- Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) was founded in 1966 by artist Robert Rauschenberg and engineer Billy Kluver from Bell Labs.
- EAT aimed to bring artists and engineers together to collaborate on projects and make technology accessible to artists.
- Their first major project was a performance series at the Armory in New York, pairing artists with engineers.
- The process of pairing artists and engineers was tumultuous but created excitement and tension.
- The performances faced delays and challenges, but still attracted a large number of visitors.
- EAT grew to have around 5,000 members by 1970, allowing access to a network of artists and engineers.
- Outreach efforts included reaching out to artists, attending engineering conferences, and giving talks at schools and universities.

- The piece discusses the network of communication between academics, the military, and artists.
- It describes an art piece by Rauschenberg at the Armory that involved a tennis match with hot-wired rackets and lights turning off with each hit.
- Infrared cameras captured the movements of people on the floor, which were then projected onto screens.
- The piece explores questions around performance, play, sound, and imaging technology.
- People had different attitudes towards the art and technology overlap, with some being amazed and others critical.
- The Automation House was a collaboration between EAT and the American Foundation on Automation and Employment, addressing concerns about automation and job loss.
- The goal was to find solutions to embrace technology while changing the sphere of labor.

- EAT aimed to pragmatically understand the impact of technology and bring together experts from different fields to solve problems.
- They renovated a townhouse in New York to create a center for job training, workshops, art exhibitions, and classes.
- They used closed circuit television cameras and video monitors, and did the first cable broadcast of artists' television programming in 1970-71.
- EAT had a social and political mission and wanted to change aspects of life through technology.
- They were commissioned to construct the Pepsi pavilion at the World's Fair in Osaka, which was a global collaborative project with sound effects, projections, and performances.
- However, Pepsi found it too strange and there were budget cost overruns, leading to a legal dispute and EAT being kicked out of the pavilion.
- The experience was traumatic but demonstrated EAT's global reach and ambition.
- EAT collaborated with physicists and other artists in similar programs, but EAT aimed to go beyond traditional institutions and genres of art.
- Some of their creations were lost or in disrepair.

- The art group EAT created many innovative works that were either lost or in disrepair
- The incorporation of new technologies and materials in art has been a challenge
- Artists have used both obsolete and cutting-edge technologies in their works
- The ready-made concept can be updated to adapt to technological changes
- Some artists want to change their works in museums to reflect new technologies
- The Venice Biennale exhibition focused on traditional craft and spirituality rather than technology
- Many artists today have access to advanced technology, but the production of technology is still inaccessible to most
- Trevor Paglen is an artist pushing the boundaries of art and technology by rendering invisible things visible through special camera technology.

- The speaker discusses the work of an artist who aims to make invisible and non-physical processes visible through various projects.
- The artist is interested in post-vision automated technologies that cannot be visualized in an optical realm.
- The speaker mentions a question about whether blockchain is being used to track authenticity in digital art, to which they are unsure but believe some artists may be interested in subverting authenticity.
- The speaker explains that machines creating art is still considered art, as artists have used machines to challenge traditional notions of authorship and privilege.
- The speaker mentions the work of Trevor Paglen and Harun Faraki, who explore the prospect of completely automated systems that do not require human input.
- The speaker discusses the constant criticism in the art world and the importance of introducing glitches and challenging systems of reproduction in art creation.

- The discussion revolves around the relationship between art and technology
- The importance lies in what artists do with the tools and their ability to create new tools
- An experiment called "Children and Communication" involved school children using teletype machines to communicate with each other, which led to unexpected outcomes
- The conversation then shifts to the need for public institutions for both art and technology to foster collaboration and exchange of knowledge
- The challenges of creating content today and the paradox of information wanting to be free but also needing creators to sustain it are discussed
- Recommended reading includes "From Counterculture to Cyberculture" by Fred Turner and "The Artist as Producer" by Maria Goff, which explore historical shifts and the role of artists in transforming society and labor organization
- The importance of exploring failed ideas and paths not taken is emphasized, as they may hold potential for the future
- The importance of reading and experiencing art in person is also mentioned.

