…and the bunny goes POP!
Tales of a rabbit gone viral
Featuring Eduardo
Kac and responses to his GFP Bunny
EXHIBITION: Saturday 2nd June - Saturday 23rd June 2018, Mon -
Sat, 12 - 6pm
OPENING: Friday 1st June, 7 - 9pm
WHERE: The Horse Hospital,
Colonnade, Bloomsbury, London
In 2000, Eduardo Kac announced his artwork GFP Bunny, in which he created Alba, a biologically-living, green-glowing rabbit. The response to this work has been voluminous and uninterrupted for nearly 20 years. This exhibition captures, for the first time, the different registers and diverse materialisations of Alba as a meme-spawning rabbit. Emphasizing in equal measure Alba’s birth, the immediate response to her appearance in the world, her two-decade long appropriation by pop culture, and the artist’s metaresponse to this unique phenomenon, the show undoes formal hierarchies, blurs the boundaries between art and non-art, and presents a wide array of examples of this bunny gone viral.
Curated by Bronac Ferran and Andrew Prescott
Supported by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council Digital Transformations theme
Introductory text:
Bronac Ferran, co-curator of the Horse Hospital exhibition
Who is Alba? What is she? Concept or chimera? The
stuff of dreams or the stuff of nightmares? This bifurcation of
uncertainties lies at the heart of this exhibition about the
multiple lives in myriad media of a metamorphosing green bunny
whose presence in contemporary pop culture is now indelible.
Conceived as a radical work of art by Eduardo Kac in 2000, his
concept has been subsumed into a global phenomenon that offers a
dark, playful, mirror to collective uncertainties.
This exhibition draws
on dialogues over the past two years between Kac and exhibition
co-curator Professor Andrew Prescott and reflects aspects of the
artists’s personal and informal collection of Alba-related
memorabilia as well as other items and manifestations uncovered
through the process of research towards the exhibition. For
several years, Kac had been contemplating the possibility of
doing an exhibition of Alba spin-off phenomena but was uncertain
how this might look and what it might contain, for reasons he
describes in the interview below with Diane Scott. The Horse
Hospital, an ancient lair of stone and avant-garde resonances,
offered a perfect context for this disparate display of
materials as diverse as the novels of Margaret Atwood and the
seemingly superficial Smurfs. But how different really are these
messages? Is everything pop culture now? Is Alba an autopoeitic
spokes-bunny for the arts of metamorphosis in the domain of
media appropriation? Is glowing in the dark the endgame or our
ultimate dream of escape?
In May 2018 Diane Scott, Research
Associate to the Arts and Humanities Digital Transformations
Research Fellowship, at University of Glasgow, asked Kac a
series of questions about Alba and connections between the work
and popular culture.
Q. There has been an explosion of
responses to your GFP Bunny on
the Internet. An anonymous contributor posted a
three-dimensional digital image to Flickr entitled Plato
drinking Vodka with Eduardo Kac, in which we see a
hybrid of human and non-human floating next to a metallic
green-glowing rabbit. How do you feel about the online
reception of GFP Bunny?
“The Internet is such a vast and complex
environment that it would be fair to say that there are many
different kinds of online responses, depending on the subculture
that appropriates Alba’s image and meaning”.
Kac explains that Plato
drinking Vodka with Eduardo Kac is
included in the video that is part of the exhibition. The video
brings together a multitude of responses, from Nobel Prize to
Hulk, from Margaret Atwood to Deviant Art, from Smurfs to
Sapiens. Informed by Twitter of Kac’s …and
the bunny goes POP! show, Atwood
retwitted it to her nearly two million followers.
Q. Why a rabbit?
“The relationship we had with domesticated
non-humans helped us leave our nomadic way of life, meaning that
we started to inhabit houses [domus]…we
self-domesticated…I wanted us to understand that this process is
more nuanced and complex than is usually conceived.”.
Referencing the initial controversy
around the creation of Alba the GFP Bunny,
Kac argues that the unease felt by some was not necessarily
about the rabbit or the work –or, at least, it was viewed in a
wider context of concerns about rapid technological and social
change as we entered a new century and new millennium. The
creation of Alba coincided with the Y2K (or Millennium Bug)
zeitgeist and concerns about the safety and robustness of
technology.
