Panel Statement 

Panel: Three-space

In this telepresence installation, a mobile, wireless telerobot Ornitorrinco (Platypus, in Portuguese) in Chicago is controlled in real time by participants in Lexington and Seattle. Communication takes place not through verbal exchange but through the rhythms that result from their engagement in a shared, mediated experience. Viewers and participants are invited to experience an invented remote space from a perspective other than their own. Anybody in the world with Internet access can see it, thus dissolving gallery boundaries and making the work accessible to larger audiences. By merging telerobotics, remote participants and spaces, the traditional telephone system, and videoconferencing through the Internet, this networked telepresence installation shows one potential direction that interactive art may take in the future

• Eduardo Kac (USA) is Assistant professor of New Media in the Department of Art, University of Kentucky, he has participated in numerous exhibitions and festivals including Interface 3 Symposium (Hamburg), Siggraph ’95, and Ars Electronica (Linz). His work has also been shown at the Museum of Holography (New York), Museum of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro), and Kunstlerhaus (Graz, Austria). Eduardo Kac is a member of the editorial board of the international journal A major WWW retrospective documenting Kac’s fifteen-year career can be found at http://www.uky.edu/FineArts/Art/ kac/kachome.html.