Experiments in Art and Technology: Billy Klüver

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Announcer: This is a Getty podcast.

Billy Klüver: We don’t, I mean, we really don’t know what’s going to come out of this. But that’s what’s exciting about it.

Ahmed Best: That’s Billy Klüver. He was a Swedish physicist who held ten patents and worked on lasers at the prestigious Bell Labs in the 1950s and 60s. But he gave that career up to pursue something bigger, bolder and more ambitious: the art/science group called Experiments in Art and Technology.

Welcome to Season 3 of Recording Artists, a Getty podcast dedicated to exploring the lives of artists through its archives. I’m your host, artist and futurist Ahmed Best. In this season, we look at Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T. This groundbreaking organization of artists and scientists formed in 1966 to facilitate collaboration and explore the creative potential of new technologies.

In our first episode we focused on painter and multimedia artist Robert Rauschenberg, who formed E.A.T. alongside engineer Billy Klüver and other artists and scientists. In this second episode, we’ll get to know Klüver a bit better. We’ll explore his role as a kind of translator and middleman, introducing scientists to art, and artists to science. I’ll talk with Fred Turner, a communications professor at Stanford, and Evan Ziporyn, a composer and musician who runs the Center for Art, Science and Technology at MIT.

When I first learned about Billy Klüver, I had a lot of questions. Why would a successful engineer with a dream job at Bell Labs leave it all behind to foster art-science collaborations? How did he get dozens of fellow scientists to spend their time making walking igloos and a gigantic mirror dome? And how did he convince a company like PepsiCo to put its reputation into the hands of avant-garde performance artists?

Nancy Perloff: This is a work that Klüver and Rauschenberg collaborated on together.

Best: I visited Getty curator Nancy Perloff at the Getty Research Institute’s archive to look at documents, diagrams, and photographs from E.A.T.’s early days.

Perloff: So that you again have this multimedia quality to it, or interdisciplinary quality to it where you’ve got…

Best: She raised another interesting question about Billy Klüver.

Perloff: But the other thing, Ahmed, that I am always fascinated by is we all find him ubiquitous and he’s present in all this documentation. You ask your average art historian, “Who’s Billy Klüver, ever heard of him? Ever heard of E.A.T.?” Never. Never heard of it. That is a question I probe with many colleagues and we never really come up with concrete answers. It’s kind of baffling.

Best: It’s true that Klüver, who worked closely with some of the biggest artists of his day, is a little-known figure in art history. Maybe it’s because he helped facilitate projects for which other people got most of the credit. Or maybe it’s because his life’s work occupies a kind of fuzzy middle ground between art and science.

To bring Klüver into focus, it helps to step back a little and see where he started. Johan Wilhelm Klüver was born in Monaco in 1927 to Swedish and Norwegian parents. He grew up in Sweden and graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm with a degree in electrical engineering. After college, he bounced around Europe a bit before earning a PhD at UC Berkeley. Though he studied math and physics, Klüver had a passion for art. All kinds of art.

Here’s Billy Klüver, recorded in 1968.

Klüver: When I was 18, 17, I was running a film society in Stockholm, and then I got into the technical institute there, and I met a lot of poets and writers and so on.

Best: He didn’t just like watching films. For his graduate thesis in Stockholm, he created an animated film of electrons in streaming motion.

Film Narrator: An electron cannon shoots a beam of electrons into the field. We may now calculate the energy that is transferred from the field to an electron.

Best: But Klüver never considered becoming an artist himself.

Klüver: I stayed an engineer. I knew I didn’t have any talent. I know I don’t have any talent.

Best: In 1958, he joined Bell Labs in New Jersey, to work on the physics of lasers. The job put him in proximity to New York, where he immersed himself in the art scene of the late ‘50s. He went to gallery openings and happenings, meeting artists and musicians like Claes Oldenburg, John Cage, Robert Whitman, and Andy Warhol.

Fred Turner studies how artists and members of American counterculture have taken up new technologies and transformed popular culture. He says Klüver didn’t just meet up-and-coming artists on his trips to Manhattan. He took them back with him to his laboratory.

Fred Turner: And he was actually bringing them in to encounter the sort of button down, pocket protector, white shirt wearing engineers of Bell Labs. And so this is a place where the counterculture and the tech world are really kind of coming together, outside big tech, outside the military industrial complex, at least in theory, and inside a very playful, collaborative, technology centered effort to build communities of consciousness.