- The speaker mentions a show at CCA Wattis in San Francisco that explores art and technology
- They also mention an upcoming show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
- The speaker suggests reading art criticism to gain different perspectives and insights
- They recommend starting with Artforum and mention Clement Greenberg as a notable writer in the past
- Greenberg's criticism provides insight into the foundation of art today and the battles fought in the past
- The stakes seemed high for critics in the 50s and 60s, as they were fighting for the soul of Western civilization.

- Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) was founded in 1966 by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Kluver.
- EAT aimed to bring artists and engineers together to collaborate on projects and make technology accessible to artists.
- Their first major project was a performance series at the Armory in New York.
- EAT grew to have around 5,000 members by 1970, allowing access to a network of artists and engineers.
- They collaborated with various organizations and created innovative art pieces.
- EAT faced challenges and criticism but had a global reach and ambition.
- The incorporation of technology in art has been a challenge, but some artists are pushing boundaries.
- The relationship between art and technology is important, as artists create new tools and challenge traditional notions.
- Public institutions for art and technology are needed for collaboration and knowledge exchange.
- The challenges of creating content and the importance of reading and experiencing art in person are discussed.
- Recommended reading and upcoming art shows are mentioned.
- Art criticism provides different perspectives and insights into the foundation of art.

Michelle Kuo is Editor in Chief of Artforum - https://www.artforum.com/

Kat Mañalac is a Partner at YC - https://twitter.com/katmanalac

Michelle came in to chat with us about art and technology and, in particular, a group called Experiments in Art and Technology - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experiments_in_Art_and_Technology

YC's podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon - http://twitter.com/craigcannon

So I'll just start by saying Experiments in Art and Technology was a group that was founded in 1966 by the artist Robert Rauschenberg by an engineer named Billy Kluver who was a research scientist at Bell Labs.

At that time, literally the heyday or basically it was the heyday of Bell Labs, which was the ground 0 for sort of everything as we know it.

None of what we're doing right now would be possible without the invention of the transistor, for example.

All of these breakthrough inventions happened at Bell Labs and it was really the center of the telecommunications revolution.

So this engineer at Bell gets together with these artists, some of whom are really, you know, prominent at the time.

And they are, they've, they've been, they've sort of met each other through some just really almost chance social circles, but also through some art world friends in common.

And you know, Jasper Johns needed a neon, wanted a neon light in the shape of a letter, the letter R, for 1 of his paintings and he didn't want a cord running from the painting to an electrical socket.

So somehow we got hooked up with Kluver, this engineer from Bell and said, can you do this?

Well, it turns out it was kind of a complicated problem at the time.

How do you make a battery powered neon light that's small enough to fit behind a painting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So they had these various collaborations.

But then Rauschenberg and Kluver, the artists and the engineers thought, Why can't we bring this to everyone?

Why can't every artist who's curious about making something float have access to an engineer who works on pneumatic technology?

So how could you create these collaborations And then how could you even scale them or grow them so that this becomes a mass sort of phenomenon?

So they set about trying to basically start to get the word out, to get artists and engineers together.

The first real project they did that they undertook was probably 1 of the largest endeavors at the time.

It involved over 40 engineers and artists, And it was this performance series that took place in New York at the Armory, which was a huge cavernous space.

And basically to get to make the performance, what became the performance pieces, They paired artists, choreographers, musicians, composers, with engineers, most of them from Bell, just because that's...

What was that process of pairing them like?

In other words, it was really a word of mouth thing.

So, Kluver would bring in friends from Bell, Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman and other artists would bring in friends from their circle.

This happened to include John Cage, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer, really people that would become extremely well-known afterward, but were already prominent at the time.

They actually held them at a high school in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, which was near the Cleavers' house.

There were people who lived sort of more upstate, so they would go there.

And they were just really trying to literally brainstorm, to bounce ideas off 1 another.

And, you know, of course the artists wanted things like, you know, I want a missile that floats.

I want, you know, a light bulb that will explode.

I want sound that will respond to the viewer as they're walking through space in real time.

And like any tech person knows, non-tech people think technology can do everything all at once already.

So they were really just pie in the sky, and I think the engineers were really shocked, but also really enthusiastic because they hadn't had experiences like that in large measure before.

So this really created a lot of excitement, it created a lot of tension, there were a lot of fights, a lot of conflict as well, just a lot of pressure because in the end they I think they signed up for creating a very, let's say, ambitious set of performances on a large scale in New York.

