The first sight of Eduardo Kac’s fluorescent rabbit Alba provokes a predictable response. Confusion overwhelms quickly, displaced by disbelief. Followed by horror. Awe. Curiosity. And finally acceptance. Green bunnies and other GFP (green fluorescent protein) “glow-in-the-dark” creatures exist and there is no going back. The last step in dealing with Kac’s biological witticism will surely become boredom as the novel becomes commonplace.
Get a glofish for your desk.
Like much of his more recent bioart, Kac’s earlier forays into telepresence art embrace emerging anxieties around the power of current technology to restructure life. As with Alba, the once mystifying quickly becomes the mundane. Here Kac is concerned with how communication technologies are rearranging dominant conceptions of time and space, where distance is temporally instead of spatially determined in a superconnected universe.
The image has taken a new form, distinct from other more inflexible representational means of architecture, painting, photography and film. We now see a representation as it exists in time rather than space per se. It’s a contentious notion, because surely space is not going anywhere, but Kac is a provocateur worth engaging with.
I think the difference here is a matter of “flow.” Whereas the first and second kind of image logic required a sense of finalized production, the third type of image logic is one constantly in flux in that we are seeing an evolving flow of information and not necessarily the discrete instances within that flow. We are seeing something perpetually in process, forever in the midst of becoming itself.
So how does this concept of “flow” impact documentary?
Documentary becomes a process instead of a product. It becomes something perpetually occurring instead of something looking to be resolved. We still collect information and documents from reality in an effort to gain understanding and communicate, but we’re talking more about how the world unfolds “right now” and less about how it used to seem “back then” when that document (be it photographic, filmic, textual, etc.) was generated.
It’s the difference between having done and doing, being and becoming. And maybe that’s a fine line.
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