Postmodern Play or Posthumanist Ethics? Eduardo Kac's Bioart as a Case in Point

Emerging in the early 90s with his media art, Eduardo Kac is also well-known for employing different life-forms in his creative process. Some of Kac’s artworks, at first sight, may appear to be spectacular or even gimmicky. Nevertheless, Steve Baker argues that Kac’s bioart is serious and meta-ethical rather than deliberately provocative. In a similar vein, Cary Wolfe contends that Kac actually destabilizes our received views of the human/animal dichotomy. In what sense can Kac’s art be exempted from the cliched postmodern play? Isn’t his employment of animals a stratagem designed to attract attention? Exploring some of his technological artworks which utilize life-forms from germs to bats, this paper seeks to answer how Kac’s creative envisioning of the alien others eventually leads the viewer to reflect upon ethical issues. In short, this paper covers two main sections. In the first section, I investigate how Kac addresses questions such as “Does the animal only have a limited access to the world?” and “Can we know what experiences the non-human animals may have?.” The second section shows how Kac’s works, remaining open to the viewers’ behaviors, come into productive dialogue with the theory of autopoiesis. Even though we cannot claim that all is necessarily well in the world of Kac’s bioart, I conclude that his attempts to conceptualize a more ethical relationship with non-human others open up the possibilities for different sentient beings to co-exist and co-evolve.