ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses to the work of Brazilian-American bioartist Eduardo Kac, shows how a certain zone of contemporary art seeks to challenge traditionally conceived boundaries between the human and the non-human, the living and the non-living, the local and the remote, as aesthetics and technology. It includes a key paradigm shift in thinking about posthumanism, insofar as Kac's telerobotic and transgenic projects mark the passage from a digital posthumanism to a biocybernetic one, following a terminological and methodological turn proposed by critic W. J. T. Mitchell. Wegenstein's phenomenological perspective, offers strong support for Mitchell's argument regarding the prevalence of a paradigm of biocybernetic reproducibility in posthumanist thinking, and also provides a powerful theoretical apparatus through which to approach Eduardo Kac's poetics of skin in his bio-telematic performance pieces "Time Capsule" and "A Positive". With the execution of "Time Capsule" in November 1997, Kac pioneered the field of bioart.
