
to deal with complexity. Science has to simplify a problem to be able to tackle it.
If science is going to look at everything that happens in the body simultaneously, it
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is an impossible task. All the DNA interactions, plus what happens in your gut, …
it’s impossible. It’s just too much information, too many things happening. So you
break it down, you itemize, you isolate. And then, because you do this, you end
up projecting this over the physical world, and we confuse processes with the
thought process; physical process, material process with thought process. But the
thought process comes from the impossibility of handling the complexity of the
material process in the first place. And we seem to lose sight of that. So, if we
can somehow understand that and arrive at a non-binary mode of thinking, then
we begin to open ourselves up to other perceptions. So you do not see dichotomy
or the need to reconcile the material multiplicity of the body with the notion of
human personhood, for example. A human person can be made of a hundred tril-
lion bacterial persons. That is what it is, and it is fine.

Figure 5 Eduardo Kac, Natural History of the Enigma, genetically engineered plant
expressing Kac’s DNA in the red veins of the flower (2003–2008).
 WE ARE NEVER ALONE 291

GG: But what about moments of individuation? Not necessarily in terms of a fully
individuated, final format, as a closed-up form, but what do you think about pro-
cesses of individuation?
EK: Again, the perception of the individual as something isolated results from this
dichotomic thought process. You use human and animal, but in reality human is an
animal, so to say human and animal is not to address the animality of the human.
It is the same problem in language because of this dichotomic thought process. The
reality of things is a network. The human body is a network. The human body as
a network is caught in another network with the environment and socialization. So
we are networks, and we are caught in networks. And the complexity only
increases when you look at it this way – but that is, in my view, what truly hap-
pens, so we better start at some point to tackle it, to address it, because other-
wise, we will perpetuate the fantasy that our dichotomic thought process has
created in the first place.
JA: Regarding this notion of individuation as an ongoing build-up of agencements,
of relays, of networks, I was wondering about an idea that is very present in many
of your writings, about the ethical responsibility the bio artist assumes for the pro-
cesses that he or she sets in motion but cannot fully control. In this sense, is the
death or the perishing of the transgenic being an end to this open process? Or
would you go as far as to say that, actually, the physical death of a creature does
not end the networking of organic matter, as a texture that rots at the same time
as it generates new forms of life? Because, what seemed interesting to us is that
several of these works obviously have a use-by date, both the transgenic beings and
the Biotopes that are a kind of painting that moulds and rots, and at some point,
becomes unrecognizable. The other day, when we were talking about Nuno
Ramos’s work, you said: ‘Well, bio art is different, because it is about life, it is
not about death or afterlife’. But, obviously, death and ending is part of this pro-
cess in a very important way.
EK: Fundamentally, you would have to say that everything that lives dies, but that
is not really accurate from a biological point of view. We have been studying the
phenomenon of death with the objective of bringing people back from the break,
to save lives, basically. The study of the human phenomenon of death has the
objective of preventing death. We have done that, culturally speaking, in a very
significant way. If you think about the average lifespan of humans, it has increased
dramatically. It is about 80–85 now, and it used to be 50, some 50 years ago. So
we have managed to do that, to extend human life. We have been studying the
period when one is declared dead, and how much time does one have to reverse
that process? A lot of this work is being done on non-human animals, for the
moment, but with the goal of bringing humans back. So there is a period where it
is possible. From the moment you are declared dead officially, there is a period
when the decay is no longer recoverable. That has to do with energy, with life
processes that are still latent. This, in humans. With other species, this is some-
what different. With plants, years ago, scientist found around Masada, in Israel,
seeds that date from biblical times, and they brought those seeds back to the lab
and managed to grow the plants. So we are talking about, give or take, more than
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2000 years that this life form stayed in suspended animation, neither dead or alive.
So it is not necessarily true to say that everything that lives dies. If we know now
that, at least 2000 years, a seed can survive if kept in proper conditions, theoreti-
cally Edunia could outlive Picasso. Theoretically. Now, with GFP Bunny, it’s differ-
ent, because Alba is a mammal, and mammals, for the moment at least, it seems
that they do die eventually. No matter how much you extend their life span, even
if it is at 120, eventually, you go. So then, you do have the phenomenon of death.