“Most people forget how frightened people were in
2000…computers were not written for 2000…satellites would fall
from the sky, the grid would be interrupted, hospitals would be
without electricity…”
Alba the green glowing rabbit has
become a familiar pop-culture reference point for many and the
technology which
the artist used to create her now
exists within a broad public consciousness. But at the time of
her creation, there was no precedent for this process in art. The very concept was new,
even frightening, and people had to come to terms with the idea
in the first instance, set against a backdrop of millennial
anxiety. In the last two decades, we have seen representations
and discussions of Alba shift from reacting to a ground-breaking
concept, to the spread of a specific and recognisable image.
“Alba has gone from iconic to archetypal, its
response has moved through first phase (immediate reaction) to
second phase (pop appropriation) – and now into a third phase
(response to the responses), that this exhibition seeks to
capture”
Q: This is a show about responses
to Alba over the last two decades and the exhibition collects
and curates a wide range of stories, artworks, and objects
which directly or indirectly reference your work. Are people
surprised by your non-proprietary approach to Alba’s image?
Kac explains that the pop culture
responses to his GFP Bunny are
central to the life, and afterlife, of the original artwork.
While he is undoubtedly still the artist, the creator of Alba,
the original work is not the end point but a starting point.
Indeed, nearly 20 years later Alba’s image continues to appear
in film, TV and music, referenced and reworked across online
platforms.
Kac continues to create new artworks
developed from GFP Bunny, including
what he calls Lagoglyphs, using a form
of ‘rabbit language’ as well as a series of Lagoogleglyphs (works
created specifically to be seen on mobiles devices via
satellites). The most recent of
this was installed at Furtherfield Gallery in Finsbury Park in
London for six weeks this spring, designed to be viewed in the
locality and collective space of a public park as well as on
Google Earth. In this exhibition at Horse Hospital in
Bloomsbury, the focus is on creative responses generated by
other people, from anonymous Tumblr and Instagram users to
best-selling authors such as Michael Crichton and Margaret
Atwood.
“People have completely made Alba their own”
The artist admits that he has been
surprised by the material on display, some of which he has not
seen before. He is
constantly surprised by the sheer variety of reactions and hopes
the exhibition will reveal at some of the broad and distributed
response which has developed over the last two decades. This
exhibition shows what Kac calls generative
reception, taking place with or without direct reference
back to the artist. The show also includes Kac’s silkscreen Lagoglyphs,
The Bunny Variations (2007),
embracing the resonances and rejecting any sense of hierarchy.
Kac notes that this exhibition is
unique in a number of ways. Most of the material has never been
exhibited before and most of it is by others. Eduardo
and Alba sit at
the point of origin, but the pieces radiate and spiral
outwards in odd, and occasionally unsettling directions.
“Something that is true for any exhibition is that
if you have familiarity with the artists and
their works, you will come with that baggage…if you discover the
artist for the first time, then you see it in an entirely
different way.
I think it is quite likely that many viewers will
discover this material for the first time…others will have
experienced some level of response in the last two decades
between the creation of GFP Bunny and
this exhibition…This is an assemblage of responses…”
One of the recurring strands of
discussion during the interview, and indeed over the course of
the exhibition install, has been the development of Alba
references over the near 20-year period, from mainstream media
to online communities and platforms – and
how this reflects and shapes different generational responses to
the artwork. The exhibition draws out this theme of reproduction
through both its choice of materials, and the mode and means of
display. The viewer will see contemporary newspaper reports of
Alba’s creation, often rather sensationalist in tone, adjacent
to cartoonish internet artworks. They will see children’s
clothing featuring Alba the bunny alongside artist’s books.
Stuffed toys of the glowing green rabbit featured in the more
recent Smurf movies
produced by Sony Pictures are nestled next to fan art inspired
by the genetically modified rabbit from BBC’s Sherlock.
“There are multiple
materialities, a transversal
multiplicity of lines flowing between the different works that
somehow seeks to convey the way that this generative outgrowth
has happened after the initial manifestation of Alba.”
