Luminous rabbit
The light rabbit (mostly called GFP Bunny in English ) is an action by the Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac .
Kac had announced the breeding of a fluorescent animal at the Ars Electronica in 1999 , but still spoke of a dog as an experimental animal . The fluorescence should be achieved by the fact that the green fluorescent protein of the jellyfish Aequorea victoria is built into the genetic material of the animal .
After consulting a French curator, Kac decided to carry out the experiment on a rabbit and contacted Louis-Marie Houdebine of the Paris Institute National de la Recherche en Agronomie . Houdebine agreed to the experiment, which was to be presented at an art exhibition in Avignon in 2000. Before the exhibition opened, however, further participation and the handing over of a rabbit to the artist were prevented by the director of the institute at the time, Paul Vial. At this point in time, Houdebine had already bred several rabbits with the gene for the fluorescent protein, including the animal named "Alba" by Kac. According to Houdebine's later testimony, however, this rabbit was not bred explicitly for Kac, but rather part of a research series in which the GFP gene was only used to identify other issues.
The project had meanwhile aroused great media coverage, which was received beyond the art and science audience. Kac then initiated an action for the liberation of the rabbit under the title Free Alba , which was unsuccessful, but fed the myth with poster campaigns and other art works (the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood , for example, mentioned released GFP rabbits as descendants of an experiment in her science fiction -Roman Oryx and Crake ). Houdebine reported the animal's death in 2002; death was not caused by genetic manipulation, but fell within the usual four-year lifespan of laboratory animals. The age in this case would not agree with Eduardo Kac's statement, who continues to claim that the rabbit was only bred in 2000 and exclusively for his art project. Kac described Houdebine's statement as a diversion designed to protect the institute from further media attention. Houdebine, on the other hand, accuses Kac of having excessively published data on the rabbit's coloration, which is only visible under laboratory conditions, and without consultation ("The scientific fact is that the rabbit is not green [...] He should have never published that. This was very disagreeable for me . ")
Popular culture
In the animated film The Smurfs - The Lost Village , Clumsy, Hefty, Schlaubi and Smurfette come across rabbits that glow in the dark in the Forbidden Forest.
Web links
- Documentation on the GFP Bunny on the artist's official website
- Comments from Dr. Houdebine , one of the producers of the GFP rabbit
- The Role of Images and Aesthetic Experience in Bio Art , Eduardo Kac in conversation with Toni Hildebrandt
Individual evidence
- ↑ Tom Abate: "Artist Proposes Using Jellyfish Genes to Create Glow-in-the-Dark Dogs" , in: San Francisco Chronicle , October 18, 1999 (English)
- ↑ Christopher Dickey: "I Love my Glow Bunny" , in: Wired , April 9, 2001 (English)
- ↑ a b Kristen Philipkoski: "RIP: Alba, the Glowing Bunny" , in: Wired , December 8, 2002 (English)
- ↑ Ernestine Daubner: "Eduardo Kac & The Art of Spinning a Green Bunny" ( Memento of the original from October 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , in: CIAC Electronic Magazine 23/2005 (English)
