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EDUOARD KAC
EDUARDO
the
thelagogylph
lagogylphseries
series
What’s Up, Doc? On reading rabbit writing in Eduardo Kac’s The Lagoglyph Series
If a rabbit could talk, what would it say to you?
In year 2000, artist Eduardo Kac created his
beloved GFP Bunny, Alba. Since regarded
as a classic of transgenic art, Alba was produced via genetic engineering techniques
that transferred EGFP, a synthetic mutation
of the wild-type fluorescent gene found in
a jellyfish, into a rabbit egg. The result was
a nonpigmented albino bunny – distinctly white with soft, pink eyes – who glowed
fluorescent green under the correct blue
light. As photogenic as she was transgenic,
Alba was an icon, and instigated debate the
world over.
In neon contrast to much institutional, academic or even mainstream response to art,
however, this GFP debate had a very particular character. Alba was referenced by
figures such as Michael Crichton, creator of
Jurassic Park, and Margaret Atwood, of Oryx
and Crake fame, was in tabloid newspapers,
and appeared on television shows like The
Big Bang Theory; people across ages, professions and persuasions responded to Alba.
Kac had always identified three stages to his
GFP Bunny project: the birth, in collaboration with zoosystemicians and scientists, of
Alba in Jouy-en-Josas, France; the scientific
and media debate that Alba provoked; and
his and his family’s experience of living with
Alba. Yet discursive response to the GFP
Bunny had exploded beyond expectation:
the transgenic rabbit was a celebrity. Residing in Paris in the mid-2000s, Kac was confronted with a question. How might Alba,
vicariously, participate in this debate?
The Lagoglyph Series became his answer – a
suite of artworks developed since 2006 in
which Kac, feeding back into this ongoing
media discourse, has created, with Alba, a
“rabbitographic” form of communication.
(“Rabbitographic” is a portmanteau typical
of the artist, who believes that new ideas
merit new terms in turn.) Four strains can
so far be identified in this series.
The first of these “leporimorphic” artworks
(another Kacism) are Lagoglyphs: The Bunny
Variations (2007). Forming the pictographic
basis of the lagolyphs, these are strictly
comprised of one green (fluorescent under
the right light) and one black component that
overlay to form an image of Alba. Appearing
like rabbit runes, or a postnuclear graffiti,
they were developed from a suite of 800
initial hand-painted designs produced by
Kac between 2006 and 2007. Silkscreened
onto paper in clusters of 12 to make The
Bunny Variations, they are editions of 50,
reminiscent of pages of script. Yet this is a
script postulating an inverted, warped and
artfully expressionistic language. Language,
in everyday use, is predicated on a fixed
series of signs (26, in the case of the ISO basic
Latin alphabet) which produce an endless
semantic field – a single alphabet allows us
to say almost anything. The Bunny Variations
work oppositely. They refer always to Alba –
an inversely singular semantic field – yet do
so via a range of infinite, eternally mutable,
signs.
Perhaps then they do a better job representing the inherent flux of language than
conventional alphabets – though any stasis in “conventional” language is fiction:
think emoticon, kaomoji, emoji; language,
even on a material level, is always changing. Such mutability is reiterated by Kac in
Lagoglyph Animation (2009). Constituting a
custom software that operates in real time,
Lagoglyph Animation takes Kac’s 800 original
lagoglyph designs as the basis for a parametric animation. Never repeating itself,
parametric animations blend existing animations together to create something new.
As Lagoglyph Animation’s parameters can
be changed while it runs, nothing is fixed;
it evolves continuously. Like a constantly
cycling and morphing vernacular, it suggests
a boundlessness to language – grounded in
transgenic experimentation rather than the
anthropocentric essentialism of the Enlightenment.
In 2010 the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull
erupted. Although relatively small for volcanic eruptions, the event nonetheless caused
widespread disruption, with air travel infrastructure paralysed from Europe outwards.
Stranded overseas, Kac was struck by the
mediated character of this natural event, as
a local explosion was amplified to have massive global consequences. As an experience
that dwarfed any individual human action in
scale, Kac found the fallout of Eyjafjallajökull
to be humbling, and, perhaps looking to occupy himself before he could travel again,
began work on the Volcano Paintings (2010).
Hybrid combinations of digital and analogue
techniques, these erupted the rabbitographic
lagoglyphs into the shape of an explosion. On
one level direct celebrations of ink on paper,
they represent only the ‘lava’ of the explosion, with volcanic landscape absent. They are
parables that recognize media as something
measured by effect as much as by initial form,
that is to say, as something that is quintessentially “trans-” (“across” or “beyond’) rather than
pertaining to static or unchanging form. They
translate Alba from ‘rabbit’ into new, generative, and molten matter.
The Lagoglyph Series is a lively example, perhaps, of what critic Brian Droitcour terms “liquid poetry,” defined as language that “appears
through a network over time as a flow rather
than in the discrete increments required by
print.” Yet what of lava, and language alike,
when it solidifies into the concrete? Is hard
condensed matter a teleological endpoint of
form, or another transitionary stage? Forming
the fourth (but not final) permutation of the
Lagoglyph Series is Lagoglyph Porcelain (2011),
with which the series emerges into three-dimensional space. Comprised of black and
handmixed-green layers making up Alba’s rabbit outline, they are rendered in highly fragile
porcelain. Porcelain is usually put through a
kiln once; these were fired four times to account for their being comprised primarily of
holes. Though three-dimensional, they embody a quantum precarity not unlike that of
a liquid: they are at once matter and air, as if
threatening to revert to dust or pure idea.
Where do we end, then, traveling across and
beyond Kac’s lagolyphs? Playfully recursive,
the lagolyphs emerge from Kac’s own GFP
Bunny, both feeding back into and outgrowing
their origin story. Along the way they provide
a blithe commentary on the movement and
mutability of language—although to an extent
we depend heavily on the continuity of tools
like the page or the alphabet, these are by no
means static forms, but rather specific contestations of matter and discourse (something
Kac is well positioned to comment on through
his longstanding overlap in interest between
experimental art and experimental poetry).
Just as genome transfers might question interspecies boundaries within fields of art, ethics
and science, so might experimentation with
the presentation of language break similar
ground within semantic fields.
Language is a rabbit hole; Alba a rabbit, whole.
— Harry Burke, Jan 2016
Published by GEARY in conjunction with the
exhibition EDUARDO KAC: the lagogylph series
January 7th - March 5th, 2016
Edition of 30 copies
Edited by Jack Geary & Dolly Geary
Design by Will Cameron and Jaime Chiang
Printed at Cameron + Brown in NYC
LAGOGYLPH
the bunny variations (2007)
GEARY
185 Varick Street
New York, NY, 10014
[email protected]
geary.nyc
Published by GEARY in conjunction with the
exhibition EDUARDO KAC: the lagogylph series
January 7th - March 5th, 2016
Edition of 30 copies
Edited by Jack Geary & Dolly Geary
Design by Will Cameron and Jaime Chiang
Printed at Cameron + Brown in NYC
LAGOGYLPH
the bunny variations (2007)
GEARY
185 Varick Street
New York, NY, 10014
[email protected]
geary.nyc
EDUARDO KAC
the lagoglyph series
JAN 7 - MAR 5 2016