Experiments in Art and Technology: Fujiko Nakaya

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

Ahmed Best: That’s Japanese artist Fujiko Nakaya. She was an early member of E.A.T, and nearly 60 years later she is still combining 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 two episodes, we traced the history of E.A.T. through the contributions of two of its key founders: artist Robert Rauschenberg and engineer Billy Klüver. In this final episode, we’ll focus on Fujiko Nakaya. She was an early participant in E.A.T. events and carries on the legacy of the group through her continued use of technology to create artworks that are ever-evolving and original. We’ll learn about Nakaya, her art, and environmental and social justice with art historian Eva Díaz and contemporary artist Tomás Saraceno. And we’ll examine the impact of E.A.T.’s legacy on art/science collaborations today.

Nancy Perloff: On this side, as you’ll recognize in a minute, we have a number of wonderful photographs…

Best: When I started working on this podcast and met with Getty Research Institute curator Nancy Perloff in the archives, the first things that caught my eye were the pictures and diagrams of the Pepsi Pavilion, this space-age geodesic dome, shrouded in fog.

Perloff: You can see a little bit there and we can show you in more detail because Fujiko Nakaya was crucial [Best: Right] to the Pepsi Pavilion. These by the way are photographs that she took [Best: Wow] of the Pavilion, so that’s very special.

Promotional Film: Expo ’70 is the first World Exposition to be held in Asia. Estimates project over 100,000,000 visitors for the six month period.

Best: As we discussed in episode two, the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, Japan, was one of E.A.T.’s big projects—and Fujiko Nakaya was essential to pulling it together. Soda-and-snack giant PepsiCo had hired the E.A.T artists and engineers, most of whom were based in and around New York City, to design and program the company’s pavilion at the Expo. Nakaya, a Japanese artist who had long ties to E.A.T. members, became their on-the-ground coordinator and problem solver.

When I saw the photos of Nakaya’s fog sculpture for the pavilion in the archive with Nancy, I thought it was brilliant. I loved the idea of an art piece that felt like wandering through clouds. As a kid who grew up on the eighth floor of an apartment building and always wanted to fly, I often imagined the rest of the world melting away and being completely surrounded by a world of mist. Fog excites all the senses, it wakes you up. But it can also be scary and disorienting. You can’t not feel an emotion when you walk through fog.

Artist Tomás Saraceno feels the same way. Saraceno makes large-scale works that address themes of ecology and sustainability, and he has collaborated with atmospheric scientists and climate researchers to study cloud formation. Saraceno is inspired by Nakaya’s sculptures, not just by the magical effect of entering and exiting a fog bank, but also her technical skill and knowledge in creating it.

Tomás Saraceno: It was something so amazing, no? Because it was— like for me when the plane is in between the clouds, you know, and you don’t see nothing and then you clear it out and then move. And the control she have over the fog and how much temperature and humidity and pressure. But she kind of grasped it in a way that was really unbelievable.

Best: To understand who Fujiko Nakaya is, and how an artist begins to work with fog, we have to start with her father, Ukichiro Nakaya. Fujiko was born in 1933 in Sapporo, Japan, the daughter of a physicist who spent his career trying to understand the structure of ice crystals. He spent years traveling the world and collecting samples of snow because, as he once said, “You have to ask the ice if you want to know about ice.” Both father and daughter worked with the many forms that water can take: Ukichiro is credited with creating the first artificial snowflake in a lab and Fujiko with one of the first forms of artificial fog made from pure water.

Fujiko Nakaya moved to the US to study painting at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, graduating in 1957. She continued her studies in Europe and began her career as a painter. In 1964, now living in Japan, she met Robert Rauschenberg when he was touring with the Merce Cunningham dance company. After one performance, she found Rauschenberg pulling all the nails and splinters from the stage. The dancers performed with bare feet, and he didn’t want them getting hurt. She found this act touching. So she started helping Rauschenberg each night, and the two became friends. She also befriended many of the dancers, including Deborah Hay.