The body stops being active. Now, these works are different, the ones you men-
tioned. The phenomenon of death has different repercussions in each case. With
GFP Bunny, for example, the difference is that people do not let her die. People
keep her alive virtually, through books, and magazines. Artists make artworks
about Alba and all kinds of things happen around Alba, some that I find out by
accident. Teachers show Alba in school, children do exercises, all kinds of things
that happen around Alba; yet in a sense, it is just her memory, not her – there is
no metaphor here – that gets perpetuated through all these other means. Now,
The Eighth Day is quite the opposite, because The Eighth Day has never been
re-exhibited. You would have to create new green mice, new green fish, new
green growing plants and new green amoeba with a new biological robot in a new
dome. You would have to reproduce the work entirely. It is possible, but it has
not been done. So that piece pretty much quieted down. It has not been done
because of the complexity. It is pretty remarkable that I managed to do that in
2001, but I had a team of 20 people working for two years on that project.
JA: But is the lifespan of the piece determined by the lifespan of the fish, the
mice, the plants? Because these are already considerably different from one
another.
EK: It is different, because with GFP Bunny, that work started to gain a different
momentum, because so much has happened around the work, and it continues in
all these books and things that happen around it. It created a new momentum, a
second wave that is an afterlife, in a sense. Now, The Eighth Day exists only in the
same way that any other artwork that is no longer physically in existence continues
to exist through video and photography, through documentation primarily. But
then, it could be recreated. It is latent. It has this suspended animation, in the sense
that it could be reproduced. You would have to produce new green glowing mice,
new green glowing fish etc., … but you could do that. The Biotopes hang on the
wall, but they are alive. They have this ambiguity. You can put them in a crate
and transport them, and they are dormant and latent, but then once you give them
water and light, they come alive again. Each one is different.
GG: It is fascinating how the challenges of bio art bring to the fore a more com-
plex and perhaps more nuanced way of thinking about that. On the one hand, you
have these ‘neither alive nor dead’ latencies, which are absolutely fascinating. They
keep coming. People are working on extinct species, trying to return them
through genetic intervention. And on the other hand, you have the singularity of
death. Alba, as this particular, singular creature that is being memorialized. So, I
think, we are faced with different inflections, modulations, in which we think
death and the dying, and I think it has to do precisely with this reconfiguration of
 WE ARE NEVER ALONE 293

the realm of the living, of the way in which we think about life processes but also
the singularity of one body. Again, the question of individuation, this body as such,
the life and death of this body as another dimension that we have to respond to as
well. I think this is a fascinating modulation of the conversation. Now, going back
to the question of ethics and responsibility: you work on the question of transgenic
art also in the context of a historical tradition in which human and non-human ani-
mals have been interacting and transforming one another, especially humans trans-
forming the non-humans, often for economic purposes. I wonder how you think
about the question of capital and the potential capitalization of transgenic art, in
the sense of creating life for the market, that is, the risk of transgenic art becom-
ing a territory of the market and just an intensification of the ways in which capi-
talism has invested bodies and especially animal bodies as a way of creating surplus
value? How do you think about this, especially when transgenic art involves capital,
it is expensive? It involves a laboratory. This is also the moment of emergence, in
the last 30 years at least, of biocapital. So the question of capitalization of bodies
and life is also part of this reconfiguration that we are talking about.
EK: All contemporary art involves capital. Olafur Eliasson received a commission
from BMW to make a piece, and the car was right in middle of his commission in
a frozen room with ice coming from the car. Or think of Richard Serra working
in shipyards where they build ships that transport merchandise across the world.
All contemporary art involves capital, so bio art is not an exception. Everything
involves capital. The iPhone, the recorder, the bottle, iPad, paper – dead trees. So
capital is in everything, the clothes we are wearing, the chairs, everything. Bio art
is not an exception and there is nothing specific about bio art in that regard.
GG: But again, thinking about responsibility and ethics vis-à-vis the life being cre-
ated. How do you avoid turning it into some kind of commodity?
EK: There we have a specificity, because where bio art is distinct is in the fact
that, when you create life – in the context of art – neither the artist or the audi-
ence – including everybody who is not the artist, such as critics, creators, collec-
tors, everybody – can confuse this artwork you created with inert artwork. In
other words, you have to have it very clear for yourself that, yes, this is a work of
art, but it is alive. You cannot reduce the living to the non-living. There is a dis-
tinction. A marble sculpture and a piece of bio art are both art, but one is inert
and the other is alive, and they shall not be reduced to the same ontological condi-
tion, because the artwork that you made and that is alive has an Umwelt and the
marble sculpture does not. There is something that it is like to be a bunny or a
flower or a bacterium, for the organism, not for yourself. So the organism, let’s
say a flower, has subjectivity in the plant world. It is now known that many plants
– not necessarily every single plant in the world – communicate by releasing mole-
cules. Very often, the main function of this communication is to fight predators.