Best: For decades before and after World War II, Bell Labs was a center of scientific development in the US. It didn’t just facilitate Nobel Prize-winning research. It encouraged collaboration across disciplinary lines and supported “free innovation”, discovery, and exploration for its own sake.

And by bringing his artist friends into this space, Klüver offered them something they could really use: technical expertise and access to the newest high-tech inventions.

In 1960, he helped Swiss artist Jean Tinguely build a machine that self-destructed in spectacular fashion in front of an audience at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the following years, he helped devise and realize works by other artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and John Cage. For Andy Warhol’s floating sculpture Silver Clouds, Klüver searched for a sealable material that was impermeable to helium, eventually finding a metallized film called Scotchpak that the US Army used to pack sandwiches.

Artists have always used new technology. Composer Evan Ziporyn, who works to foster art and science collaborations at the Center for Art, Science and Technology at MIT, explains:

Evan Ziporyn: At one point, state of the art technology is like taking a bone and, you know, blowing through it and be able to get a sound, you know, or taking the hide of an animal and like stretching it across a gourd and realizing that it has certain acoustic properties and, and using that, you know, to make your music. So I just kind of thought like well all art is basically artists interfacing with the technology of the time. And just certain places at certain times are more aware of that connection than others. And that can be useful.

Best: 9 Evenings, the 1966 event we talked about in the last episode, was an art-science collaboration on a new, much larger scale. It brought together ten artists and thirty engineers, most of them from Bell Labs. Here’s Fred Turner.

Turner: Klüver had two ambitions, and I’ll say the one that I think was explicit and that animates a lot of art and technology enterprises now. And then I’ll say the one that I think was implicit. The explicit one was artists are engines of creativity. Engineers, to innovate, need access to creative ideas. Artists bring those, so let’s bring the arts in. You hear this today all through Silicon Valley you know, with Google establishing an art center in Paris, you hear it all around the world.

Best: At its most basic, technology is a tool for people to use. You can make amazing tools but you need creative people—the composer, the musician, the artist—to make something of value with them. And what was the implicit part? It has to do with legitimacy.

Turner: In the late, mid to late 1960s, technology was somewhat illegitimate. It had been delegitimized by the Vietnam War. All of America's beautiful technological material, had gone into fighter planes and bombers, and it was being used to assault a population who had nothing like the technology we did, and it was a horror show. It was essentially an atrocity. And while that’s going on, engineers don’t look so good. And I think that artists, by contrast, seem to be entrepreneurial, creative, independent. They’re sort of the legatees of American individualism. If you can hook up with artists, you can become cool in a way that you really can’t on your own.

Best: Whether consciously or not, Klüver was engaging in something Fred Turner calls “legitimacy exchange”, a concept advanced by the sociologist of technology Geoffrey Bowker. When people in one field associate with people in another field, they can validate each other’s work in a way they can’t do by themselves. Engineers who work with artists can rebrand themselves as imaginative creators. Artists who work with engineers can be seen as innovators at the forefront of science.

It’s hard to overstate just how separate the art and science worlds were at this time. And Klüver, by bringing these two worlds together, was doing something radical. But to succeed in building these bridges, he had to serve as a kind of translator and mediator between groups that spoke very different languages and had different ways of working. Again, Fred Turner:

Turner: I think it was very difficult. I think the collaborations were quite difficult and they were kind of clumsy. Engineers are problem solvers. And so artists would try to give them problems. But artists are not necessarily creators of well framed tasks. And you can absolutely see it in the pictures of the time. You can see the engineers in their white shirts carefully having unbuttoned the top button, taking the tie off, and the artists are in their loose kind of downtown T-shirts and cottons, and you can see that they're really quite different worlds.

Best: It makes you think about how alien the Bell Labs campus must have seemed to the artists Billy Klüver brought in for tours. And how strange the downtown art scene was for the scientists when the roles were reversed. Or, as Klüver puts it:

Klüver: It is one thing to do electronics inside your laboratory, you know where everything is, and another to do it in a loft, where there are a lot of girls running around in miniskirts, and so on.

Best: But fashion wasn’t the only divide between the artists and scientists. The two groups often viewed authorship and collaboration in very different ways. Evan Ziporyn has a lot of experience trying to get these two groups to work together.