Perhaps one of the most striking
themes of the exhibition is the relationship between the artwork
and the culture from which it emerges. As Kac notes,artists have
often taken from popular culture; the GFP
Bunny has given back to popular culture
and the responses and resonances have taken on a life of their
own that shows no sign of abating.
Professor Andrew Prescott, Arts and
Humanities Research Council Digital Transformations Research
Fellow, co-curator of the Horse Hospital exhibition, reflects on
Kac’s GFP Bunny and its
offspring.
GFP Bunny is the
most famous of the pioneering transgenic art works created by
the Chicago-based artist Eduardo Kac. The image of Alba, an
albino rabbit genetically modified so that, when illuminated
with light at a particular wavelength, she glows fluorescent
green, became one of the first iconic images of the twenty-first
century. As a result of the international controversy and
debates generated by GFP Bunny,
depictions of fluorescent green rabbits appeared widely in
newspapers, magazines and television.
The process by
which Alba escaped into the outside world and spawned
innumerable offspring provides a fascinating case study in
cultural dynamics, and this is the focus of the present
exhibition. From the outset the artist saw the public dialogue
generated by the project as integral to the artwork, however,
the scale and extent of the response has taken even the artist
by surprise. This exhibition reflects the main components of
this cultural phenomenon.
Alba is Latin
for white and also Italian for dawn. She was an albino rabbit
with no skin pigment, so that under ordinary environmental
conditions, she appeared completely white with pink eyes.
However as she was created with EGFP, a synthetically-enhanced
version of the fluorescent gene found in the jellyfish Aequorea
Victoria, she would glow when illuminated with blue light
(maximum excitation at 488 nm). Then she would glow with a
bright green light (maximum emission at 509 nm). GFP stands
for Green Fluorescent Protein.
Kac described
his intentions with GFP Bunny as
follows:
The first phase of the ‘GFP
Bunny’ project was completed in February 2000 with the birth of
‘Alba’ in Jouy-en-Josas, France. This was accomplished with the
invaluable assistance of the zoosystemician Louis Bec and
scientists Louis-Marie Houdebine and Patrick Prunet [of the
Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in France]. Alba’s
name was chosen by consensus between my wife Ruth, my daughter
Miriam, and myself. The second phase is the ongoing debate,
which started with the first puublic announcement of Alba’s
birth, in the context of the Planet Work conference, in San
Francisco, on May 14, 2000. The third phase will take place when
the bunny comes home to Chicago, becoming part of my family and
living us from this point on.
However, Alba
never went to live with the artist’s family. An article in the Boston
Globe on 17 September 2000 reported ‘As
word has slowly leaked out about Alba – who was supposed to
‘interact’ with Kac in a faux living room as a piece of
performance art, but is instead confined to her French
laboratory after protests – it is bringing outcries from
scientists and animal rights activists, shocked at the idea that
the powerful tools of biotechnology would be used for an art
exhibit’. In London, The Times reported
in October 2000 under the heading ‘Hop off…’ that ‘Scientists at
the French Agricultural Research Institute have refused to give
a genetically modified rabbit to Eduardo Kac, a Chicago artist
who wants the animal as a work of art. They deny that Alba, a
lab pet with a jellyfish gene, is green but say she has a slight
hue’.
The public
discussion sparked by GFP Bunny led
to articles in newspapers and magazines from America and
Australia to Poland, Sweden and Romania. These were frequently
illustrated by a photograph of a fluorescent Alba, popularising
this image. The idea of a fluorescent bunny even excited
newspaper cartoonists in France and Australia. The public debate
was further enhanced in December 2000 when Kac launched a
campaign in France to bring Alba home. This intervention
included a poster campaign at various sites in Paris, newspaper,
radio and television interviews, and public lectures and
debates. Alba quickly became an international rabbit cause
célèbre.
In the wake of
the public controversy and the campaign to release Alba from the
laboratory, Eduardo Kac produced a series of works inspired in
different ways by Alba. The Alba Flag (2001)
was hung outside the artist’s house as a memento of Alba’s
absence and a beacon to guide her home. Kac’s memories of Alba
prompted him to create a wordless language incorporating rabbit
imagery which he called ‘lagoglyphs’ (from the ancient Greek
words ‘lagos’ for hare and ‘glyphe’ for carving). Lagoglyphs: The
Bunny Variations (2007) are
bichrome silkscreens demonstrating this leporimorph or
rabbitographic writing. Kac comments that ‘As visual language
that alludes to meaning but resists interpretation, the
Lagoglyphs series stands as the counterpoint to the barrage of
discourses generated through, with, and around GFP
Bunny’.
