Toward Material and Interspecies Communication: An Interview with Eduardo Kac

Abstract

ABSTRACT Communication is neither just verbal communication nor written and has to be understood in relation to a particular context: historical, material, embodied, emotional, and so on. We also have acknowledged that some kind of communication is possible between species. The investigation of interspecies and material communication is interestingly developed through artistic experiments of Eduardo Kac (a Chicago-based, Brazilian-born bio-artist interested in genetic engineering, and the first person to implant an RFID microchip under his skin in the art project “Time Capsule,” 1997). The aim of the interview was to inquire into Kac’s views on language, evolution, and material and interspecies communication, which turns out to have the capacity to mitigate our anxiety that direct, material, nonlinguistic communication will be lacking poetic, aesthetic, and interpretative values. Kac states that if we resign from linguistics and philology, we will open ourselves to the possibility of interspecies communication. This kind of communication appears in a few instances, or on different levels, biological and behavioral (which are not always easy to distinguish between), creating new threads of relationship with other nonhuman entities, which plausibly will make us more sensitive to their well-being, and can cause important shifts in our behavior, supporting the development of empathy toward others in global terms.