Ziporyn: We have had situations where, like, an artist wants to work with a lab or with a scientist and the scientist is very happy at the end to say, like, okay, here’s the research and here’s who did the research and it includes the artist. But then the artist just wants the art to be their art. And that can cause bad feelings. It can cause people to end up withdrawing their work.

It can cause lawsuits. It can just cause kind of general things you don’t want to, like, see happen.

It seems to be harder for artists to embrace the idea of collaboration with scientists, even when they’re doing it, than it is for scientists to embrace the contributions of artists.

Best: Publications in science journals often credit many people. It’s the norm to include everyone who made a contribution to the research. But artists, art historians, critics, and the public in general like to think of artworks as the vision of a single person. People who work with artists are often dismissed as just fabricators or facilitators, even when they’re engineers from a prestigious institution like Bell Labs.

Billy Klüver experienced this himself in his early work with artists and he fought for his fellow scientists and engineers to get equal billing with their artist collaborators. In 1968, E.A.T. organized an art contest and exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, where the prize was awarded not to the best artwork, but to the best contribution by an engineer. When a press conference was organized to promote the show, Billy Klüver made it clear who was not welcome to attend the event: art critics.

Klüver: We said right away, we’re not going to do it if we get somebody from the art pages to review it. And we managed to get the science writer of the New York Times, and he made a marvelous review of what was going on. And that was that, you see. Those are the means, I think, whereby you can try to turn the situation around. If you're going to leave it to the art critics, it'll never change.

Best: In addition to mediating the often-challenging marriage of artists and engineers, and promoting equal billing for both, Klüver sought out sponsors for E.A.T. projects. He told company executives that the artists would use their technology in creative, unexpected ways—opening avenues for new uses, new methods, and possibly new products. He pointed out that for engineers, escaping the lab to work with artists was stimulating, rewarding, and even fun. If these companies wanted to keep their employees happy, which also meant keeping them from leaving, this was one way to do it.

Klüver: And one of the suggestions from one of these presidents that liked our ideas was that this would in fact be a better idea than to build another golf course, to keep the employees in the company happy, so to speak.

Best: In 1967, KIuver took a leave of absence from his job at Bell Labs to focus on E.A.T. As part of that, he traveled to new cities, promoting E.A.T. and encouraging people to start chapters of their own. The presentations he gave on these tours are the source of most of our archival audio in this episode. Here he is in Toronto in March, 1968.

Klüver: I’ve been doing this for about five months, I guess, more or less, full time. I’m on a leave of absence from the Bell Labs right now. And I’ll go back to the laser April 1st.

Best: But in fact, Klüver never did go back to his work with lasers at Bell Labs. Instead, he devoted himself fully to E.A.T., pursuing large new commissions for the group and developing a database that worked like a kind of international Match.com for artists, engineers, and corporations. That program was called Technical Services. It aimed to pair artists’ projects with engineers who could make them a reality. Fred Turner:

Turner: They charge corporations a thousand dollars a year. And corporations can invite, collaborate with, get to know artists and technologists. Artists and technologists can sign up as individuals and be registered there and be coordinated for projects.

Best: Art historian Michelle Kuo, from our last episode, says that at its peak the group had 5,000 individual members.

Michelle Kuo: They would send in a form and the form would say, “what are you interested in?" And you could check off, you know, polymers, cybernetics, computer graphics, lasers, and then they would have engineers fill out the same form and say, engineers, what are you specializing in? What do you have knowledge of? Where do you live? In a 25-mile radius of this city or this city? Are you interested in one-on-one collaboration? Or do you want to just provide technical information? The real aim was to just get people together and see what happened.

Best: Fairly soon after leaving Bell Labs, Klüver had his first big success in courting corporate sponsorship. E.A.T. was chosen to program PepsiCo’s pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan. They made a film to promote it.

Promotional Film: It is the second World Exposition to be held in Asia. Estimates project over 100 million visitors for the six-month period.

Best: Expo ‘70 would showcase the most cutting-edge tech from across the globe–we’re talking the first-ever IMAX film, early cell phones, even a rock brought back from the moon by the Apollo 12 astronauts. Fred Turner:

Turner: In 1968, the Pepsi Cola Company began preparing to participate in the Osaka Exposition, the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan, in 1970. And they wanted to build their own pavilion, and they wanted it to be the coolest thing out there, and they wanted to demonstrate that they were deeply in touch with the youth movements in the United States. And so, a guy named David Thomas, who was a Pepsi executive, started reaching out to folks in the New York art world, downtown, to try to find folks who could help him design such a thing. And Experiments in Art and Technology, led by Klüver, won the contract.

