Chapter 1

Interdisciplinary Collaborations: Ideas

Art and Technology Movement

Marshall McLuhan has stated that a particular technology becomes a subject for the artist only when it is already superseded by the next one. Pontus Hultén exemplified this somewhat in his catalogue essay for The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, an exhibition about the use of the machine in the visual arts, organized for the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1968. Be that as it may, these discussions still made a distinction between the relationship between art and science and that between art and technology. It was not until the sixties that this discrepancy in time between scientific discovery and technological application began to disappear. Science and technology have become closely interconnected since then, for both economic as well as political reasons. As a consequence, relationships of art to science and technology were predominantly discussed in one context, that of technology. Simultaneously, there was the introduction of the electronic media and the computer technologies, making their first impact; media that have infiltrated our daily existence. With it came theoretical and philosophical publications about the possible social, political and economic effects of the new technologies, some of which were widely read in art circles.

Literary and philosophical discussions since modern industrialization, i.e. the Industrial Revolution, have often stressed the growing chasm between a scientific culture, founded on specialization of external knowledge, and a literary-artistic culture aiming at intellectual internalization of cultural achievements.Writers, like C.P. Snow, have often perceived of the two as “two cultures,” whereby anxious thoughts about a forthcoming alienation were voiced as a consequence of the growing importance of the scientific and technological culture in the society of the Machine Age. For what could be the function of the arts in an automated society? Discussions about possible congruences and differences between the two worlds also predominated in the sixties. Virtually only Susan Sontag put forth a different point of view in her article “One Culture and the New Sensibility” (1966), criticizing Snow’s “false assumption that science and technology are in motion, while the arts are static.” She perceived an overall new kind of sensibility, which will affect the “transformation of the function of art.” Sontag argued that science and technology, all forms of social life, all cultural forms, including works of art, reflect each other, therefore change with each other. For Sontag it followed logically that today “its spirit of exactness, its sense of ‘research’ and ‘problems,’ is closer to the spirit of science than of art in the old-fashioned sense.”[24] The experimentation with new materials, techniques and forms was its first expression and in a sense this book extended these thoughts.

The wave went into the history books as the Art and Technology Movement. The museum and gallery world reacted with a number of large exhibitions. To mention just the most important ones: Pontus Hultén’s The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 1968, presented a diverse survey of machine-related art forms. Hultén had invited Experiments in Art and Technology to participate in the contemporary section. Jasia Reichardt organized a show of computer-based art forms, titled Cybernetic Serendipity, which took place at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1970, and traveled to Washington D.C. Then there was Jack Burnham’s notorious Software exhibition at the Jewish Museum, also in New York, in 1970. Maurice Tuchman initiated a collaborative project to connect artists with industry for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art and Technology Program (1969-1971), and György Kepes organized Explorations at the Smithsonian Institution of the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., in 1970. There were numerous activities by small interdisciplinary groups like Pulsa and USCO, which discontinued their activities long ago. Pulsa was a group of seven artists and architects teaching at Yale University, who did a series of outdoor temporal light environments between 1968 and 1971, revolving around the concept of the city as artwork, using what they called its “soft information systems,” such as water supply, electricity, telephone, heating, as working parameters. USCO was a group of artists and engineers pioneering with multi-media and kinesthetic performances in the United States as well as Europe. In the late sixties they also worked with behavioral scientists “to explore multi-channel techniques and design of facilities, hardware and software.” Their ultimate focus was more toward entertainment and as education.[25]

