The artist Eduardo Kac was at his New York gallery the other day to show a reporter his work: a hologram encoded in a sliver of glass that sits inside a small metal case. This little package is the capstone of Kac’s career to date — an artifact he created in 1986 that is now, finally, about to find its intended home in space. On January 8 it is scheduled to board a Vulcan Centaur rocket as it lifts off from Cape Canaveral and heads into orbit around the sun. This holographic artwork – a “holopoem,” Kac calls it – may or may not be discovered hundreds of thousands of years from now by any beings around to find it. But at the moment it is here at the Henrique Faria gallery just off Madison Avenue, that one can soon see.
I slowly took the small round case. “Okay,” Kac said. “You just have to, like, unscrew it.”
“Uncover it?” The object was barely more than half an inch in diameter and had no obvious grip.
I tried it. It immediately fell to the floor.
Kac (pronounced Katz) didn’t seem fazed. “This thing is titanium 5” – the strongest titanium alloy there is. He opened it soberly.
The small square of glass inside looks clean, untouched. But when Kac held it up between thumb and forefinger and aimed a small, hand-held laser at it, the word AGORA appeared in eerie green letters on the opposite wall. This is his holopoem: In his native Portuguese it means “today.” But the name engraved on the outside of the titanium case is ÁGORA — a subtle but important distinction. With the accent mark, the Portuguese word changes meaning, from “now” to “place,” as in the ancient Greek word “agora” for “gathering.” (The Greek agora is similar to the Roman forum.)
So the holopoem refers to time, and it refers to space. Space/time. In eternal orbit around the sun.
“Kac has always been interested in radical new forms of distribution, but this really takes it to a new level,” said Stuart Comer, chief curator of media and performance at the Museum of Modern Art. “It completely reframes how we think about art, language, communication — we don’t communicate very much, so why not try the space?”
Kac hypothesizes that his holopoem will eventually be discovered by some unspecified species he calls “homo spaciens”: humans in space. When, he knows better than to rush. “It’s like you have a gallery exhibition and no one shows up for the opening,” he said. “But it’s a permanent show, so you hope that over time they will come.”
His main concern seems to be not time but space. “Putting a piece of art deep into the cosmos is an attempt – it creates this public space through the simple act of working with it,” he said. This is not the first time he sought to create a public space, an agora. “But now, in this space poem, my agora is the cosmos.”
Kac took a risk first in public space, and in the art world, as a 17-year-old in Rio de Janeiro. That’s when he founded the Porn Art Movement with friend It was 1980, at the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship. The Porn Art Movement is not really about pornography; it’s more subversive than that. In her “Pornogram 1,” for example, a naked Kac is sprawled out in front of the camera, her hairy legs spread far enough apart to reveal a well-made private. Almost as radical was the idea of a public performance, since under military rule any form of assembly was forbidden. Public space does not legally exist. So Kac donned a pink miniskirt and put on guerilla shows in Rio’s central plaza and on the beach in Ipanema. He had several run-ins with the military police, but was unable to talk to anyone.
“Paulo Freire has a pedagogy of the oppressed,” he told me, citing the leftist philosopher. “Then you have liberation theology. I created the pornography of emancipation.”
Kac was raised by his maternal grandparents in the trendy, upscale beach district of Copacabana. The Polish Jewish refugees who arrived in Brazil in 1939, they supported his unusual activities. They funded a book of his porn art poetry. His grandfather even came to the print shop to make sure the job went well. “The issue for them was, How is this kid going to survive? In art and poetry? The fact that I was dealing with the body and wearing a miniskirt — that they didn’t care.”
Enrolling at a Catholic university in Rio, Kac found its arts and literature programs unbearably conservative. He settled on communications because that would open the door to other disciplines — sociology, anthropology, semiotics, cinema, philosophy.
By 1982, he had entered digital technology. A few years ago, when he was 12, he devoured an encyclopedia of current affairs with entries on subjects such as cybernetics, digital art and holography, whose inventor, Dennis Gabor, had recently won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work. Back then, digital art had to be done on a mainframe; by the 1980s, Kac could create art on a personal computer or on Minitel, France’s videotex service, a version available in Brazil. And that means his agora is no longer Ipanema Beach or Cinelândia Square. His agora is bigger, wider — the network.
