E.A.T.’s debut event, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, integrated art, theater, and groundbreaking technology in a series of performances at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan. Its second major event, the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan, presented a multisensory environment for the first world exposition held in Asia. At these events, and in the hundreds of collaborations E.A.T. facilitated in between, the participants—including John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and David Tudor—imagined innovative ways for art and science to intersect and enrich society.
Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) (Getty Research Institute, $30) tells the story of these collaborations between artists and engineers and how they led to new installations and technology-based artworks. Through the examination of films, photographs, diagrams, and artists’ records from the E.A.T. archive at the Getty Research Institute, this volume provides a new perspective on multimedia art in the 1960s and ’70s and highlights the ways E.A.T. pushed the role of the artist beyond the traditional art world.