When Nakaya visited New York in 1966, Hay invited her to take part in the 9 Evenings performances that Rauschenberg was instrumental in organizing and that we discussed in episode one. Nakaya appeared in Hay’s piece called Solo, and in doing so, shifted the trajectory of the rest of her career.

Here she is in an interview with Harriet DeLong describing the impact of that event on her thinking.

Harriet DeLong: Did it change the work you were doing after 9 Evenings?

Nakaya: Yes. It really gave me, it sort of loosened me up into an open situation rather than what I can do myself. I mean, it’s very limited what you can do yourself.

DeLong: Yes.

Nakaya: Well, maybe for talented people it’s different. I don’t know. But it really is easy to get locked into your own self. [DeLong: Yeah, oh yes.] And that was happening when I was just, you know, painting.

Best: Nakaya was now determined to collapse the boundaries between art and life, to move art off the walls of the gallery—and to use the newest technologies to do so. It was the 60s, she said, “everyone was out in the streets.” She wanted her art to be out there with them. She wanted to create an experience, to interact with the environment and the whole social world.

After 9 Evenings, she stayed in touch with many of the E.A.T. artists. So when the group was awarded the contract to design and program the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ‘70 in Osaka, it’s no surprise they approached Nakaya to help coordinate the project. It also didn’t hurt that she was a Japanese female artist—and E.A.T. was trying to involve more women and local artists in the pavilion.

When E.A.T. had to figure out what to do about the huge white geodesic dome that they had been assigned—and hated—it was Nakaya’s Fog Sculpture to the rescue. Now, I have always loved Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. So it was fascinating to hear just how much the artists of E.A.T. disliked the pavilion’s design. But the domes—so popular and futuristic earlier in the 60s—were already becoming passé.

Around this time, clouds were something of an obsession among the artists of E.A.T. Here’s E.A.T. co-founder Billy Klüver on that moment:

Billy Klüver: A lot of people were interested in clouds. How do you make clouds? How do you make clouds that you can hang stationary in a room? A lot of people wanted to fly. There’s a tremendous interest among the artists to be able to move around in the air.

Best: Like every aspect of the Pepsi Pavilion, Nakaya’s Fog Sculpture was the result of close collaboration not only between artists and engineers, but also among artists themselves. The initial idea to wrap the Expo ‘70 dome in a cloud started with another artist, Forrest “Frosty” Myers. But when the E.A.T. members saw Nakaya’s work creating clouds with dry ice, they asked her to figure out how to hide the enormous bubble-shaped building in fog. She had never worked on such a large scale before. And she’d need to come up with a totally new process for making fog.

Here’s art historian Eva Díaz:

Eva Díaz: It was kind of like a serendipitous thing that she’d already done stuff with clouds. They had this idea of clouds that seemed to be independently generated. And then she goes full speed ahead to do this cloud, shrouding the pavilion. And so over the preceding year before the pavilion opened, she works with various physicists trying to work out how to do it so it’s not just going to be a really damp and messy thing. You know, she’s like— Because a lot of their tests, and they did numerous tests, um, you know, would just involve it raining, essentially.

Best: Nakaya spent four months working with researchers, scientists, and engineers in Japan. In the spring of 1969, she traveled to Los Angeles to work with physicist Thomas Mee, who coincidentally had worked with Nakaya’s father and greatly admired his research. Here’s Nakaya:

Nakaya: He was developing a chemical fog for agricultural use, for frost protection, and when I told him that I wanted a fog, enough fog to cover the pavilion at Expo, in that amount, he suggested to use a chemical fog. But I wanted people to walk into it and experience it and feel it. And so I asked him if he could make the pure water fog. And he came up with the system within one month. And it doesn’t have pollution problems either, which the chemical fog had.

Best: Engineering this fog was a complex process. It required shooting pressurized water droplets through hundreds of tiny nozzles. Early prototypes were incredibly energy intensive. But in a matter of weeks, Nakaya was walking through engineered fog in Mee’s backyard on a 105 degree day in Los Angeles.