Before discussing interdisciplinary collaborations as the most important characteristic of the art and technology movement, it needs to be emphasized that it was never really a movement in the formal or stylistic sense, nor was it a movement with a uniform set of ideas or concepts. Rather it was the umbrella for a change in attitude toward technology and science among a group of artists. This ‘group’ of artists was part of a larger ‘group’ that wanted to extend the boundaries of art. The interest in technology was from the start related to the desire for something new outside the realm of art; a desire to participate in the possibilities for radical changes in our environment which technology was to bring about. Around 1965/66 there existed a situation in which artists interested in technology were looking for knowledge and access. For in discussing the relationship between art and technology, one major problem was the access to this technology. At first, a characteristic of technological progress was the widening of the gap between the sophisticated technologies used in scientific laboratories and those available to the general public. Artists were not able to use these technologies until the personal computer and its accompanying software programs became gradually accessible, and not until the introduction of equipment like the portable video camera and recorder by Sony Corporation, Japan. In addition, sufficient knowledge was wanted. Art academies, colleges and universities were at first not at all equipped to deal with these rapid changes. In reviewing publications, newspapers and magazines, it becomes apparent that the atmosphere was one of an incredibly optimistic belief in the advancement of technology. It stood for progress. The same optimism was voiced in art criticism. John Perrault, critic for the Village Voice, wrote: “Certain similarities between art and technology indicate the possibility of a fruitful marriage. These similarities also clarify differences. Art and technology are both systems of translation. Technology translates pure science from the realm of abstract ideas into useful techniques and devices. Art translates experience and emotions into form. ... We are in a period of transition. With one foot in the Mechanical Age and the other in the Electronic, there is always the possibility to slip back into the dark. The Electronic Age, not yet completely assimilated, already seems to be branching off into the Bio-Chemical. Where are we going? ... Our relationships with machines and electronic systems are mirror images of our relationships with ourselves. If we learn how to relate to technology, we may yet learn how to relate harmoniously to ourselves.”[26] His writing is an example of the extent to which this advancement was personalized as a utopian possibility for total personal harmony, far beyond what Marshall McLuhan advocated as being a reflection of society’s so-called harmonious progress.

Catalysts: Gyorgy Kepes, Billy Klüver and Jack Burnham

Hungarian-born György Kepes had become acquainted with the theories of the Bauhaus and Constructivist movements as well as Dadaist expressions while moving in progressive circles in Budapest. He was apparently very impressed with the Dada photomontages of Hanna Hoech and Raoul Hausmann. During the late 1920s and early 1930s he changed from photography and photocollage to making films. In the meantime Kepes had become familiar with the work of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and collaborated with him in Berlin and London between 1930-1937. During his stay in London he also made the acquaintance of a science writer, J.J. Crowther, and it was through him that Kepes met some of England’s leading scientists - Joseph Needham, J.D. Bernal, and C.H. Waddington. When Moholy-Nagy invited him to Chicago in 1937 to head the Light and Color Department of the Institute of Design (also called the New Bauhaus) in order to “form a nucleus for an independent reliable educational center where art, science, technology will be united into a creative program,” Kepes accepted. The intentions of the program were just in line with ideas that were gradually developing in Kepes’s mind; ideas that connected his thoughts on visual communication with the Bauhaus point of view, which attempted to find a philosophical and functional agreement across a wide spectrum of disciplines.[28] There he developed light and color workshops in which various forms and techniques were researched on their visual and psychological impact. However, in 1945 he was invited to introduce a series of visual design courses in the School of Architecture and Planning, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (MIT), something new at the time, and was subsequently offered the position of Professor of Visual Design. His association with MIT would prove to be a long and fruitful one. During the following decades György Kepes put his ideas on paper in a number of books which became widely publicized and gave him wide recognition as educator and theorist.

The Language of Vision (1944) was his first attempt to connect the different languages of the different disciplines of knowledge, taking visual communication as a starting point. In particular the idioms of contemporary media like photography, motion pictures and television functioned in his eyes as a universal language that could be understood internationally.[29] Coming from the Bauhaus and Constructivism, György Kepes was of course highly interested in an integration of the visual arts with the visual idioms of the daily environment, including design and architecture. He was able to develop this ideal vision through the interdisciplinary research groups which germinated at MIT around that time. This development was partly accelerated because of the school’s involvement in war research as a consequence of the United States’ activities in World War II. In 1942, a secret research group came together under the title Radar Laboratory. It was their task to develop a new electromagnetic radar system or anti-ballistic missile system, called Radio Detecting and Ranging. Rad Lab’s success was succeeded by the first interdisciplinary (a new term) laboratory at MIT: the Research Laboratory of Electronics in 1952. Its director was Jerome Wiesner, and one of the participants was Norbert Wiener, who was making a name in the science of cybernetics at that time. Wiesner in an interview with Steward Brand: “The Research Laboratory of Electronics was probably the most exciting place in the world for anyone interested in communications. We were doing research on neurophysiology, we were studying electrical noise problems, we were doing coding, we were following Shannon’s work on information theory, we were even thinking about computers. Out of this I acquired the idea from Norbert Wiener that we would understand both living system communications and machines better if we worked on them not necessarily together but in the same environment.”[30]