Examples of his Minitel art are now in the permanent collection of MoMA and the Tate. Even as he programmed the Minitel, however, Kac began experimenting with holopoems. In 1986 he was granted a residency at the Museum of Holography in New York, where he created “Ágora.” But when he returned to Rio and tried to set up his own holography lab, he found nothing but disappointment. He didn’t get the materials he needed. His laser stopped working. One of the most advanced holography laboratories for art practice is at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. So he moved to Chicago, earned his Master of Fine Arts in 1990, began teaching there a few years later, and has remained on its faculty ever since.
Kac created 24 holopoems between 1983 and 1993. He also began experimenting with telepresence and robotics, and then with what he called “bio-art.” It ended in a fire of controversy in Alba, the “GFP Bunny,” a cute little albino rabbit who, thanks to some fancy gene-splicing, turns fluorescent green when you put him under a blue light.
Meanwhile, the excitement that greeted holography in the ’70s and 1980s is fading. The Museum of Holography closed its doors in 1992. The C-Project, an ambitious program with artists such as Louise Bourgeois and James Turrell experimenting with holography, began in 1994 but closed five years later. The second Museum of Holography, this one in Chicago, remained until 2009. Now the scene is in limbo. It twitches occasionally: a show at the New Museum in New York in 2012, a C-Project exhibition at the Getty Center in Los Angeles next summer. “It’s not dead,” said Matthew Schreiber, a holographic artist who worked on the C-Project and maintains his own holography lab in Brooklyn. “It’s a little too small.” And Kac? “Wherever the bleeding edge of technology is, Eduardo is there.”
These days, that’s like space. Kac’s first work to venture beyond Earth was the “Inner Telescope,” a paper sculpture developed under the auspices of France’s cultural arm. National Center for Space Studies and realized in 2017 by Thomas Pesquet, an astronaut aboard the International Space Station. It took him 10 years to fix. A small glass craft, “Adsum,” is planned for the moon’s surface in 2025. If Vulcan Centaur launches on schedule on January 8 and successfully enters solar orbit a few weeks later, it will finally achieve he set the goal for “Ágora” in 1986. “I envisioned the work for deep space,” he said. “And from that moment on, I tried to find a way to complete it.”
This will be the first voyage of the Vulcan Centaur. The rocket system was developed by United Launch Alliance, based in Centennial, Colo., a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing that competes with SpaceX and others for contracts from NASA and the Defense Department. Its primary payload is a lunar lander scheduled to separate from the Centaur V upper stage 92 minutes and 20.9 seconds after liftoff to perform a lunar delivery for NASA. The Centaur V upper-stage rocket and its forward adapter will continue into deep space, settling into orbit around the sun with a “memorial payload” for Celestisa Houston-based company in the business of sending tiny smidgens of human remains into the cosmos.
Among the heirs who placed them above the rocket’s second stage, fellow travelers with the holopoem, were Apollo 14 astronaut Philip Chapman, “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry and his wife Majel, and the actors who played the three main characters in the original “Star Trek” series — Lieutenant Uhura, Lieutenant Commander Scott and Dr. “Bones” McCoy.
The connection of “Ágora” to science fiction seems appropriate. “I’m still in awe of the brilliant technology Eduardo uses in that work,” says Jenny Moore, who curated the holography show at the New Museum and now heads Tinworks Art, a new exhibition space in Bozeman, Mont. “And it’s a very good time for it to meet its moment,” he added – at the end of the extraordinary achievement of the James Webb Space Telescope, whose images bring us closer to the moment of the Big Bang. However, Moore pointed out, getting into orbit won’t actually complete the task.
“Will some other entity see this?” said Moore. “Think of the Rosetta Stone – how will that word be received? Because until it is seen, its potential is still unfulfilled.”
Neither did Kac or the rest of us for an answer.