This water-based fog is actually one of the few technologies with practical applications to come out of E.A.T. It’s used now on server farms and real farms, amusement parks and botanic gardens. It’s ironic that this technology, of all the impossible-to-monetize innovations that came out of E.A.T., has commercial value, since you can’t really sell a cloud.

The pavilion fog sculpture was a huge draw at Expo ‘70, but it was almost too disorienting for some. As it drifted around the plaza, it occasionally obscured or interrupted other activities. A hamburger vendor near the dome complained that no one was buying his imported hamburgers because they couldn’t see the concession stand through the fog. A thick cloud often drifted into a nearby amphitheater, forcing performers to stop what they were doing. On the first day, the fog even brought out the fire department, who didn’t realize it was water—not fire—causing the cloud they saw.

Nakaya learned that the humid climate in Osaka would cause the fog to drape around the edges of the geodesic dome, so she placed the nozzles in a way that would amplify that natural effect.

It was almost like Nakaya was choreographing these natural elements. It brought viewers new awareness of these elements, too.

Nakaya: That’s why I like the fog as a medium. It will reveal the features of the environment by responding to it. And also I like it because it makes the visible things invisible and you know, invisible, wind, visible.

Díaz: It’s essential to know those things like wind and humidity to be able to produce fog. Otherwise you’re going to get rain or you’re going to get just a very damp space without the fog.

Best: Eva Díaz studies how contemporary artists use senses beyond the visual: taste, touch, sound, and smell. We talked about some of Nakaya’s technical considerations.

Díaz: But the wind is also something she talks about, “making the invisible visible.” And wind is one of the main aspects of that because normally wind is something we hear and feel but we never see. In a fog, wind currents are evident. So she has to know a lot about the wind.

Best: Nakaya describes her work with fog as “negative sculptures.” “It should disappear, not persist,” she said. She wanted the fog to “feel soft and cool to the skin,” as she wrote in 1970, vulnerable to changing atmospheric conditions like temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind patterns, or pollutants. Nakaya’s fog sculptures are sensitive to even the slightest change in temperature. With every body that enters the space, with every single breath, they transform.

At times, Nakaya took a more active role in shaping the fog.

Díaz: Different objects create fog banks or fog lifts, so if she puts a rock somewhere, you know, the fog is gonna do various things. So she’s orchestrating it, but she talks about the performance of the fog. In a way, it’s like, I guess you could say a collaboration with this thing she’s creating.

Best: What Nakaya was creating wasn’t an unmediated experience of nature but it wasn’t altogether artificial either. The fog technology helped her amplify the environment, creating an experience that felt natural and heightened at the same time. Fujiko Nakaya:

Nakaya: If the conditions, atmospheric conditions for fog to form could be there when we wanted it to, then maybe I don’t have to use it. But it’s sort of an ideal condition, I’m trying to create by the help of the technology. I just want to emphasize the situation which can happen naturally, through technology. That’s all. I want it to have, very close relation, closely related to the natural process of life as possible. I want people to become more sensitive, or sensitize people, so that nature can reveal itself.

Best: To explain what she meant by an “ideal condition,” Nakaya used the analogy of the traditional Japanese tea ceremony: a heightened version of an everyday practice.

Nakaya: I think I mentioned tea ceremony in terms of that being art, abstract art. Also it’s the same thing as the daily life, you know, it’s idealized form the daily, everyday thing, like making tea. And serving it to, to people, friends. So that’s the relationship of art to nature, I was referring to tea ceremony to everyday tea drinking.

Best: For Nakaya, the tea ceremony is a way of experiencing an everyday act—preparing and drinking tea—with utmost intention and mindfulness. This idea is similar to the big breakthrough of avant-garde art: anything can be art, from eating a sandwich to walking down the street, if you treat it with a special kind of attention. And that special attention can transform your everyday experience of the world around you, too. She explained in an interview:

Nakaya: It’s the most beautiful way of doing something, tea ceremony. I mean, making tea and serving. Which you experience with your body. And that becomes part of you and in everyday life too. You don’t lose that, whatever, the skill or the movement of your body. And by learning this most well balanced way of doing things, you can do other things, too, as long as you have that control of body within you. You can jump with a cup in your hand still. You won’t spill it and, you know, you can do other things. And still have that balance that stays within you, in your body.

