Abstract
“Time Capsule” is a work-experience that lies somewhere between a local eventinstallation, a site-specific work in which the site itself is both my body and a remote database, a simulcast on TV and the Web, and interactive webscanning of my body. The live component of the piece was realised on November 11, 1997, in the context of the exhibition “Arte Suporte Computador”, at the cultural centre Casa da Rosas, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. “Time Capsule” was carried live on the evening newscast of the TV station Canal 21 and on tape by two other TV stations (TV Manchete and TV Cultura). The webscast was transmitted by Casa das Rosas.
The object that gives the piece its title is a microchip that contains a programmed identification number and that is integrated with a coil and a capacitor, all hermetically sealed in biocompatible glass. The temporal scale of the work is stretched between the ephemeral and the permanent; i.e., between the few minutes necessary for the completion of the basic procedure, the microchip implantation, and the permanent character of the implant. As with other underground time capsules, it is under the skin that this digital time capsule projects itself into the future.
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Further reading
Atkins, R. “State of the (On-Line) Art”, Art in America April 99, pp.89–95.
Carvalho, M. “Artista implanta hoje chip no corpo,” Folha de São Paulo, C. 11 November 1997, p. 3. (Portuguese)
Cubitt, S. “Re: Prepare for the Wired Human”, posted to Cyber Society (http://www.unn.ac.uk/cybersociety), 29 September 1999.
Decia, P. “Bioarte: Eduardo Kac tem obra pol^emica vetada no II”, Folha de São Paulo, IIustrada, 10 October 1997, p. 3. (Portuguese)
DeMocker, J. “Monsters, Spies and implants”, Wired News, 23 June 1998.
Esnal, L. “Un hombre IIamado 0261109532”, La Nacion, Section 5, Buenos Aires, 15 December 1997, p. 8. (Spanish)
Kac, E. “Time Capsule”, InterCommunication, N. 26, Autumn 1998, Tokyo, pp. 13–15. (Japanese)
Kac, E. “Time Capsule”, in Ars Telematica—Telecomunicação, Internet e Ciberespaço, Claudia Gianneti, ed., Eelògio
D'Àgua/Goethe Institute, Lisbon, 1998, pp. 237–242. (Portuguese)
Kac, E. “Time Capsule”, in Art Futura, book/cd-rom, Montxo Algora, ed., Teatro Central de Sevilla, 1998, n.p.n.
Kac, E. “Art at the Biological Frontier”, in Roy Ascott, ed., reframing Consciousness: Art, Mind and Technology (Exeter: Intellect, 1999), pp. 90–94.
Machado, A. “A Microchip inside the body”, originally published on the Nettime list on February 22, 1998. Republished in Leonardo Electronic Almanac (May 15, 1998), Vol. 6, No. 4. Published in Spanish in the magazine Mediapolis, Ano 2, N. 5, Buenos Aires, (1998) pp. 6–9. The article was first published in English in print in Performance Research, “On Line” special issue, London, 1999, pp. 8–12. An enlarged version of the article was presented at Siggraph 98 in the panel “Sublime and Impossible bodies”, Orlando, FL. the enlarged version was published as: Machado, Arlindo. “Expanded Bodies and Mind”, in Dobrila, Peter Tomaz and Kostic, Aleksandra (eds.). Eduardo Kac: Teleporting An Unknown State (Maribor, Slovenia: KIBLA, 1198), pp. 39–63.
Paul, C. “Time Capsule”, Intelligent Agent, Vol. 2, N. 2, (1998) pp 4–13.
Tomasula, S. “Time Capsule: Self-Capsule”, CIRCA, N. 89, Autumn 1999, Ireland, pp. 23–25
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Kac, E. Time capsule. AI & Soc 14, 243–249 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01205454
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01205454