Please join us for Eduardo Kac’s book launch of Space Poetry and ISS#71904, and reading of his Space Poetry manifesto. Entirely handmade, and featuring the embroidered Space Poetry patch on the cover, the multilayered risograph book Space Poetry recounts in images the story of Kac’s collaborative effort with astronaut Thomas Pesquet’s to produce Inner Telescope, an artwork created and experienced in outer space on February 17, 2017. The offset book ISS#71904, printed with silver ink on black paper, functions as a purely visual manual and shows, step by step, the protocol created by Eduardo Kac—and followed by astronaut Thomas Pesquet—in the realization of the artwork aboard the International Space Station. These two artist’s books, signed and numbered by the artist, express different aspects of Kac’s Inner Telescope, as recently featured in a full-page article about the work in the New York Times.

Eduardo Kac is internationally recognized for his influential contributions to the development of contemporary art and poetry. Since the early 1980s, Kac has pioneered new art forms such as digital networking, telepresence, holopoetry, and bio art. These practices anticipated the new global culture we live in today, composed of ever-changing subjectivities and information in constant flux. Throughout his four-decade career, Kac has produced works that erase the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, the biological and the technological, the verbal and the visual, the local and the remote. Kac’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues such Whitechapel Gallery and Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Maison Européenne de la Photographie and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; and Power Station of Art, Shanghai. Kac’s work has been showcased in biennials such as Gwangju Biennale, Korea; Bienal de Sao Paulo, Brazil; Yokohama Triennial, Japan; and Bienal de Habana, Cuba.