Building Systems: Experiments in Art and Technology Before the Collaborative Turn Ian Wallace Nearly half a century before the acknowledgement of contemporary art’s “collaborative turn,” In her 2007 essay “The Collaborative Turn,” Maria Lind posits 1999 as the beginning of what she refers to as “extensive” collaborative art projects. Lind acknowledges that artistic collaboration has a long history, but argues that the methodologies of collaboration that she calls “group work”—which she finds exemplified in the emergence of “Relational Aesthetics” in the late 1990s—were explicitly the product of the societal tensions and longing for community after the events of 1968 as amplified by early ’90s new media critique and the production paradigms of “open content.” “Strategies for collaboration in contemporary art,” Lind writes, “seem to have a particular relationship to the last decade’s political and social activities.” Experiments in Art and Technology radically restructured the artistic field to incorporate interdisciplinary, socially active, and internationally engaged projects. Billy Klüver founded E.A.T. in 1966 with fellow engineer Fred Waldhauer and artists Robert Whitman and Robert Rauschenberg, applying a toolkit of concepts derived from his experience working as a technologist at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey; practicable notions of communication, interfacing, boundary conditions, feedback, and “systems building” that could equally be applied to describing developments in participatory and collaborative art of the past few decades. A proper historical investigation of the organization linking it to more recent practices, however, has been limited, somewhat ironically, by the notoriety of its earliest and most visible projects. 9 Evenings of Theater and Engineering, the series of performances that mark E.A.T.’s founding, was held at New York’s Park Avenue Armory on October 13, 1966 (fig. 1). The evening’s performances by Rauschenberg, Whitman, Deborah Hay, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and David Tudor each engaged cutting-edge technological processes, including wireless radio signals, large-scale projection, and Doppler sonar, and were achieved in collaboration with a total of thirty engineers. Despite its universal panning by critics—Robert Smithson called it a “funeral of technology”—the widespread interest produced by the event lead to E.A.T.’s establishment as a formal organization to facilitate further crossover art-and-engineering projects. For E.A.T’s second major event, the Pepsi Pavilion at the 1970 World Exposition in Osaka, the organization again integrated the work of artists and engineers—seventy-five in total—in the production of a massive dome containing hallucinatory installations of video, sound, lights, and interactive optical displays, all immersed under a blanket of fog thanks to an innovative infrastructural design by the artist Fujiko Nakaya (fig. 2). Both 9 Evenings and the Pepsi Pavilion, as conglomerations of dizzyingly proportioned spectacle and utopian expectations of what were still relatively limited technologies, have been described in detail elsewhere in discussions that generally focus on the experimental media and formats of the individual artworks included in each event. Less explored is the infrastructure that E.A.T. implemented to realize not only these foundational projects, but also countless individual collaborations that facilitated the production of works by artists as diverse as Carolee Schneeman, Steve Reich, Max Neuhas, Marta Minujin, Trisha Brown, Jasper Johns, and Hans Haacke—to name only a few of the hundreds of artists who utilized E.A.T.’s artist-engineer matching service known as the EATEX (fig. 3). Among the products of this service are such seminal works as Mel Bochner’s Measurements series of 1967, a key work of dematerialized conceptual art that was only realized thanks to a residency at the Singer corporation facilitated through E.A.T. Even further outside of the traditional historical view of E.A.T. are its activities in the early 1970s, which, by 1972, had shifted almost entirely to what would historically be referred to as a non-art context. E.A.T.’s “Projects Outside Art,” as they were officially designated, included experiments in early broadcast technologies, communications networks, eco-engineering, and experimental education; projects that were, in other words, far outside the purview of the traditional art world at the time. Collaboration was, in fact, E.A.T.’s driving ethos; and it’s only by revisiting the organization’s legacy as refracted through the expanded understanding of collaborative artistic practices in the past several years that we can begin to revisit its experimental projects, and Billy Klüver’s anachronistic vision, with the attention that they deserve. Beyond the US’s post-World War II “cottage industries” for consumer technologies, or the progressions in electronics and engineering spearheaded by companies like Bell Labs, the 1960s’ expanded application of interdisciplinarity and collaboration writ large give us a sense of the greater cultural and intellectual zeitgeist out of which E.AT. was formed. Ann Collins Goodyear has pointed to the importance, for example, of the 1962 publication of George Kubler’s The Shape of Time and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution, both texts that sought to describe the development