However, while
the creation of Alba sparked public debate, including some
criticism of Kac, on ethical grounds, by some of his
artist-peers, GFP Bunny nevertheless helped spread educational
and public awareness of the underlying science. The chemists who
developed the green fluorescent protein won the Nobel Prize in
2008, and alluded to Kac’s work in their acceptance speech. Alba
was used to explain biotechnology in children’s books and
popular science publications. In Brazil, questions about Alba
featured in high school examination papers, and many high school
children worldwide became
familiar with the image of Alba from their text books.
This initial
discussion of GFP Bunny was
however only the first stage in the process by which the bunny
went viral. It is sometimes assumed that the proliferation of
cultural memes is due largely to the internet. However, the
initial debates around GFP Bunny were
dominated by more conventional media: newspapers, magazines,
television, radio, public debate and performance. Moreover, the
subsequent and most influential stages of the process by which
the idea of a flourescent green bunny was taken up by a wide
range of creative artists was transmedia in character and not
restricted to the internet. The bunny appeared in films, novels,
TV programmes, cartoons and as a toy. The internet undoubtedly
accelerated this process and extended its international reach,
but was not the reason the bunny went viral. The internet also
assists in investigating and documenting the bunny’s journey.
Alba was
extensively appropriated by a number of authors and artists,
with and without acknowledgement, from her earliest appearance.
However, as is shown in the exhibition, some of these became
influential, to the extent that the idea of a fluorescent green
rabbit is now better known through these channels than from
Kac’s original artwork. What is striking about this process is
the way in which the concept has moved from dystopian views of
biotechnologies, during the years immediately after Alba’s
birth, to a more commercialised and arguably sanitised view in
recent manifestations. One of the issues raised by the way in
which the bunny went viral is to what extent these shifting
views reflect underlying cultural and social trends.
First, in 2003
the Canadian author Margaret Atwood published Oryx
and Crake, a dystopian novel describing a degraded and
depraved world in which biotechnology companies have unlimited
wealth and power and all life is commodified. A plan to
genetically modify the human race eventually leads to its
destruction. Atwood’s novel is packed with many strange
transgenic creatures, such as the Hyena Swine (a cross of pig
and hyena), M’ling (a hybrid of bear, dog and ox). Pigoons (pigs
bred to grow human organs) and Wolvogs (that have the appearance
of dogs and savageness of wolves).
Among the first
of these transgenic creatures to be created, according to
Atwood, was a fluorescent bunny:
Across the clearing to the
south comes a rabbit, hopping, listening, pausing to nibble at
the grass with its gigantic teeth. It glows in the dark, a
greenish glow filched from the iridicytes of a deep-sea
jellyfish in some long-ago experiment. In the half-light the
rabbit looks soft and almost translucent, like a piece of
Turkish delight; as if you could suck off its fur like sugar.
Oryx and
Crake was one of Atwood’s most successful novels and a
television adaptation is in development, which will doubtless
feature the green rabbits. Many illustrations of Oryx
and Crakegive prominence to fluorescent rabbits but
without referencing Alba, as original inspiration—even though
Atwood herself has acknowledged being inspired by Alba. Oryx
and Crake was the first of a trilogy,
and green rabbits also figure in the other novels in the
trilogy, Year of the Flood (2009)
and Maddadam (2013).
The second
major development in the media career of Alba occurred in 2012,
when the Japanese director Yukata Tsuchiya premiered at the
Tokyo International Film Theatre a film inspired by a scandal
which had shocked Japan, when a schoolgirl had tried to poison
her mother with thallium. Tsuchiya’s film explored the girl’s
motives by examining her other interests, which included
experiments in dissection, genetic engineering and bio-art.
