Eduardo Kac’s Letter is a navigational poem that presents the viewer with the image of a three-dimensional spiral jetting off the center of a two-dimensional spiral. Both spirals are made exclusively of text. Thus, reading becomes a process of probing the virtual object from all possible angles. The reader is also able to fly through and around the object, thus expanding reading possibilities. In Letter a spiraling cone made of words can be interpreted as both converging to or diverging from the flat one. Together they may evoke the creation or destruction of a star. All texts are created as if they were fragments of letters written to the same person. However, in order to convey a particular emotional sphere, the author conflated the subject positions of grandmother, mother, and daughter into one addressee. It is not possible to distinguish to whom each fragment is addressed. The poem makes reference to moments of death and birth in the artist’s family. Originally created as a VRML file on a Macintosh Centris 650, Letter was later converted to mp4.

The digital poem Insect.Desperto is a runtime animation in which the visual and sound tracks function independently and complementarily in two languages (English and Portuguese), one not being the translation of the other. Desperto means “awaken” in Portuguese. Insect.Desperto was first published online in 1994 through ftp (file transfer protocol).

Cyborg (1985) is Eduardo Kac’s first digital artwork in color, made by the artist on a France Telecom Minitel editing console. In the image we see an anthropomorphic creature, half-human, half-robot, arms bent with clenched fists, shouting the neologism that expresses its uniqueness. The symbolism of clenched fists is well established as a form of civil rights activism; here, a hybrid lifeform proudly affirms its right to exist. The portmanteau “cyborg” appears in a comic book balloon, a nod to the artist’s passion for the medium. In a world where identity was traditionally imposed along predetermined lines, the self-affirming act featured in this image stood as a beacon of freedom.