And at the end of the day, very little was tested or tried out.

And there were long delays, nearly 10,000 visitors over the course of these essentially 20 nights.

Yeah, so like just so I understand the time frame.

They decide like there's this 1 project with a neon behind the painting with a battery.

They then like book the armory like 9 months in advance.

But basically they had proposed, They got together, let's say maybe 10 of them.

But really spearheaded by Rauschenberg and Kluver, and then it kind of built a bit.

And again, this is just this really almost contingent aspect to it.

There's a Swedish performance festival in Stockholm.

And they thought, well, let's apply to do something for that.

They, EAT claimed later that it was because The performance festival didn't want to give, they didn't like the idea that the artists would give so much agency to the engineers and that they would kind of be this freewheeling thing.

Regardless, that fell through, so then they just thought, okay, how can we produce these performances that we'd already started brainstorming about and everyone's really excited about.

And again, Rauschenberg and some of these other artists were quite prominent at the time.

So the Armory was suggested as a venue because they wanted to test out literally physical scale.

And in the armory there are echo times of up to 5 seconds.

So people interested in sound, in remote control, in video, or basically in projection, were interested in this very large physical scale already.

But again, I guess part of it is that some of these artists were already quite prominent.

And so on opening night for this performance series, you have Senator Jacob Javits and his wife.

You have the sort of who's who of the New York art world, but also of the avant-garde, Demi Monde.

And they're all really mad because they're waiting.

And so eventually when things did start to work, you know, really extraordinary and interesting things happen.

For example, in Rauschenberg's performance piece, To make a long story short, 1 of the technologies they got and used was infrared.

And at the time, infrared was a classified military technology.

They ended up getting infrared cameras from a Japanese supplier.

And so, 1 part of the performance was turning all the lights off and in the dark then training these infrared cameras on hundreds of performers that assembled on the floor of the armory.

And so you got these very ghostly spectral images of these people for the audience at large.

And again, you know, that was an extraordinary thing that happened.

It's like as if today you would have an artist that had access to the Pentagon and was spending time you know toying around there.

And from there, they got momentum even more.

And then anyone could really become a member.

You just signed, you filled out a form and you sent it in.

And so at their peak, by around 1970, they had nearly 5,000 members.

So basically to be a member, you could get access to this network.

In other words, you could fill out what you're interested in whether you're on whatever field you're in.

If you're an artist, you could say, I'm interested in new plastics and holograms and also cybernetics.

And then if you were an engineer, you could say, well, this is my disciplinary expertise.

I'm also really fascinated by kinetic sculpture or I really like dropping acid.

They're just like, okay, yeah, I'm into acid.

I guess I know how that makes it to your town.

So part of the whole thing was outreach, and they made a concerted effort, obviously not only to reach out to artists, but then to go to IEEE, which was the engineering society.

Hans Hacke had a booth, was manning a booth there and handing out flyers.

So again, It's like, let's take this to the trade fair, to conferences.

They did almost like, not really publicity, but let's say tours of schools.

The university was, of course, a whole other connector.

And what you see as well is this network of what becomes or was a kind of academic military industrial complex.

All these people are really in communication And so EAT is basically saying, well, how can we get the word out?

So can you explain the actual Rauschenberg piece at the Armory?

Because I thought that was particularly cool.

He was very interested, again, in, first of all, remote control, this...

What he kind of thought of as action at a distance.

You know, how can you make something else happen but not be physically tethered to it.

He's also interested in sound effects, in sonic, sort of in noise as well as, you know, experiments basically in acoustics.

And the other part of it is really almost creating something, let's say, poetic out of people's movements.

And at the time, a number of artists had already or were already exploring the sort of structure of the game and it was also very much a conscious reference to game theory even and so all of these layers are definitely you know there.

Rauschenberg's piece basically set up in this huge cavernous expanse of the armory a tennis match.

He had the artist Frank Stella, who at the time was actually taking tennis lessons from a tennis instructor named Mimi Konarek.

So the tennis instructor and Frank Stella are on the tennis court, and they play a game of tennis.

But it so happens that the tennis rackets are actually hot-wired.

