Experiments in Art and Technology (E.AT.) 1966
Robert Whitman, Robert Rauschenberg, Fred Waldhauer, Billy Kluver. In November 1966, Bell Labs engineers Billy Kluver and Fred Waldhauer joined artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman to establish the organization Experiments in Art and Technology. By 1966, Kluver had brought together 10 artists and more than 30 Bell Labs engineers to collaborate on performances for 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, using nascent technologies such as photocells, transistors, remote controls, fiber optics, and infrared cameras. At its height in the 1960s, Bell Labs employed 15,000 people. During this time, Kluver integrated the New York avant-garde with the engineering community, bringing artists on tours through Bell Labs and recruiting engineers to collaborate on multimedia sculptures and performances. Before the establishment of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.AT.) in November 1966 the group's founding members had already begun to create works of art that utilized technology, including Robert Rauschenberg's Dry TET Mey ta aia Us Shopping Bag. Later, EAT supported the production of artworks incorporating a variety of technologies, from a digitally reimagined portrait of dancer Deborah Hay created by Bell Labs employees Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton to drawings that Forrest Myers sent to the moon with the help of engineer and EAT co-founder Fred Waldhauer In 1967 EAT partnered with the Museum of Modern Art in New York to hold a competition for works of art featuring technology. The museum presented the nine winners in the exhibition "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age", and E.AT. quickly organized a satellite exhibition, "Some More Beginnings" (1968), which included nearly 140 of the submitted entries.
John Cage: Variation VII
John Cage and Deborah Hay soldering wires, 1966
David Tudor, Deborah Hay, Waldhauer, and Kluver working on the Proportional Control System, 1966
Artists Rauschenberg and Lucinda Childs and engineers LJ Robinson, Per Biorn, Kluver, and Herb Schneider discussing the capabilities of the Theatre Electronic Environmental Modular system, 1966
Robert Whitman: "Shopping Bag" (1966)
Robert Rauschenberg: "Dry Cell" (1963)
Nine Evenings poster. In 1965 Swedish electrical engineer Billy Kluver and US artist Robert Rauschenberg gathered 10 avantgarde artists and 30 Bell Labs engineers to participate in a collaborative, multidisciplinary project combining new technologies with theatre, dance, and music, The event, "9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering", took place at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York on October 13-22, 1966. More than 10,000 people attended performances by John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Oyvind Fahlstrém, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Robert Whitman. Nine Evenings engineers created the Theatre Electronic Environmental Modular, a flexible, wireless, networked control system, and the Proportional Control System (PCS), which used photocells to adjust light and sound levels. The event led to the founding of Experiments in Art and Technology the following month.
Alex Hay: "Grass Field", performed at Nine Evenings
Robert Whitman: "Two Holes of Water -3", performed at Nine Evenings
John Cage's "Variations VII", performed at Nine Evenings. To create Variations VII, Cage utilized only sounds that were in the air at the time of the performance. He placed contact microphones in tocations throughout New York City, including Merce Cunningham's dance studio, a restaurant kitchen, the sanitation department, and composer Terry Riley's turtle tank. Telephone lines brought these sounds of city life into the Armory, via phones placed alongside additional sources of sound including a blender, a box fan, and electrodes affixed to performer David Behrman's head that transmitted physiological sounds. A series of photocells installed below the appliances and phones emitted beams of light that cast dramatic shadows on a screen behind the performers. More than simply visual, the photocells were integral to the sound of the composition; as performers moved around, they interrupted the light beams the photocells produced, triggering switches which turned individual sounds on and off.
Kluver and Waldhauer, 1966
Demonstration of PCS with Waldhauer, Tudor, Hay and Kluver, 1966
Program for Nine Evenings
Program for Nine Evenings
Oyvind Fahlstrom: "Kisses Sweeter than Wine", performed at Nine Evenings
Rainer's "Carriage Discreteness" at the Nine Evenings. Rainer created a choreographed performance in which two unrelated action sequences unfolded simultaneously. One, called “Performer Continuity,” featured dancers whose actions were dictated by Rainer. Following her directions, communicated via walkie-talkies, they moved different materials— including plywood panels, metal sheets, and foam blocks, all made by the artist Car; Andre'— around the stage. Rainer oversaw their performance from her “remote plotting table,” a seat high above the Armory floor. The other element, "Event Continuity", involved a series of slide projections, film excerpts, tape-recorded conversations, and other technological components that had been pre-programmed to run automatically using the Theatre Electronic Environmental Modular system.
Steve Paxton's "Physical Things" at Nine Evenings
Deborah Hay solo at Nine Evenings. After experiencing Toshi Ichiyanag's electronic composition "Funakakushi" in 1963 in its original form— an outdoor installation in Shikoku, Japan, using eleven stone-sculpture speakers— Hay was inspired to choreograph a performance set to it. In her resulting piece, solo, 16 dancers dressed in shiny white costumes moved throughout an open space, performing simple choreography and sometimes standing or lying on moving platforms. These platforms covered remote-controlled carts operated by eight additional performers sitting at the back of the performance area and wearing formal evening attire like a musical ensemble. Bright lights illuminated the dancers, with punctuations of darkness controlled by a button near the stage entrance. Tudor performed the score by using the movement of a smaall flashlight over the surface of the Proportional Control System, thus sending sunds selectively to eleven speakers throughout the Armory.