So one plant that is attacked can release molecules to inform the other plants that
it is under attack, and those molecules then trigger a process that makes the plants
themselves inedible, so the predator moves away. Plants exist in this collective –
let us not call it consciousness – state where they communicate through molecules,
and they talk about what interests them, which is survival, first and foremost. You
see, consciousness, theoretically located or having a brain as part of it, is not
necessary for this mode of networked existence. It is very important to have this
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distinction, to not reduce the living to the condition of the non-living, because
both are works of art. Another way of saying this is that I do not make objects. I
create subjects. This would be another way of saying this.
JA: Let me insist a little further with Gabriel’s question, because there is an inter-
esting point there. Obviously, you are completely right in that everything is tra-
versed by capital in different ways, but art is traversed by capital in a very
particular, historically precise way: through the notions of work, of author, and so
forth, and the attendant circuits of exhibition and spectatorship. Where you are
saying that there is an ontological distinction between the bio artwork and the
painting, I guess there is an interesting challenge here to the very notion of art that
bio art, by necessity, has to make, so as to have this distinctiveness acknowledged
by the art institution. Actually, to be able to acknowledge bio art, the art institu-
tion has to change radically, does it not?
EK: Exactly. And that is a very good point, because all the institutions are dedi-
cated to non-bios. That is, it is fundamental to a museum or a gallery to eliminate
every trace of life. The whole institution of art is predicated on the notion of iso-
lating itself from the living: the temperature control, the dryness, everything con-
spires against the living. So if the art world embraced bio art, it would have to
reconfigure itself, which is non-trivial, to say the least. Some bio artworks have
been sold, and are now part of museum collections, but these museums cannot
keep the work alive. So they purchase the work, they own it, they have the right
to exhibit the work. But in storage, the work itself is not living, so if they ever
decide to show it, they would have to find a way to bring it back to life. Literally.
Because the whole logic, the whole premise is non-biological. The artist teaches
bio art, but the students in the thesis show are not allowed to exhibit anything that
lives. It violates the code. They cannot have fire, they cannot have anything living.
So how would a museum preserve and exhibit bio art living continuously as such?
They would have to reinvent themselves. Where the museum has come closest to
this premise, this condition, is the Parco d’Arte Vivente in Torino. It is a museum
created by Piero Gilardi, who is an artist involved with arte povera in the 1960s. In
the 80s and 90s, he did interactive art, in the computer-based sense. He created
PAV, which is a museum/park, a hybrid institution, dedicated to the living arts,
lato sensu. Bio art is part of the program, but not only. He is also interested in
ecological art, land art, any kind of art that uses anything that lives in one form or
another. There is a huge grass field in the park where you can do experiments or
just hang out, but there is a building as well with some elements of control. Some
of Piero’s own works are on permanent view, but the museum has regular groups,
shows and workshops and so on. So the museum that comes closest to this vision
is PAV, to my knowledge.
JA: There is an old, almost Lessingian, notion of art in play here as somehow the
better life. Because, when we go into the Parco d’Arte Vivente, what we see is a
curated and, thus, harmonious and respectful, ethically superior, form of convivial-
ity. But this notion of art would also have a somewhat pedagogical slant to it, bio
art showing us the way forward where life would need to go. I am just putting this
provocatively.
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EK: I don’t think bio art is trying to show us where life needs to go, because life
goes where it needs to go without artists. In fact, maybe the opposite: artists take
life where it does not want to go. Think about Alba, for example, it is impossible
to cross a jellyfish with a bunny, and yet, there it is. So in four billion years of
evolution that gave us all the complexity we have, life did not go there, did not
want to go there, did not need to go there, but I took it there. So it is maybe not
where life needs to go, but where life did not go.
GG: Going back to the question of how we are traversed by capital, in the evolu-
tion of bio art, do you sense a spirit of anti-capitalism or critique of capitalism? In
the sense that, in the last thirty or more years, the question of ecology and capital-
ism more and more became a point of gravitation of the political in a way that we
try to resist the ways in which capital reduces life, flattens life, and turns it into a
commodity. Did you sense that bio art is exploring ways of contesting – precisely
because of the bio component – the ways in which, more and more evidently, cap-
ital is becoming a threat to life, in many ways? Do you sense any evolution or
direction in bio art vis-à-vis a critique of capital?
EK: Bio art is a relatively young field, going back to the late 1990s, so we have,
give or take, some fifteen years of practice. It is extremely difficult to do. It takes
a long time. I myself, in all these years, have made about half a dozen works.