Best: The physical experience, the feeling of being inside your body, was a crucial part of Nakaya’s work. These fog sculptures let us experience something important about how we exist in relation to the environment and each other.

Nakaya came up in the idealism of the 60s and 70s. She described her values as “anti-establishment, anti-hierarchy, anti-art.” And she’s called clouds “ideal models of democracy”—regardless of who you are or where you are from, we all experience clouds and breathe air.

Eva Díaz feels that Nakaya’s work became even more resonant in the COVID era, when our breath—what it meant to exchange air—seemed more important than ever before.

Díaz: It doesn’t seem coincidental that her work becomes important to me as I’m trying to understand that vulnerability of space and the shared space and what it might mean to create new forms of sharing of space that attune us, you know, to the invisible.

Best: Nakaya’s work is about the bodies we inhabit, and how vulnerable we all really are. Of course, what stood out so starkly during COVID was how some people are more vulnerable than others. People from Black and brown neighborhoods, disproportionately represented in low-wage, in-person jobs, faced higher risks of exposure to the virus. And they are also disproportionately exposed to pollution. Artist Tomás Saraceno thinks about this a lot:

Saraceno: People of color, Latinos and many other communities, constantly are exposed to a different air and constantly have a lot of damages in their body because they’re exposed to completely different air. The politics of who is allowed to breathe or who is allowed to be in a certain milieu is very strong.

And you know clouds, which clouds are we talking, you know what I mean? The clouds of pollution, misinformation, a toxic cloud who come from a fossil fuel industry, who are that type of cloud? And so much how it’s controlled by the 1%, the 1/3% of the population of this earth, is huge. It needs to be regained, that possibility of being beneficial for the majority and not for the, just the few.

Best: Eva Díaz said that evoking pollution was intentional for Nakaya.

Díaz: It was important to her to use fog as opposed to cloud because she liked the way that fog had a connection to smog and to pollution so that it made you conscious of your environment in a different way than a cloud, which she felt had a somewhat rosy connotation.

Best: In the late 60s and early 70s, in the wake of the atomic bomb, the world had witnessed the dark side of technology and “big science.” Nakaya began making her fog sculptures at the height of the Vietnam War, where chemicals fogs like Agent Orange served as weapons. As a Japanese artist, she understood more than many about the destruction caused by mushroom clouds. But there was reason for optimism, too. The environmentalist movement was meeting with some success, like the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in the US in 1970.

Nakaya and her cohort of E.A.T artists and engineers maintained the hope that through their partnership, they could design and use technology to bring people closer together. Nakaya, for her part, saw her fog sculptures as utopian propositions that emphasized a shared experience. In these sculptures, we are the environment. She raises awareness about the fragility of our planet’s atmosphere and our deep interconnectivity with it. These concerns are only becoming more urgent. Here’s Tomás Saraceno again:

Saraceno: We are facing something which is called climate emergency, climate injustice, and maybe less of climate change.

I’m now fascinated with a sentence that Kim Stanley Robinson, a science fiction writer, has said: justice should be the best technology. It seems like it’s so easy to decouple technology from justice. And actually he reverts it, says like, look, justice, it should be the best technology. It was almost like, technologies should be world changing, not world ending.

Best: We tend to think of technology as cold and inhuman. Maybe that’s why Billy Klüver argued that engineers need artists, to remind them of the humanity of technology. Nakaya’s fog exemplifies this idea of blending humanity and technology.

Fujiko Nakaya spoke about why it mattered so much to her that her fog be water based and therefore something people could actually walk through:

Nakaya: Well, I sort of said it from my own experience, that when you know, when you experience it with your own body, it really stays with you, or it becomes conscious, rather than just being told what to do in abstract words.