So each time you hit the ball, a resounding amplified, a microphone would pick up an amplified sound that would resonate throughout the armory, And it triggered a huge bank of lights to be turned off.

So with every volley, a successive set of lights would be turned off.

So by the end of the game, which has no winner or loser, the armory is in complete darkness.

And then that's when these infrared cameras were turned on.

And a mass of sort of, they're not really performers, they were people that Rauschenberg sent out sort of vague instructions to, but they were just supposed to gather on the floor and do, maybe make a motion, like pull your ear or touch the person next to you.

Just these sort of very vague instructions.

So that's what they were doing, assembled on the floor and the image of them via infrared is then projected above on these huge screens.

And then at the end of that, they turned 1 spotlight on and the choreographer Simone Forti came out and was being carried and was singing a sort of Italian folk song.

So again, this is all, you know, it's not a regular narrative.

But what it did was really push, It investigated some questions around performance, play, sound, imaging technology, and also the idea that you could have...

A performance didn't have to be about a climactic spectacle.

It was about some other kind of experience and a kind of experience that the artist hoped you wouldn't have had before.

And that, you know, really that was the case.

Of course, the first night, the rackets didn't work.

Or the lights, the trigger for the lights didn't work.

So they were actually manually turning off the lights.

You know, sort of jerry-rigging or retroactively making the piece happen.

But so, you know, again, it was, it was really a test and an experiment in every sense of the word.

And at the time, you know, people didn't really, they didn't really sort of understand that that's what it was.

I've been wondering this the whole time, right?

Because it like, so much of this technology was so new, like, to the extent that you had never even seen an infrared camera, right?

How are people talking about this art and technology overlap?

Because I know, or I think I imagine how people talk about it now, but how are people talking about it at the time?

Well, you have a couple different attitudes.

And part of that is a very futurist strain of language, which is, you know, people basically trying to predict what's going to happen and having fun doing so.

Just like the artists were in a way as well.

But you have a lot of people theorizing about the future of communication, the future of images, the future of human perception.

And so there's a lot of literature around that from, you know, at every sort of end of the spectrum.

And then there are people who are extremely critical and wary.

And at the time, you know, this is the height of the anti-Vietnam protests.

This is a moment when, you know, well, 10 years or so after the military-industrial complex is coined as a term, it is a concept that begins to really take root, and Particularly among the avant-garde, among the counterculture, among the very artists that...

And some of the engineers that are part of EAT.

So they actually came under a lot of flack.

I mean, there are articles actually written in Artforum as well as elsewhere that essentially accused EAT of being complicit with, you know, the military and taking that as far as you might even go.

So that was also part of why I think EAT had a very conflicted reception at the time and why maybe people haven't heard so much about it since then as well.

And you get… it really crystallizes both the utopian and the dystopian attitudes toward technology at the time and what art's role was to either explore that or in fact, critique and negate that.

Okay, and so this led to the Automation House, which I have so, what was it exactly?

So this is like their, the collaboration between, I think I got this right, American Foundation on Automation and Employment.

So basically this argument that they were having at the time which is exactly like the same thing as today

and so it's Kluver and he and the people and I forget the guy's name who is the organizer of that?

Yeah, they like this building together, right?

which is the like future of life house like what I don't really understand what it's supposed to be.

Well, basically what, this is around in 1968, 1969.

And they viewed the physical space as actually an important part of what they were doing because as much as they were actually building what would become a real network that was sprawled globally, they also wanted what they called a place to try things out, you know, a testing ground.

And so they thought various physical spaces like a loft could be that place.

Then they got into, again, through Rauschenberg in large part, talks with this group, the American Foundation on Automation and employment.

And Theodore Kiel was the guy who had started this, was the head of this organization, and he was a labor lawyer.

He'd actually become well-known for mediating a massive, I think it was a newspaper worker's strike in the early 60s.

So suddenly all of these concerns about collective action, about technology and labor, come to the fore.

And everyone is really worried that automation is...

Kennedy had said, you know, automation is the greatest threat facing humanity today.

They didn't even know about artificial intelligence.

So, you know, it was really a widespread fear.

And so this group that the labor lawyer was sort of running was actually trying to literally mediate these concerns.

And they thought that they could find solutions to not only accept but embrace technology and recognize that it was a reality, that it wasn't going away, but also then somehow change the sphere of labor.

