Excerpt out of the interview with Eduardo Kac (EK) conducted by Samantha Mealing (SM), on the work Time Capsule, January 2021.
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SM: Given the physical changes of technology since 1997, do you think Time Capsule's implantation signified a transition to a more transhuman integration of technology?
EK: I, personally, am not a subscriber to the transhuman agenda per se. Time Capsule springs from my preceding body of work, and, in retrospect, we can clearly see that it opened up a new phase in my practice. In a sense, it could be understood as a transitioning piece because it's the artwork in the context of which I created the term Bio Art to signal a transition from a purely digital framing to an embodied, biologically driven approach. In a sense, it was not quite yet the type of work that I really wanted to focus on within the field I was opening. For me, 1998 was a more introspective year when I tried to formulate more clearly what it was exactly that I wanted to do within that new field. And at the end of the year, I published the Transgenic Art manifesto, and I was already working on Genesis because, you know, these projects take a while. They are not made in the month that you show them, right? It takes a long time to assemble all the tools and the people, processes, resources, and venues; it takes time to bring it all together. In 1999, I was able to exhibit Genesis at Ars Electronica. There is a very interesting relationship between Time Capsule and Genesis because they both use the living organism as the substrate in which information is stored, with the exception that Genesis takes it further by enabling the transformation of that stored information and the retrieval of the transformed information. Because in Time Capsule you could store and retrieve, but you couldn't edit or change it. In Genesis, you can store, change, and retrieve. So, in a sense, it's another development within that approach that has implications in its own right. But the point is that Time Capsule involves an element of telepresence, which I have been developing, in the sense that I attribute to it, since 1986. Our videoconference, right here, right now, via Google Meet, is not telepresence; this is telecommunications. This is like talking on the phone, but with images. To me, telepresence is the addition of a physical dimension to telecommunications, which telecommunications before 1986 could not do. I did it — in the context of art. So, to me, telepresence is the coupling of telecommunications with the physical element. So, for example, if you have a mug or a pen in front of you, through telepresence, I could move it. I could move it a centimeter to the left where you are, from here, right now. So, it's going through the screen and exerting a sense of physicality that the transmission of sound, text, and image on a screen cannot do.
SM: Going back to transhumanism and posthumanism - given your perspective on transhumanism, does that affect your perspective on posthumanism? And do you apply the same kind of perspective towards posthumanism with Time Capsule?
EK: I don’t really subscribe to the transhumanism agenda. But posthumanism is different. Because, to me, posthumanism seeks to offer a non-anthropocentric perspective; what we used to understand by 'human' is displaced. It's not that in posthumanism there is no human anymore; we simply move past the previous understanding of the human in which the human exerted a central role or was understood as a discrete entity. Before, there was a perceived hierarchy, and somehow, we were at the top of that hierarchy. To me, the posthuman represents a decentering, a surpassing of the centrality of the human.
Therefore, the "post" is a new condition, and it's one in which, yes, technology plays a role. But so does our relationship with nonhumans. And we begin to evolve a model that is not binary, which is something that I've been talking about for decades, not just when, you know, these issues came to light more recently. I have been talking about overcoming this polarity, this way of thinking that is predicated on oppositions for a very long time. And, at least the Western world has operated, not only intellectually, but also materially, predicated on oppositions with grave consequences. We have defined the human in opposition to technology. We have defined the human in opposition to animality. We have ascribed humanity to certain humans and not to others. So, these modes of approaching the world predicated on oppositions have enabled the construction of these hierarchies. The idea I have always defended and worked towards is that we would develop a model predicated on the principle of networking. Network is a noun and a verb. We understand the human as part of an ecology, as part of a continuum. And we also understand that the human is now rethought in light of a lot of what we have learned in the recent decades. We used to understand the human as an entity in its own right. Not anymore.