Eduardo Kac, Assistant Professor of Art, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
          Respondents:  Kalman Bland, Elizabeth Kiss, Joseph Nevins, Jeremy Sugarman
          Organizer and Moderator:  Edward Shanken

Sponsored by: Duke Department of Art & Art History; Center for Genome Ethics, Law and Policy; Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory; Center for International Studies; Center for the Study of Medical Ethics and Humanities; Kenan Institute for Ethics; and the Vice-Provost's Office for Interdisciplinary Studies.

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Artist Eduardo Kac, whose "GFP Bunny" is the first artwork to incorporate a genetically altered mammal, will visit Duke University on Monday, Nov. 6, to participate in a symposium dedicated to his genetic artwork and its social implications.

Kac has received widespread media attention for creating a green flourescent rabbit, named Alba, as an artwork.  Alba possesses genetic material from two species, thus making it "transgenic."  It was created by splicing together rabbit DNA with the gene for Green Flourescent Protein (GFP) taken from a jellyfish. Assisting Kac in the GFP Bunny project were French artist and curator Louis Bec and scientists Louis-Marie Houdebine and Patrick Prunet. Alba appears white in daylight but glows green under blue light.

The symposium - "Art, Genetics, and Ethics: The Transgenic Art of Eduardo Kac" - will focus on the ethical issues raised by GFP Bunny and the future implications of genetic engineering. To pose ethical questions about science in an artistic form allows them to be studied in a broad social and cultural frame. Kac's work pushes the political, cultural, and ethical boundaries of aesthetics, and interrogates the relationship between art and science in a social context.  GFP Bunny makes concrete the reality of living with the current state of biotechnology.

The symposium will include a multi-disciplinary panel of Duke professors, who will respond to Kac's use of genetic engineering as an artistic medium. A question-and-answer session involving the audience will transpire at the end. The event will take place in the Levine Science Research Center's Love Auditorium, from 7 to 9:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public.  No reserved seats are available, and seating is limited.

Scientists now routinely engineer transgenic animals for use in cancer research and other diseases.  However, the use of this sort of technology for artistic research is new, and has not met with the same degree of acceptance. The director of the French government lab that engineered Kac's green flourescent rabbit has declined to release Alba to the artist, impeding  a key aesthetic component of Kac's project: to participate in the socialization process of a transgenic being in the context of his own family in Chicago.

It is unclear why genetic engineering performed in the name of science is more acceptable than the same process carried out in the name of art. Art has always made valuable contributions to the understanding of technology and its social ramifications. GFP Bunny explores the boundaries between art and science, and between animals that are genetically altered and those that are not.  It opens up new dimensions of discussion about the ethics of genetic engineering in general.

The panel of respondents and moderator include:

* Kalman P. Bland, Professor of Religion, Director of Judaic Studies Program, and author of _The ArtlessJew: Medieval and Modern Affirmations and Denials of the Visual_. Bland teaches courses at Duke on medieval and modern Jewish thought, and has a rabbinic degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary.

* Elizabeth Kiss, Director of Duke's Kenan Institute for Ethics. She is also Associate Professor
of the Practice of Political Science and Philosophy, and is interested in moral and political philosophy focused on human rights.

* Joseph Nevins, James B. Duke Professor of Genetics and Chair of the Department of Genetics.  He is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is recognized internationally for his research on
mammalian cancer gene regulation.  His response will address the use of transgenic technology for scientific goals.

*Jeremy Sugarman, Director of Duke's Center for the Study of Medical Ethics and Humanities.  An associate professor with dual appointments in the Departments of Medicine and Philosophy, his research focuses on
ethics and physician-patient communication.

* Edward Shanken, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Art & Art History at Duke. He has published widely on the intersections between art and technology, and is editor of _Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology and Consciousness by Roy Ascott_ (University of California Press, 2001).

Eduardo Kac is Assistant Professor of Art and Technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His first genetic art installation, "Genesis," premiered at the Ars Electronica "Life Science" exhibition in Linz, Austria in September 1999, and was more recently included in the exhibition,"Paradise Now," at Exit Art in New York City from September 9-October 28, 2000. This work consists of a Biblical passage translated into Morse Code, then translated into DNA code and injected into a bacteria. Internet surfers from across the world were able to log onto the gallery's Web site and view the bacteria. A strong ultraviolet light above the bacteria was then activated, and the bacteria mutated.  Kac is also  theorist and critic whose writings investigate the philosophical and political dimensions of communications processes.  He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Leonardo.

More about Kac's work can be found at the artist's website http://www.ekac.org