So that labor that people could still be employed, it's just that what they did would change.

And again, this is obviously incredibly- So

They really wanted to try and solve this problem.

But then it dovetailed very nicely with what EAT was trying to do, which was to say, How can we pragmatically understand the force of technology in a way that, you know, I think people were really almost willfully blind to.

In other words, you reject it and you don't even want to understand it.

You can't really understand it and therefore you're just, you know, going to condemn it.

So they really wanted to bring people from different knowledge domains, fields of expertise together,

So they decided to build or renovate a townhouse in New York to create a center for job training, for workshops about automation and technology, for art exhibitions, for EAT to have their kind of headquarters there as well, for classes.

And they got 2 young architects to essentially retrofit the building with closed circuit television cameras, video monitors.

They had a video workstation there where 1 of the projects they did was actually convert a bunch of really experimental film pieces to video and then do the first cable broadcast of artists' television programming pretty much of all time.

It was broadcast on local access, cable access in New York.

And they published the schedule in the Village Voice and like I think a few other newspapers.

And so they were trying to create some kind of studio slash laboratory where all these things could happen.

It again really highlighted how despite all of the tensions and conflicts surrounding their relationships to technology, EAT really did have a social mission and was extremely political and wanted to, you know, change both social and political aspects of life.

But it just, let's say from a different vantage point than maybe other artists did at the time.

Because what ended up happening with the house, which is my concern the

So you know, again, it's, it was both practical and really impractical because, you know, many of their ideas, again, or many of their plans, sort of petered out and, and the, I would say 1 of the most amazing and fantastic, but then also cataclysmic events for them was when EAT was commissioned to construct and realize the Pepsi pavilion at the World's Fair in Osaka in 1970.

But basically, that was the biggest single collaborative project they took on.

I mean, they worked with Japanese artists, engineers, European artists, engineers, obviously American artists, engineers.

They tested it in LA, but they created a 180-degree hemispherical mirror dome that was inflated, made out of inflated mylar, essentially, which was the same technology that was being used for the first telecommunications satellites.

It's like they would launch a reflective balloon into space and you're literally bouncing waves.

But instead, they used that technology, or essentially through much trial and error, jerry-rigged it so that they could create an inflated mirror dome.

And then when you walked inside, there were all of these sound effects, different textures, different projections and performances.

But the mirror dome itself created essentially three-dimensional, near holographic, inverted reflections.

And you could capture this in photographs.

So there are incredible photographs of this as well.

But basically, they took on this massive project, and it, by all rights, was actually really created unprecedented experiences that were literally giving you both real and virtual images, as they called them.

But Pepsi, to make a long story short, when the pavilion opened to the public, they basically thought, this is too weird.

there were also huge budget cost overruns.

There was also a fog sculpture surrounding the entire pavilion.

I can't even get into all of these things.

So they sent, the first day they sent, you know, firetrucks screaming.

Anyway, Pepsi kind of thought, well, actually, this is really weird.

And so there was a breakdown, actually, there was essentially a legal dispute.

And at the end of the day, EAT sort of got kicked out of the pavilion.

They were literally smuggling their tapes, like their sort of, you know, eight-track tapes for programs out of the pavilion.

And the end result is that Pepsi replaced all of these experimental sort of John Cage slash David Tudor composed soundtracks with It's a Small world.

And that was effectively enough to like burn everyone out?

And I think the whole thing was traumatic.

I mean, they still went on for, you know, a number of years.

But after, let's say, that really, I think, was tough.

And yet, you know, again, I would say it was the...

It really demonstrated how global they could be actually, and how they could construct a global team that would create something of a very ambitious scale.

And it just… it also just became an object lesson in all of the difficulties, of course, surrounding…

Well, because what I had been wondering was that the first thing that got me into this was I was reading the the Conversations with Robert Irwin book.

It talks about him hanging out with Richard Feynman.

I don't know if there's footage of it, but...

That's a famous sort of interaction where Robert Irwin was experimenting with… basically would shape his work where he's really interested in shutting out all sensation and then he goes on to create works that explore the Gonsfeld or this perceptual limit in the same way that an anechoic chamber does.

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Experiments in Art and Technology with Artforum Editor Michelle Kuo