There are numerous artists working in this field now, some of them more inter-
ested in addressing this as activists. Others modulate their mode of presentation
and articulation and process not so much from an activist point of view. So, it
depends on what you mean, if one is being explicit about it as an activist, or, as I
do, more philosophical and poetic. If you look at it, even in my way of working,
there is a reflection on this issue, which is less evident now, because this is becom-
ing somewhat more common than fifteen years ago. What am I talking about? I am
talking about the fact that we have a standard narrative that comes from the indus-
try. Monsanto, for example, basically destroys bio-diversity, claiming that they do
this to feed the world, which is their rhetorical strategy. At the same time, from
the main body of scientific discourse, we have the notion of DNA as the book of
life. We understand the human genome, and all the mysteries will unravel. All
these standard narratives. When an individual that is not a corporation or a busi-
ness or a government uses the same tools that they use, and takes things in an
entirely different direction, this individual demonstrates that DNA is actually mal-
leable, plastic, that you can tell multiple stories with DNA, not just the one that
they tell. That story is just one of them. And they tell it because they are inter-
ested in pursuing their ideology. But you can do other things with DNA, you can
make it sing different songs. So just by doing that, by making DNA sing a different
song, you demonstrate that what they are doing, they are doing it because they
want to preserve their monopoly, their ideology etc., because you can use DNA
for other things, for other purposes, such as critique, poetry, philosophy …. That
alone is already a political gesture but in my case, not as an activist, not in order
to make propaganda. But there are some artists that are interested in being very
vocal, very blatant, very persuasive.
Audience: My question has to do with what we were discussing earlier about
thought processes, the material processes and the necessities of capturing things
through language, or systems of classification. So I was wondering, why is bio art
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called ‘art’ at all? I think you were just answering this question when you were
talking about the plasticity of the DNA and the capacity to make up a narrative,
because there seems to be this tension between an idea of museums as kind of
forensic deposit of things that are already dead and then the intrusion of bio art as
a living process within that space. So, I was asking myself, why call it ‘art’ at all,
and this division you make between bio art as something entirely new, discon-
nected from earlier aesthetic traditions such as land art, performance …. Is it this
counterposition between the living and the dead that brings out the alterity or the
strangeness of bio art? And what does the museum offer it that other contexts
cannot?
EK: There is often a gap between intellectual discourse, critical discourse, analyti-
cal discourse, and the reality of art. I am sure you know the interview book that
Pierre Cabanne did with Duchamp. There is a moment in the interview that
Cabanne asks, ‘But you made a urinal, and you are the anti-artist par-excellence.
Why did you make an edition of the urinal in the 1950s and another one in the
60s? This seems contradictory.’ Duchamp replied, ‘An artist has got to live’. It is
as simple as that. He needs to live. So what does a museum offer? It becomes part
of enabling you to work, to live. The museum buys, and you continue to make
art. Just like you need to have a job and to live and get money from somewhere,
the artist needs to sell to continue producing. So we do not need to theorize, have
Lacan and Foucault brought into this. It is part of enabling your work. But it is
also part of preserving your legacy. It is part of keeping your work preserved for
future generations, because you cannot do it yourself. You are going to die eventu-
ally. That would be the end of that individuality, so ideally somebody would take
responsibility for that, and there would be a protocol. This is why I produce dia-
grams that show exactly how I made the work. I always do this, because when I
created Edunia, for example, I did not even know if it was possible. That is why I
took six years. I say six years now, because the work is done, but while I was
doing it, I did not know if it was going to be ten or twenty, if I would ever suc-
ceed. But once I finished and I knew what I had done, what worked, I made a dia-
gram, so the process is very clearly spelled out. And even when the last seed gets
planted and no more Edunia is around, the process is very clear, so now you can
just repeat it. There is still no guarantee of success, but what I did is well docu-
mented, so you can try and redo that. The museum offers all these very concrete,
very tangible, very simple advantages. Why call it bio art? Because it is an art
form. It is all I do. I do not do anything else. Why call it theory? Because it is
what you do. These issues to me are very uncomplicated.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by the Swiss National Research Fund [grant number
100016_153032].
 WE ARE NEVER ALONE 297

Jens Andermann is an editor of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies and a
Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University. Forthcoming is his book
Tierras en trance: arte y naturaleza después del paisaje.

Gabriel Giorgi is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese at New York

University. His most recent books are Formas comunes: animalidad, cultura, biopolítica
(Buenos Aires, 2014) and, with Fermín Rodríguez, Excesos de vida. Ensayos sobre
biopolítica (Buenos Aires, 2007).