Best: As big a leap as 9 Evenings was from Klüver’s one-on-one collaborations with artists, the Pepsi project was just as big a leap from 9 Evenings. It brought together over twenty artists and fifty engineers as well as dozens of corporate and institutional partners, from university research departments to the U.S. Marine Corps to MGM Studios.

Promotional Film: as well as scores of workmen, strain to meet the March 15 deadline set for the opening.

Best: The process of designing the pavilion and its programming took place over 18 months and cost more than a million dollars—in 1970’s dollars. It was deeply collaborative, but also tense—getting all these groups on the same page while developing and modifying new technologies was a huge challenge. Both artists and engineers had to continually adapt, revising their ideas and designs based on real-world limitations.

The end result, though, was an environment that fully engaged the senses.

Promotional Film: To create a perpetual cloud over the dome, engineer Tom Mee collaborated with sculptress Fujiko Nakaya to fashion the world’s largest man-made fog system.

Best: As a visitor to the Pepsi Pavilion, you approached a large white geodesic dome which was intermittently obscured by a shroud of artificial fog that moved with the breeze. At times, it almost completely hid the building. Artist Fujiko Nakaya, who was also the groups on-the-ground coordinator in Japan, developed the fog effect with the help of American physicist Thomas Mee. We’ll talk more about Nakaya in our third and final episode.

Outside the pavilion, large white igloo-shaped robots called Floats, created by Robert Breer, moved almost imperceptibly around a plaza, emitting a variety of soft sounds like music, voices, engine noise, and the sound of sawing wood.

Promotional Film: The darkness of the entrance tunnel conditions the eye to the patterns of the laser light shower.

Best: Entering the pavilion, you descended a dark tunnel to a cavern where lasers and other projections distorted the space. Up in the main hall, a huge mirrored dome reflected your image down at you, giving the impression that you were floating. The floor underfoot was made up of twelve different textured sections, including gravel, wood, carpet, and astroturf. As you walked over them, you heard different sounds through a translucent handset that you were given upon entry. When you walked on grass, for example, you heard bird noises and lawnmowers. When you walked on asphalt, you heard city noises.

Promotional Film: The small handsets are given to augment the audio system with localized sound effects. Sound waves behave essentially the same as light. The visitor is virtually inside a mirror of sound.

Best: As immersive experiences in 1968 went, this was totally far out.

The Pepsi Pavilion opened with great fanfare and positive reviews. One Newsweek critic called it “an electronic cathedral in the shape of a geodesic dome.” But if the project showed what a partnership of art, science, and corporate commerce could achieve, it also demonstrated the limitations.

Operating expenses were much higher than expected, and PepsiCo had no appetite for the technical setbacks and daily fixes that dogged the project. Just a month after the opening, Pepsi fired E.A.T and took over the pavilion, scaling back the displays and canceling a planned run of experimental music concerts and poetry readings.

Art historian Barbara Rose wrote about the project. “The gap is not between art and science, or between art and technology,” she wrote, “but between the values of aesthetic and human experience and those of purely commercial interests.” The greatest challenge for E.A.T., it turns out, was not getting artists and scientists to speak the same language, it was figuring out how to pay for it all. Introducing corporate sponsorship had created another culture clash. Artists and scientists, as we've explored in this podcast, are willing to accept and even embrace risk, ambiguity, setbacks, and failure. Corporations are not.

Even so, this idea that corporations can use artists is ever present today, especially in the Big Tech world. Fred Turner:

Turner: E.A.T., 9 Evenings, Klüver, and Rauschenberg, that combination of folks, really prototyped a way of doing art and technology and sharing the legitimacy of those worlds that has come down to us from that time and that is re-invoked regularly. You know, Facebook has a global arts program. Google has a very serious effort to engage engineers and artists in working together. That thought that, that’ s what we should be doing, that creativity resides in art and should be brought to bear inside engineering worlds, has come down from that moment and completely suffuses ours, especially here in Silicon Valley. So I think that’s the legacy of that particular collaboration.

