In the fall of 1966 more than 10,000 people gathered in the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, a yawning Beaux Arts–style building reminiscent of a medieval fortress, to see a series of performances titled 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.
Ten artists and 30 engineers had come together to create the event, and musicians, dancers, visual artists, and theater makers used nascent technologies like real-time sound manipulation, biofeedback, and video projections to create new works of art.
Like many revolutionary things, the performances were beset by technical malfunctions and were sometimes poorly received. Many viewers came away angry or bored. Yet born from this ambitious series of performances was Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), an organization founded by engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, along with artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman. Klüver, a physicist at Bell Telephone Laboratories, had connected the New York avant-garde to colleagues pioneering the kinds of technologies that would define the information age: lasers, computers, electronic sound. In fostering these one-on-one collaborations between artists and engineers, the idea was that the gap between the realms of art and cutting-edge technology might be bridged, encouraging innovation and new forms of creative expression.
In the postwar era, against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s damning documentation of the effects of pesticides introduced during World War II, the technology produced by the military-industrial complex had emerged as something wondrous, but also sinister. Without the humanizing touch of the artist, would an increasingly technological society become cold, mechanized, and authoritarian? “E.A.T. is founded on the strong belief that an industrially sponsored, effective working relationship between artists and engineers will lead to new possibilities which will benefit society as a whole,” Klüver and Rauschenberg wrote.
Together, as they were preparing for the wild experiment that was 9 Evenings, artists and engineers invented solutions to problems that didn’t yet exist. “The artists asked about buildings with walls made of warm air,” wrote artist Simone Forti, who would appear in one performance singing an Italian folk song while inside a sack. “Masses of materials that would decay before your eyes. They asked about being lifted on growing masses of Styrofoam. About television systems that could instantly turn live action into slow motion.” These fantastical visions, she continued, formed “a first meeting ground for two groups of people who had sought each other out and who didn’t yet know how to work together.”
Featuring artists like John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer, Rauschenberg, and David Tudor, who would all go on to achieve world renown, 9 Evenings made use of now-common technologies that were then confined to the military and corporate labs. The new technologies being invented at Bell Labs found new uses. Rauschenberg’s “Open Score” enacted a tennis match in which each thwack of the ball triggered a light to go out in the Armory, followed by individuals, tracked with infrared cameras, whose movements were projected on large screens. In “Grass Field,” sensors attached to Alex Hay’s body captured physiological data that was then translated into sound. Cage’s “Variations VII” featured manipulated sounds mixed from external sources around the city—from the Department of Sanitation to the tank for composer Terry Riley’s pet turtle—to create an ever-changing soundscape in real time. Thirty photocells aimed at bright lights beneath the performance tables triggered the release of the sounds to speakers situated around the Armory.
The project was like a science experiment, Klüver told one interviewer, “and therefore full of risks.” Still propelled by the belief that artists had something valuable to offer the corporate world, E.A.T’s next step was a PR blitz to recruit engineers. Members began a newsletter, E.A.T. News, staged open houses, and gave public lectures at a 16th Street loft on topics like lasers, television, and computer graphics. They organized tours of Bell Labs and IBM for artists (called “E.A.T.-ins”) and set up a booth at the annual meeting of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The hardware developed for 9 Evenings—all the amplifiers, speakers, and switchboards—formed a lending library for New York artists. Most strikingly, they devised a punch card system, an early form of computing, as a kind of matchmaking service that paired artists with engineers to realize specific projects. It was, in fact, an early database. The group functioned somewhat like an analog people-powered search engine, making connections and distributing information to those who needed it. Soon, E.A.T. counted 4,000 artists and engineers from around the world as members.
In the late 1960s, the activities of E.A.T. spread beyond the traditional boundaries of the New York art world. In 1970 the group staged a series of iconic multimedia performances at the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan. While a specially engineered fog shrouded the exterior of the pavilion’s geodesic dome, a highly polished spherical mirror inside created a continuous 360-degree reflection. Under the umbrella “Projects Outside Art,” the group began rooftop gardens and telecommunication centers for children. Throughout the course of the 1970s, E.A.T. also developed artists’ cable broadcasting, and educational television programming for rural Indian villages, with the help of NASA and experimental satellites. By applying an artist’s way of thinking to contemporary problems, their work, ever ahead of its time, could be considered a proto version of social practice art, or design thinking.
“Art desires technology’s seeming omnipotence, its cold power, its cutting-edge materials and processes,” writes art historian Michelle Kuo. “Technology wants art’s creativity, its free thinking, its radical innovation.” If military think tanks and corporate labs like NASA and AT&T sought “universal connectivity,” she posits, E.A.T. realized this dream with a “new kind of network.”
The legacy of E.A.T. is found not only in the artworks left behind but also in the community infrastructures produced to create them. In an age where “creativity” is a buzzword, the founders of E.A.T. knew early on the importance of risk-taking and interdisciplinary collaboration and how artists can help us find our way in a wild, technologically saturated world.