David Tudor's "Bandoneon", performed at Nine Evenings. Tudor taught himself to play the bandoneon, an accordion-like instrument, after seeing Mauricio Kagal's Pandorasbox, bandoneonpiece (1960). The title of this performance, Bandoneon! (a combine...), has a layered meaning. The exclamation point represents a factorial, a mathematical operation used to calculate the number of ways a set of iterns can be arranged, while the phrase “a combine” references Robert Rauschenberg's term for an artwork that incorporates both painting and sculpture. In his composition, Tudor created countless combinations of sound, lighting, and sculptural elaments, all controlled by the bandoneon’s buttons. Electronic equipment, including Waidhauer's Proportional Control System and Kieronski’s Vochrome, played a key role in processing and modifying the sounds the bandoneon activated, distributing them to loudspeakers moving araund the Armory floor. The sounds also reached Lowell Cross's image-deflection system, resulting in visual projections of large screens. Through this performance, Tudor embraced the cavernous space of the Armory, turning it into a giant feedback instrument.
David Tudor & Peter Moore, 1966
Rauschenberg: "Open Score" at the Nine Evenings. Open Score began with a tennis match between professional player Mimi Kanarek and painter Frank Stella. Engineer William Kaminski wired their rackets with transmitters that caused every strike of the ball to emit a loud sound and extinguish an overhead light. The game continued until the Armory was completely dark. At that point, a cast of 300 volunteers walked onto the court and performed a series of loosely choreographed movements while infrared cameras projected their images onto large screens. Rauschenberg described the action as "the conflict of not being able to see an event that is taking place right in front of one except through a reproduction,” an idea that resonates in today's world of social media, streaming and smartphones. For the second performance, Rauschenberg added a third section in which be carried dancer Simone Forti around the Armory in a burlap bag while she sand an Italian ballad.
Lucinda Childs: "Vehicle" at the Nine Evenings. Childs imagined Vehicle as a performance that translated movement into sound. Hirsch responded by designing the “Doppler sonar machine,” which produced ultrasonic sound beams whose pitch depended on the speed of approaching or retreating objects. For the objects, Childs used three swinging buckets— she called them “dancers’—to cross the beams and trigger a landscape of swirling sounds. She also requested a technical component called the Ground Effects Machine. Designed by Per Biorn, this six-foot-high Plexiglas cabinet was kept above the floor by two Hoover vacuum cleaner motors and guided manually across the Armory space by William Davis. Standing inside, Alex Hay delivered the three buckets to Childs and then roamed around the performance area. Lights both inside the buckets and on the floor around tha central scaffolding cast shadows on a screen behind Childs.
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The Great Big Mirror Dome Project (1970). The main space of the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion was a 90-foot diameter, 210-degree spherical mirror made of aluminized mylar. The mirror produced an image resembling a hologram. Due to the mirror's size and shape, spectators could walk around and view the same image from all sides. A sound system designed by David Tudor as an "instrument" with 32 inputs and 37 speakers was installed on the surface of the dome behind the mirror. The floor was divided into ten areas made up of materials such as astroturf, rough wood, slate, tile, and asphalt. Using handsets visitors could hear different sounds on each floor material. The overall effect was of being inside a "sound mirror."
In 1970, the Pepsi-Cola Corporation commissioned E.A.T. to design a pavilion for Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan. Artists Robert Whitman, Robert Breer, David Tudor, and Forrest Myers made early contributions to the design of the pavilion; eventually the design team included 20 artists and 50 engineers and scientists. Outside the pavilion, a water-vapor cloud sculpture by the artist Fujiko Nakaya covered the white, faceted dome. On the plaza, seven of Breer’s Floats, six-foot-high dome-shaped sculptures, glided in slow motion while emitting sounds. Visitors entered the pavilion through a tunnel and descended a staircase into a clamshell-shaped room lit by moving patterns of laser light. On the far end, another staircase led up into the Mirror Dome, a 90-foot diameter, 210-degree spherical mirror made of aluminized Mylar. Within the Mirror Dome, visitors’ reflected images appeared to float upside down above their heads. The spectacular visuals and sounds in the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion invited visitors to create their own multisensory experiences. Using handsets, visitors heard a variety of sounds emitted from different sections of the Mirror Dome floor. Simultaneously, the sound-modifier console delivered sounds to 37 speakers arranged in a rhombic grid on the surface of the dome behind the mirror. These speakers could be pre-programmed or controlled in real time, using a library of over 500 sounds including insects, thunder, whales, earthquakes, and bird calls. Tudor conceived of the Mirror Dome as an “instrument,” the sounds of which varied with the visitor's path. In the late 1960s, E.AT. increasingly looked for opportunities beyond the art world. In 1969, the organization announced a call for multidisciplinary projects that addressed social issues. The resulting 1970 exhibition, Projects Outside Art, confronted various topics including housing, education, environmental sustainability, labor, and communication. In one project, City Agriculture, E.AT. staff member Peter Poole collaborated with the Environmental Research Laboratory at the University of Arizona to design rooftop gardens intended for installation in New York City. Children and Communication featured dreamy interior environments designed by Robert Whitman in which children from different parts of the city could communicate with one another using telephones and telex machines. E.A.T.’s Telex: Q & A (1971) invited participants in New York, Stockholm, Ahmedabad, and Tokyo to use telex machines to share their predictions about the state of the world in ten years.
Harry Shunk & Janos Kender: Sound-modifier console, 1970
Diagram of Pepsi-Cola Pavilion
Great Big Mirror Project
Great Big Mirror Project
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