Best: Ultimately, the Pepsi Pavilion would be the high-water mark for E.A.T. The Vietnam War made artists increasingly reluctant to engage with techno logy companies who were associated with weapons systems. Involving other sponsors as patrons began to feel to the artists like they were selling out. E.A.T.’s roster of artists and engineers, which had reached five thousand by 1970, declined by more than half by 1972 .

But even as the winds of the art world changed, Klüver kept going. With E.A.T, he pursued other projects through the 1970s, many of them combining technology with education and as ambitious in some ways as the Pepsi Pavilion.

It’s difficult to quantify the impact of Klüver’s efforts to reach outside of his scientific bubble and engage with some of the most experimental artists of his day. Few marketable technologies came out of these collaborations. We don’t know how many artworks were possible only through these partnerships, either.

As composer Evan Ziporyn points out about his own work facilitating interactions between artists and scientists, it’s not so easy to trace a straight line from collaboration to results. But maybe that’s not the point.

Ziporyn: My feeling is that, like, If you’re creating like a milieu which is supporting creative thinking on a large level and you’re involved in an endeavor in which people are encouraged to like foster their own creativity that eventually it pans out in some useful technology. And so it doesn't really matter if you get it from one project or another. That we're all ultimately kind of ants in this particular anthill and so if an art technology collaboration happens where, like, a piece of like usable software comes out or a piece of you know usable equipment comes out, then that's great. But if it’s just, like, sort of making somebody who happens to be in the audience think more creatively and that impacts on their work now or in a month or in a year or somewhere in their life, that’s okay, too.

Best: Klüver’s willingness to explore new ideas alongside artists was in keeping with his work as a laser physicist at Bell Labs. He famously said that an engineer who fails 96% of the time is better than one who succeeds more often, because failure meant they were truly willing to try new things. Working with artists greatly expanded his understanding of what new possibilities could exist.

Here’s curator Michelle Kuo:

Kuo: What I find fascinating, this idea of a set of experiments that are not meant to work in the ways that we think that they would. And so that sense of quote unquote failure is really about a nonlinear idea of process and progress. You’re not going to get at the end of this, “wow, suddenly we invented the personal computer.” You’re going to get a strange kind of otherworldly experience and a way of facilitating or creating that experience that is, is truly kind of pushing the bounds of what we think we know.

Best: Klüver continued to match artists and scientists for projects until shortly before his death at age 76 in 2004. What excited him about E.A.T. and working so closely with artists, what inspired him to devote his life to this work, was the appeal of pushing into new territory. So we’re closing this episode as we opened it, with Klüver explaining, in his words, the draw of working across scientific and artistic boundaries. Here he is speaking in 1968 about the work that would consume the rest of his life, hinting at why he couldn’t leave it behind.

Klüver: I think it’s too early to... I mean, we really don’t know what’s going to come out of this. But that’s what’s exciting about it. That’s what makes you want to do it, because you don’t know what's going to come out of it.

Best: In our third and final episode, we’ll examine the legacy of Experiments in Art and Technology, from the 1960s to Silicon Valley. And we’ll look closely at Fujiko Nakaya, an E.A.T. member who participated in 9 Evenings and the Pepsi Pavilion and who has continued to combine art and science to innovative effect throughout her career.

Fujiko Nakaya: I want people to become more sensitive, or sensitize people, so that nature can reveal itself.

Best: That’s on the next episode of Recording Artists.

This podcast is sponsored by the Getty Patron Program.

This season was produced by Zoe Goldman with audio production by Gideon Brower. Episode script by Zoe Goldman and Gideon Brower. Our theme music is by Bryn Bliska. Mixing, additional music, and sound design by Myke Dodge Weiskopf. Christopher Sprinkle is the executive producer, and Gina White managed rights with Joohee Lee.

Additional audio in this episode comes from Billy Klüver: Motion of the Electron, copyright Billy Klüver; 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering; a series of 10 documentary films, copyright Experiments in Art and Technology; and The Great Big Mirror Dome, copyright PepsiCo Inc.

Thanks to Nancy Perloff and Megan Mastroinni for their research.

Special thanks in this episode to Fred Turner, Evan Ziporyn, and Julie Martin.

To see Billy Klüver working on an impossibly large speaker and an invitation to a mirror dome test at a Marine Corps base, along with more photographs and transcripts, visit getty dot edu slash recording artists.

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