This text is an interview by Simone Osthoff with artist Eduardo Kac on his work Rara Avis exhibitedat the first Bienal do Mercosul in Porto Alegre (Rio Grande do Sul) in 1996. Kac points out the important role that new technologies play in the visual arts. He states that the use of those technologies does not ensure the quality of the work; he does not write off work made using solely manual tools and processes. Technology is important to the work in question as potential, but not as a measure of “technological” value. He describes Rara Avis as a tropical and technological bird produced to undermine notions of the macaw as exotic, visions that are still operative if only from a foreign perspective. The work consisted of an enormous cage with real birds and a robot-parrot which—as a virtual element—displaced the viewer’s point of view, shifting it toward the perspective of the robot-bird seen solely through the eyes of a webcam. The work was available in real time on the Internet. In Kac’s view, the greatest contribution of electronic art is the links it establishes with other fields of knowledge, furthering the integration of art into culture as a whole. 

Rio de Janeiro-based artist Eduardo Kac (b. 1962) emerged on the art scene at the heart of what is called the “Geração 80,” a movement characterized by a return to painting, which had become largely obsolete at the time. He is indisputably one of the most internationally recognized Brazilian artists working in the field of electronic art. He is a research pioneer in developing a dialogue between technology and art, and his work was also a precursor in transgenic art and what is called “telepresence” (in the work Ornitorrinco, 1989). Since 1995, articles documenting the development of these ideas have been published in the journal Leonardo. Kac, who moved to the United States in 1989, is currently a professor in the Art and Technology Studies program at the Art Institute of Chicago. In the show Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria, 1999), he created a synthetic “artist’s gene” based on a verse in English from the Old Testament translated into Morse code to be used as the DNA.

For other relevant essays by Kac on this topics, see “Origem e desenvolvimento da arte robótica” [doc. no. 1111127], “Em Brasil High Tech, o xeque ao pós-modernismo” [doc. no. 1111320], the polemical “GFP Bunny” [doc. no. 782231], “Microponto, microficha, videodisco: a arte high-tech em espaço microscópico” [doc. no. 1110966], and “As três dimensões do signo verbal” [doc. no. 1111228].