of diachronic forms via interdisciplinary investigations stemming from information theory and Gestalt theory, respectively (Goodyear, 2004, p. 615). Equally important to the greater artistic atmosphere of the decade, and more explicitly aligned with technological investigations, was Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media of 1964, an exploration of the fundamental cultural changes engendered by technology. These and other texts made explicit the interrelationship between technology and social practices, while also pointing to the potential for the total recalibration of a culture’s understanding of its own modes of production and experience by combining the methodologies of previously disparate fields. This milieu gave rise to numerous hybrid art-and-technology organizations both in the U.S. and abroad. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art initiated its Art & Technology program, the brainchild of curator Maurice Tuchman, in 1966. Art & Technology sought to promote exchanges between the art and corporate worlds, placing both American and European artists in Californian companies in short-term residencies. The same year, Barbara Steveni founded the Artists Placement Group in London, with a focus on art production within an expanded social context. Seeking to counteract art’s marginalization within British culture at large, A.P.G. placed artists in temporary positions within government and industry departments to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue. Both Art & Technology and the A.P.G. anticipated the now ubiquitous format of the artist residency, which was still a novel idea at the time. Perhaps E.A.T.’s closest corollary was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for the Advanced Visual Studies, a fellowship program for artists initiated by MIT professor György Kepes in 1967. The C.A.V.S.’s mission was to facilitate cooperative projects that emphasized an expanded understanding of the artist’s social role. Explicitly anti-market, C.A.V.S. placed special emphasis on what Kepes called “monumental scale environmental forms;” projects that were meant to benefit not only the creative pursuits of individual artists, but also their greater communities at large. In comparison with these contemporaneous organizations, E.A.T. was, in many ways, unique. Whereas Art & Technology, A.P.G., and the C.A.V.S. imported artists into preexisting corporate structures, E.A.T. engaged experimental technology as well as experimental art, establishing connections between individual artists and individual engineers based on artists’ proposals that called for specific experimental processes. Unlike C.A.V.S., in other words, E.A.T. was non-prescriptive; any artist could ostensibly use its services for any project, whether explicitly commercial, politically subversive, environmental, and so on. Klüver and Waldhauer’s connections to Bell Laboratories also meant there was an expectation that engineers could, in fact, be as creative as artists; Bell Labs was, after all, home to the likes of Leon Harman and Ken Knowlton, who were responsible for bringing experimental filmmakers Stan Van der Beek and Lillian Schwartz to the laboratory, and who were also actively engaged in their own experiments with cutting-edge digital imaging technologies (fig. 4). While Bell Labs was E.A.T.’s incubator, however, it was, importantly, not its physical home, and this is another distinction that differentiated E.A.T. from its contemporaries: rather than a physical hub, the organization took the form of a dispersed network of both individual practitioners and localized “chapters” that served their own smaller communities. Much was made of E.A.T.’s innovative infrastructure at the time, though this factor of the organization’s activities has been largely forgotten in its recent history. Indeed, for Klüver, this was the most important aspect of E.A.T.’s program. “If all the separate sections of a project are to be of the best quality,” he wrote in 1972, “then they must develop independently. Interfacing of the various elements becomes the overriding problem” (1972, p. xi). In the same volume, the engineer and technology journalist Nilo Lindgren enthusiastically described E.A.T.’s functioning as a variant of Olaf Helmer’s “Delphi Method,” a horizontal convergence of individual judgments by a number of experts, and compared it to both the administrative models of a Quaker meeting and security analysts’ methods for predicting stock prices (16). Given the claims made in the name of E.A.T. and its radical infrastructure at the time of its establishment, the fact that its history continues to focus almost exclusively on 9 Evenings becomes an increasingly serious oversight. E.A.T.’s historical neglect is a complex matter stemming from multiple sources, and the historiographic difficulties surrounding the organization say as much about its sometimes utopian ambitions as they do about the limitations of the art historical context in which it has been somewhat awkwardly placed. The most obvious difficulty, thanks, in particular, to Robert Rauschenberg's involvement in the organization's founding, is the temptation to hagiography. Because of the involvement of so many well-known artists in the 9 Evenings event, E.A.T. came to be seen as simply a vehicle for the works of a handful of already well-established artists. Not only that, but the Black Mountain model of