Experiments in Art and Technology seems acommonplace collection of words. Yet, when

E.A.T. was founded in 1960, the notion of com-bining art and technology was a radical one—decades before its time. Imagine two groups ofchildren, miles away from each other. Imaginethat over a four-month period, these children com-municated with one another via fax machines,electrowriters, and telex machines, and telephonesand then shared their experiences. Doesn’t soundtoo interesting? Well, imagine that this was hap-pening in 1971. Such visionary collaborations asthis, E.A.T.’s Children and Communication, were cel-ebrated recently at the Sonnabend Gallery in Man-hattan, the first stop on a worldwide tour of theexhibit that pays tribute to the rich 42-year historyof this ground-breaking group dedicated toartist–engineer collaborations.

Getting startedE.A.T. started with a bang, literally, as Billy

Klüver (an engineer at Bell Labs) and JeanTinguely received an offer to build a sculpture inthe garden of New York City’s Museum of Mod-ern Art. Their solution was a series of “timing andtriggering devices to release smoke, start a fire ina piano, break support members, and make nois-es,” Klüver explained. (This and all other quotes

in this article are from Klüver’s unpublished bookThe Story of E.A.T. Experiments in Art and Technol-ogy 1960–2001.) Twenty-seven minutes afterinstallation, their Hommage to New York self-destructed and was unceremoniously “cartedback to the dumps in New Jersey.”

During the next five years, Klüver and hisassistant Harold Hodges, among others, workedon different collaborations with a diverse groupof artists. Some of the artists involved were JasperJohns, Robert Rauschenberg (who created Oracle[see Figure 1]), John Cage and David Tudor, andthe dancer Yvonne Rainer.

Oracle, a five-part sound sculpture, consisted offive sculptures made of material Rauschenbergfound on the streets in New York. One of thepieces contained five AM radios; sound from theradios transmitted on the FM band to receivers andspeakers in each of the other sculptures. Knobs onthe top of the staircase, which was the control unit,allowed views to adjust the sound and sweep rateof the continuously moving tuning mechanism sothat the radios never stopped on one station.

By 1965, the artists and engineers began plan-ning more organized, large-scale performances.9 Evenings: Theatre And Engineering was the cul-mination of previous projects and collaborationsand is now considered central to E.A.T.’s found-

4 1070-986X/02/$17.00 © 2002 IEEE

Artful Media Editor: Dorée Duncan Seligmann,Avaya Labs

Erik La Prade

The Early Days of E.A.T.

Author’s NoteThe E.A.T. exhibition will next move to Lafayette College in Easton,

Pennsylvania, in March–April 2002 and then Seattle, Washington, in Octo-ber 2002. All quotes in this article are from Klüver’s unpublished book TheStory of E.A.T. Experiments in Art and Technology 1960–2001. On Record—text and audio documentation from Billy Klüver’s interviews with Jim Dine,George Brecht, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, John Wesley, Robert Watts,Tom Wesselmann, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Jim Rosenquist, andRobert Rauschenberg—is also in preparation. Klüver recorded these con-versations for the Popular Image Exhibition at the Washington Gallery ofModern Art in Washington, D.C., from 18 April to 2 June 1963. For furtherinformation about E.A.T., email Billy Klüver at kluverb@comcast.net.

Figure 1. Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg

working on the sound sculpture, Oracle. Oracle was

shown at the Leo Castelli Gallery in May 1965.

ing. 9 Evenings opened on 13 October 1966, atthe 69th Regiment Armory and continued for 10days. More than 1,500 people attended each per-formance, and as “a truly cooperative venture,”it was a success, revealing to the public thecrossover possibilities between science and art.

Soon after 9 Evenings, in 1966, Klüver, RobertRauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and Fred Wald-hauer officially formed E.A.T., as a “not-for-profitservice organization for artists, engineers, scien-tists and industry, to promote artists’ access to thenew technology.” For artists who wanted to col-laborate or incorporate technological elementsinto their art, E.A.T. was a much-needed resource.

A formidable precursorBy 1970, collaborative projects were moving to

another, more global, level. Sixty-three engineers,artists, and scientists (including Billy Klüver,Robert Breer, Frosty Myers, Robert Whitman, andDavid Tudor) designed the Pepsi Cola Pavilion forExpo 1970 in Osaka, Japan. The interior of thePepsi Pavilion, The Mirror Dome, was a 90-footdiameter, 120-degree molar spherical mirror, heldin place with negative air pressure (see Figure 2).The 3D real image of the floor of the pavilion andof the visitors on it floated upside down above thevisitors’ heads. Sound loops embedded in thefloor allowed visitors to hear different soundsthrough handsets as they walked on the differentmaterials the floor was made up of. A sound sys-tem consisting of 39 speakers arranged in a rhom-bic grid behind the mirror, allowed composers tomove sound around the space in real time.

The exterior of the Pepsi Pavilion (see Figure3) was covered with a fog sculpture by Japaneseartist Fujiko Nakaya. Nakaya worked with cloudphysicist Tom Mee to create a natural water fogsystem using water under 500 psi and jet-spraynozzles. The white sculptures by artist RobertBreer moved slowly around the plaza—less than2 feet per minute—emitting sounds. The tallblack towers housed xenon lights, which createda frame of light around the pavilion at night. For-rest Myers created this light sculpture.

The story behind Andy Warhol’s Silver Cloudsshows us how fruitful these early collaborationsbetween artists and scientists could be. As Klüvertells it,

At the 47th Street factory, Andy Warhol asked me

for a floating light bulb. My colleague at Bell

Laboratories found a material called Scotchpak,

which was relatively impermeable to helium and

could be heat-sealed. When I brought this material

to Andy, he decided to make clouds, and while we

were figuring out how to heat-seal curves, he

simply folded the material over and made these

Silver Clouds.

Offering technical information, a newsletter,and a matching service for artists and scientists,E.A.T. was an early forum for bringing artists andscientists together for the benefit of both. Its earlyhistory provides us with a perspective that is bothhistorical and prophetic. In today’s Internet age,it’s possible to look back on E.A.T.’s history and seein it a precursor for the kinds of informationexchanges we take for granted today. MM

Readers may contact Erik La Prade at 317 W 23rd St.,

New York, NY 10011.

Contact Artful Media editor Dorée Duncan Seligmann at

Avaya Labs, 666 Fifth Ave., 11th Floor, New York, NY

10103, email doree@avaya.com.

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ril–June 2002

Figure 2. The Mirror Dome, the interior of the Pepsi Pavilion,

which E.A.T. designed and built for Expo 1970 in Osaka, Japan.

Figure 3. Exterior of the Pepsi Pavilion.