Among the characters encountered by the girl are a biologist who
created a transparent frog and an artist who implants a chip
with GPS in her hand (echoing Kac’s own 1997 work Time
Capsule). At the end of the film, the girl rides off on a
motorcycle with Takahashi, a body modification artist.
This film won
the best picture award in the Japanese Eyes section of the Tokyo
International Film Festival and has been shown at many other
major international film festivals including Rotterdam,
Singapore, Taipei, Hamburg and Montreal. By agreement with
Eduardo Kac, the English title of the film was GFP
Bunny. As a result, this Japanese film came to occupy the
GFP Bunny space in social media. The only GFP bunny domain in
use on the web is that used by the film: gfp-bunny.info. The
Facebook and Twitter accounts for gfpbunny are used by the film.
(The gfpbunny Instagram account is owned by James Matthew, an
American epidemiologist who is doubtless aware of Kac’s work but
does not refer to it in his Instagram account). The Japanese
film not only took the idea of the GFP bunny to new audiences
but also effectively colonised its social media presence.
The third and
perhaps most influential media appropriation of Alba occurred in
2012. In reworking Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story The
Hound of the Baskervilles for the BBC TV
series Sherlock (as The
Hounds of Baskerville), the scriptwriter Mark Gatiss read
about Kac’s GFP Bunny. Realising how
the genetic engineering could be used to update Conan Doyle’s
plot device of luminous paint, Gatiss introduced a side plot in
which a scientist at the top secret base of Baskerville had
created a glow-in-the-dark bunny called Bluebell. At the
beginning of the episode, the scientist’s child writes to Holmes
to ask for his help in finding the missing Bluebell. The
Hounds of Baskerville was one of the
most popular of the Sherlock reworkings of detective stories and
the vanishing luminous rabbit Bluebell became celebrated in T-
shirts, mugs, stickers, toys and even babies’ clothes
This process of
commercialisation of Alba reached its apotheosis with the
release by Sony Pictures in April 2017 of the animated film, Smurfs:
The Lost Village. In the film, Smurfette and her friends
Brainy, Hefty and Clumsy use a mysterious map to enter the
Forbidden Forest and find a lost village said to be full of
Smurfs before the evil wizard Gargamel. The four Smurfs suffer
many hair-raising adventures. Gargamel tries to kill them with
fire-breathing dragonflies and the four Smurfs get lost in a
maze of caverns. They are rescued by a stampede of
glow-in-the-dark rabbits. Smurfette and the other Smurfs
befriend one glow bunny, Bucky, who takes them all the way to
the river but is afraid of the river itself. Later on, he helps
Papa Smurf in locating the four missing Smurfs.
Whilst the glow
bunny Bucky featured prominently in the formidable merchandising
of Smurfs: the Lost Village, with many
glow bunny toys and games being produced, Alba finally reached
merchandising nirvana when a series of McDonalds Happy Meals
were recently produced featuring The Lost
Village, including toy packs with luminous bunnies. At one
level, the Smurfs, and the ‘Happy Meals’ of McDonalds, might be
seen as representing a sanitisation of the vision of Alba presented
in Oryx and Crake. However, at another
level, references to transgenic animals in animated films and in
hamburger merchandising might be taken as indicating that we are
on the path to the dystopian world described by Atwood.
The glow bunny
Smurf toys were licensed with the full weight of Sony’s
commercial might, although Sony itself appropriated the idea of
the glow bunny from Kac and the GFP Bunny.
It will be interesting to see whether Sony tries to restrict the
cultural proliferation of fluorescent rabbits and what effect
this commercialisation has on Alba’s continued dissemination. Do
the Smurfs and McDonalds represent the end of Alba’s journey?
Probably not.
Alba is now a creature of the internet. Glowing creatures
permeate popular art, as sites such as Deviantart reveal.
Meantime, Patrick Lichty, Peer Hansen and Rachel L. have taken
the cultural commentator McKenzie Wark’s mesh of Guy Debord, and
added an ear on the back (for Stelarc) and Bunny Ears (for
Eduardo Kac). This Detournement #1 of
McKenzie Wark's Guy Debord: Kac/Stelarc Remix is
available under a Creative Commons licence in Thingiverse, so
that Alba responses are now being 3D-printed. It seems that Alba
will run and run.