aleatory experimentation exemplified by the performance works of Rauschenberg and John Cage shifted the focus of both 9 Evenings and the Pepsi Pavilion onto the aesthetics of chance, rather than the concept of collaborative production. Michelle Kuo has argued that 9 Evenings put on display the increasing inefficacy of such chance-based artistic strategies, somewhat ironically because of their reliance on technology, which already in 1966 invited negative associations with commodification and instrumentality (31). It follows that one of the major complaints leveled at the event was the technical failure of many of the evening's electronic apparatuses. As Kuo’s argument suggests, a dialectic of technophilia and technophobia is another centrally important factor in E.A.T.’s reception, both in 1966 and today. Critical responses to the events of the Vietnam War played a major role in the art world’s perception of both the corporate and technological spheres’ relationships to artistic production, leading US and British museums to purposively turn their attention away from technologically-oriented art beginning in the 1970s as new technologies’ destructive potential came to overshadow the utopian claims of the pre-Cold War era (Goodyear, 2008, p. 172). Caroline Jones has suggested that this collective anxiety resulted in the displacement of technology’s influence in American art into its parallel engagements with industrial fabrication, mechanization, and corporatism as the major liminal concerns of Minimal and Pop art as well as structural film (39), all of which served to divert the concept of technological intervention in the arts, contrary to intuition, away from technology itself. An additional historiographic difficulty comes from the fact that by 1970, E.A.T. had already initiated an organizational shift away from the official art context altogether, exemplified in its open call for “Projects Outside Art” of May 1st of that year (fig. 5). At this point, E.A.T. had over individual 6,000 members, nearly evenly split between artists and engineers. The open call requested submissions for projects that would engage “education, health, housing, concern for the natural environment, climate control, transportation, energy production and distribution, communication, food production and distribution, women’s environment, cooking, entertainment, sports . . . ” and so on. Proposals were received by Agnes Denes, Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, and many others; competition was stiff enough to prompt Kaprow to author two lengthy letters detailing his disagreement with E.A.T.’s selection process. Of the proposals received in response to the 1970 open call, those that were accepted and moved into the planning stages included a wide range of ambitious projects. International collaborations, betterment programs for the developing world, non-consumerist applications of communications technologies, and intersections between engineering and the natural environment were all common aspirations. Anand (1969), for example, proposed by Indian Atomic Energy Commission head Vikram Sarabhai and realized in tandem with the Anand Dairy Cooperative in India’s Gujarat State, sought to develop instructional programming for buffalo milk production to be distributed via India’s newly installed ATS-F satellite. Spearheaded by Robert Whitman, the project utilized then cutting-edge 1/2 inch video tape equipment to document and gather material from Gujarat villages that were used as references for a final program, which was, eventually, adopted for regular use (fig. 6). Billy Klüver would later refer to it as “E.A.T.’s most significant contribution” (2003, p. 63). In New York two years later, the project Children and Communication (1971) established two communications hubs, one at 9 East 16th Street, the other at 49 East 68th Street, that were specifically designed for use by children (fig. 7). Including fourteen telephone lines, Xerox and Magnavox facsimile machines, electro-writers, and telex machines, the sites were designed to link the city’s underprivileged downtown with its wealthier uptown neighborhoods via the children’s drawings, invented long-distance games, and convivial correspondences. Other projects were more exacting in their application of engineering principles for issues of urban civic life: in 1970, in collaboration with the Environmental Research Laboratory of the university of Arizona and New York’s Automation House, E.A.T. produced a prototypical closed-environment “Envirodome” vegetable greenhouse, accompanied by a general feasibility study on the potential for farming initiatives in urban environments (fig. 8). Working with the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala (Projects in Central America, 1971–’74), E.A.T. produced studies on the applicability of mass-communication delivery systems and mobile broadcast production equipment in rural villages in each respective country—projects that, for whatever reason, were never conclusively realized. Still other proposals were equally ambitious in scale, but approached the notion of working “outside art” as a radical expansion of the artistic field, rather than building off of civic or global exigencies. David Tudor’s Island Eye Island Ear (1974–’79), for example, proposed transforming an island off the coast of Sweden into a macro-scale performative installation, with “cloud sculptures” by Fujiko Nakaya, kites