Best: Her fog allows audiences to experience first hand how everything in the world is connected and interdependent. In doing so, audiences can become somehow more human, more present.

Nakaya’s engagement with E.A.T. shaped her art practice for the rest of her career. Even as E.A.T became more amorphous, she maintained lifelong correspondences with Billy Klüver as well as some of the E.A.T. artists. She has worked at the cutting edge of video art, and even now, in her early 90s, she still makes the works she’s best known for—her fog sculptures. She’s continued to adapt to new technologies, like using 3D modeling computer programs to predict how the fog will behave. She’s made more than 90 of these fog sculptures all over the world—including one in collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg at Guggenheim Bilbao. She has more new fog sculptures planned for the coming years.

I spoke with Getty curator Nancy Perloff about the continued relevance of Nakaya’s work that has relied on the same basic principles since the 1970s:

Perloff: I think unlike during its time when people didn’t really have a heightened consciousness of how we treat the environment, how we surround it, how climate is affected, I think now people do think about that, and that may be why it’s been successful.

And Fujiko Nakaya is alive and unlike in 1970, when no one had heard of her and women were not given a lot of attention, now she’s a hero.

Best: As in the 1960s and 70s, we’re at a moment when science and technology can feel a little scary or out of control. But the divide between the “two cultures” of science and art has changed.

Here’s curator and art historian Michelle Kuo, who we spoke with in episode one:

Michelle Kuo: I think, of course, this ethos of testing and experimentation and essentially a kind of subversive, counter cultural aura of all of these projects gets absorbed into what we now know as Silicon Valley. And, when you “think differently,” to use Apple’s slogan. That’s, that’s something that really comes out of this period of the 60s and 70s. At the same time, I think the legacy of E.A.T. carries on in art practices. It’s just that, um, artists sometimes themselves have internalized the expertise or capability.

Best: Nakaya, with her intimate knowledge of the elements that impact her fog, might exemplify this internalized expertise.

Before E.A.T, there hadn’t been this kind of large-scale interdisciplinary collaboration between artists and engineers. Projects like 9 Evenings and the Pepsi Pavilion showed how the most cutting-edge tech could be incorporated into artistic performances—but also how doing so didn’t necessarily make the art a hit, either with audiences or with funders. E.A.T. demonstrated how art could be a place to experiment with new technologies, as artists utilized new computers, robots, interactive installations, and electronics to try and make their wildest and most abstract visions come to life. And it showed how these art projects could engage people in new ways, transforming how we think about our shared public spaces, and using technology to craft a vision for the future.

Today, it’s hard to understand just how groundbreaking E.A.T.’s projects were for artists and audiences. Our world is suffused with technological innovations that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Still, I find Nakaya’s take on what working with technology experts does for her inspiring. In an interview with Harriet DeLong, she talks about what she gets out of her collaboration with scientists. So I’ll close this episode, and this season, with her voice as she encourages us all to continue to open ourselves up to new ideas and create new optimistic futures.

Nakaya: I just believe that, you know, artists has to be completely free. And the artist get locked into his own world. And the technology gets locked into his own world, too. Just, it wasn’t that you bring technology into your, you know, own system, but it’s, you know, just interaction, stimulating each other to also not get them out of the, the thought situations, because you start, begin, wanting what you can, you can get.

Best: 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 Anya Ventura with Zoe Goldman. Our theme music is by Bryn Bliska. Mixing, additional music, and sound design by Myke Dodge Weiskopf. Christopher Sprinkle is the executive producer. Gina White managed rights with Joohee Lee.

Additional audio in this episode comes from 9 Evenings: Theatre & 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 Mastrionni for their research.

Special thanks in this episode to Eva Díaz and Tomás Saraceno.

To see fog tests in Thomas Mee’s backyard and diagrams for the nozzles at the Pepsi Pavilion, along with more photographs and transcripts, visit getty dot edu slash recording artists.

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