Eduardo Kac was born in 1962 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and is now a professor of Art and technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2002, Kac received the Creatice Capital Award in the discipline of Emerging Fields. He is considered a pioneer in many fields. Eduardo Kac’s “biotopes” are so unique and hard to categorize, the artist himself doesn’t know what to call it. His art requires a new art vocabulary, new cultural principles, and new criteria of artistic method. In To Life, a biotope is defined as “a uniform environment occupied by a specific community of plants and animals.” Aquariums and rooftop gardens are constructed biotopes. Kac’s biotopes are small habitats populated with microorganisms that cannot be seen with the naked eye. He keeps these biotopes in shallow, transparent 19” by 23” rectangular boxes. Eduardo Kac allows three different types of interactions to happen within his biotopes. The first: organisms respond to the environment’s temperature, humidity, airflow, light levels, etc. Second: the organisms relate to each other by competing for food and space as well as dealing with the ongoing production of waste. Lastly: they interact with people feeding, installing, transporting, and viewing the artwork. Biotope conditions are altered by this last interaction by generation of warmth, shadows, and humidity, and by releasing more populations of microorganisms when they breathe, sneeze, or cough. Kac uses these microorganisms as a medium to paint, rather than a traditional medium such as acrylic, oil, or watercolour paints. The organisms create compositions naturally and become pigmented over time. They gradually contribute their own shape, texture, colour, and pattern. Kac considers his biotopes to be new entities that are a new piece of artwork and a new living being all at once. “By incorporating microbial life cycles into art, Kac materializes the dynamic instability and multidirectionality that are currently infiltrating intellectual discourse, reformulating human expectation, and redefining lived experiences. My favourite piece of his is “Doohickey” from his series of biotopes called “Specimen of Secrecy about Marvelous Discoveries.” I am drawn to this piece mainly because of the geometric shapes, the balance of elements, and the colours. Blue and Orange is my favourite colour combination and those are two of the colours in this piece. I love abstract art and “Doohickey” caught my eye the moment I saw it on his website and even when looking at his other pieces, I always found myself looking back at this one. I utilize texture in a lot of my paintings and I adore the texture these microorganisms made within this painting. Tavares Strachan was born in Nassau, the capital city of the Bahamas in 1979 and now works both in his home city and in New York City. He started as a painter, earning his Associate of Fine Arts at the College of the Bahamas in 1999. In 2003 he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design and in 2006 he earned his Master of Fine Arts in sculpture from Yale University. My favourite work of art is a good example of Strachan’s goal with his art. “The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want” is a two and a half ton piece of ice taken from a frozen river in the Arctic. He transported this block of arctic ice to his home in the Bahamas. Before the ice was taken there, Strachan utilized the storytelling he experienced when growing up in the same area and the same school. He told the children of his adventure and how the sun was used to keep the ice frozen. This seemed impossible to them, like the myths he remembers from his own childhood. He even reenacted his adventures for this kids. He spoke to the children about global warming and the changes they and the Earth may experience during their lifetime. When the ice showed up, it gave the children hope in many ways. They saw that the sun was “a powerful ally” in endeavors that it actually caused. They were also shown that humans can come up with ingenious ways to battle these problems. They were also given hope because someone from their own home was able to complete such a great deed. He added a flag commemorating Matthew Henson, an African American explorer who was part of the team that discovered the North Pole, which was another message of hope for the children. When the ice was moved to Miami Beach, he traded that flag for two more flags. One was from Mount McKinley, known for its ferocious winds and ice-clad peaks that register below-zero temperatures. This flag had a fan that made it flap fiercely. The second flag represented the Bahamas, which has warm waters and lush foliage. The fan that effected this flag caused it to rustle gently. The fans and flags added even more contrast to his piece, embodying the interconnectedness of a globe where melting polar ice caps effect tropical islands thousands of miles away by raising ocean waters. This piece shows us how we depend on “hyperextended” means to deal with the effects of global warming that we as a species caused and now have to try to fix. “The ice chunk is, simultaneously, a wonder of nature, a strange anomaly, a holy relic, an alarming warning, and a pitiful refugee.” If I were to design a sculpture inspired by Eduardo Kac, I would build a box large enough to hold and grow plants. I would get seeds of various flowers, succulents, and cacti and I would mix them together and plant them randomly in the box. The plants would hopefully grow to create various patterns and colour combinations and interesting compositions within the box. Since it would be a living sculpture, some plants would die sooner than the others and some may even be seasonal. I think this would be an interesting living piece of art and the spontaneity of planting the seeds would also coincide with my own artwork. Creating a sculpture or project inspired by Tavares Strachan is more difficult because it deals with such a heavy subject matter and major contrasting elements. One idea I had for a project would be to create bird nests or bird houses from trash found in the environment, like at the beach or in a park. Birds already make their nests from trash in big cities and I think that's really cool. It would be taking something discarded that would usually destroy the world and creating something like a home out of it that actually benefits wildlife. This isn't even just an idea for bird houses, certain types of trash might be used to make shelters for other stray animals as well. This would utilize the idea of benefitting nature with something we as a species are ruining it with: litter.
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