and balloons by Jacqueline Moonier, and reflecting sound beams by Tudor. The extensive search for an appropriate site was carried out with the same organizational vigor as the earlier collaborations with foreign governments and the U.N.; ultimately, however, the project was cancelled over concerns about the concert’s potential environmental impacts on the island’s native ecology. Goodyear has suggested that the notion of the “thought form” of the environmental and conceptual projects of the ’70s might be employed to impart a sense of artistic validation to the numerous projects proposed via the E.A.T. program that were either too expensive or too impractical to be realized, and as a way of retrospectively contextualizing the Projects Outside Art as essentially artistic. Klüver, however, was adamant that E.A.T.’s ultimate end goal was communication on a large scale. “Although the total reality of each man is different,” he wrote, in his characteristically programmatic language, “the interactions between men and the world result in a convergence of the individual systems into general systems which are necessary in order to establish communication. . . The consequence of the system builder’s isolation from reality is that the general systems are drifting without guidance from meaningful decisions made on the basis of our total knowledge. This drift will inevitably lead to a situation where an ultimate decision is forced upon us; a fait accompli which is destructive to man” (1999, p. 108). For Klüver, in other words, the stakes of E.A.T.’s success were high, and, while rooted in art, extended well beyond its purview. In that regard, Utopia: Q&A (1971), in many ways, exemplifies both E.A.T.’s greatest ambitions and its greatest limitations. Devised as the organization’s contribution to Pontus Hultén’s exhibition on the Paris Commune, “Utopia and Visions: 1871–1981,” the project consisted of four Telex machines linking the four public spaces: Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, the exhibition’s originary venue; New York’s Automation House; Ahmedabad, India’s National Institute of Design; and an exhibition space within the Sony building in Tokyo (fig. 9). Visitors to each site were invited to use the machines to ask questions about the year 1981, a decade into the future, to users at the other locations’ machines. Anyone could ask a question, and anyone could offer an answer. Telex, of course, has since become largely obsolete, displaced by faster, more efficient, and more advanced communications technologies. If one focuses on the technology involved, the project can only seem outmoded; a relic of a bygone era. But the project’s titular reference to utopia points to its other aspect: a radical, future-oriented vision of a world transformed by the very possibility of communication. By 1981, the greater art world would not yet recognize much of E.A.T.’s activities after the 9 Evenings as essentially artistic; but we’ve come a long way since then.  Illustrations Fig. 1: Robert Rauschenberg’s Open Score being performed at E.A.T.’s 9 Evenings of Theatre and Engineering at the Park Avenue Armory, New York, October 13 1966 Fig. 2: E.A.T.’s Pavilion at the 1970 World’s Fair, Osaka, Japan Fig. 3: EATEX card system used for E.A.T.’s Technical Services program, n.d. Fig. 4: Ken Knowlton and Leon Harman, Nude, 1966, computer graphic, 12 feet long Fig. 5: E.A.T. open call poster for “Projects Outside Art,” May 1, 1970 Fig. 6: Still from Anand, 1969 Fig. 7: Installation views of Children and Communication, 1971 Fig. 8: “Envirodome” proposal from City Agriculture, 1971 Fig. 9: Utopia: Q&A (1971) as installed in New York  Works Cited Goodyear, Ann Collins. “From Technophilia to Technophobia: The Impact of the Vietnam War on the Reception of ‘Art and Technology’” in LEONARDO, vol. 41, no. 2 (2008), p. 172 Goodyear, Ann Collins. “Gyorgy Kepes, Billy Klüver, and American Art of the 1960s: Defining Attitudes Toward Science and Technology” in Science in Context, vol. 17, no. 4 (2004), p. 615 Jones, Caroline. “Machine in the Studio” as cited in Branden W. Joseph, “Engineering Marvel: Branden W. Joseph on Billy Klüver” in Artforum vol. 42, no. 7 (March 2004), p. 39 Klüver, Billy. “Fragment on Man and the System” in The Hasty Papers: Millennium Edition of the Legendary 1960 One-Shot Review, Austin, TX: Host Publications, Incorporated (1999), p. 108 Klüver, Billy. “The Pavilion” in Billy Klüver, Julie Martin, and Barbara Rose (eds.), Experiments in Art and Technology: Pavilion, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972, p. xi Klüver, Billy. “The Story of E.A.T.: Experiments in Art and Technology, 1960–2001” in Billy Klüver, Julie Martin (eds.), E.A.T. – The Story of Experiments in Art and Technology, Tokyo: NTT InterCommunication Center, 2003, p. 63 Kuo, Michelle. “9 Evenings in Reverse” in 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006, p. 31 Lind, Maria. “The Collaborative Turn” in Johanna Billing, Maria Lind, and Lars Nilsson (eds.), Taking the Matter Into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practice, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007, pp. 15–31 Lindgren, Nilo. “Into the Collaboration” in Billy Klüver, Julie Martin, and Barbara Rose (eds.), Experiments in Art and Technology: Pavilion, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1972, p. 16 1 Wallace, “Building Systems: E.A.T. Before the Collaborative Turn”