It should come as no surprise that the interdisciplinary nature of these projects triggered Kepes’s interest to research possible relationships between art and science. While there was a growing exchange of ideas amongst a number of science departments, he noticed very little discourse between the humanities and science faculties. But even if many people thought that art and science were unmixable entities, Kepes was convinced that there existed a symbiotic relationship between the two, which would only grow stronger when nourished by each other.[31] Informed about the “new frontiers of knowledge,” as he called the scientific discoveries, and aware of the potential of technological progress, he expressed both his admiration and ambivalence. “Science appears to be the most confident and vigorous unifying force today. It has produced a new foundation for our material existence, but as we all know, has not yet solved our human problems. So far, our recently acquired knowledge, with all its precision and power, has brought us as much ugliness, discomfort and danger as it has sanity and order. Science is only one component of the understanding that we need for a well-balanced attainment of human ends. In our chaotic and directionless world, it gives us two-edged weapons - powerful tools and ideas with which we may either create or destroy.”[32] For Kepes, technological progress was not in itself negative, but he warned against an uncontrolled utilization of it. György Kepes: “The obvious world that we know on gross levels of sight, sound taste and touch, can be connected with the subtle world revealed by our scientific instruments and devices. Seen together, aerial maps of river estuaries and road systems, feathers, fern leaves, branching blood vessels, nerve ganglia, electron micrographs of crystals and the tree-like patterns of electrical discharge-figures are connected, although they are vastly different in place, origin and scale ... Their similarity of form is by no means accidental. As patterns of energy-gathering and energy-distribution, they are similar graphs generated by similar processes.”

His interest in the progress of science and technology was always guided by an ethical attitude. But he went even further, saying that we should never lose sight of its effects on the environment, and that the technical landscape should in fact serve to restore a lost balance of nature. When Kepes tried to give an account of the different functions of the visual arts and the sciences, and what might connect them, he kept returning to the idea that nature served as a common base, as a common language for both. Being both ordering devices in that they try to impose a structure upon the human experience, art and science could have a complementary function in restoring the balance in today’s society, which he felt had been lost. What connected them further, argued Kepes, was that both art and science were “image-making devices” which needed to visualize experiences. For György Kepes it was no accident that there was such a remarkable similarity between certain paintings and photographs and the images that had become visible through new optical technologies such as infrared and ultraviolet rays, microscopic and telescopic photography, X-rays and other radiation techniques. Both were looking for laws, such as pattern, structure, harmony, order or even disorder in natural and other phenomena. These technologies offered a completely new picture of nature’s order, which had hitherto been invisible to the human eye, giving new sensory experiences and expanding the range of perception. In order to make his findings known to the public, he organized an exhibition titled The New Landscape (1951), in which he presented the visual analogues between recent scientific visualizations of research models and the visual arts. Computer images, serial and other photographs of the “micro-world” and “macro-world” made by scientists, were presented next to artist’s images, showing analogous forms and patterns. A few years later he published The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), in which he “attempted to present in pictures the new visual world revealed by science and technology, things that were previously too big or too small, too opaque or too fast for the unaided eye to see.”[34] This book remained relatively unnoticed for a while. This was because his timing was off at the time, he thought later. Many scientists and artists still considered art and science unmixable entities.[35]

György Kepes gradually moved beyond a comparison of visual analogues, on to another level of relationships between art and science. He felt that the scientific concerns with the invisible micro-world in terms of energy or dynamic organization instead of measurable, and tangible objects could be compared to the changes in the visual arts. The fact that sculptors had turned to new ‘immaterial’ technologies of light, video or laser was representative of this new way of thinking for him. His position allowed him to closely follow the latest scientific developments, which not long before had turned the classical mechanistic notions of the universe upside down, absorbing the new ideas about time and space, about seeing things as an interrelated whole, and about the fusion of the subject-object distinction. He introduced these concepts in his writing to give a theoretical basis to the visual analogues he saw in art and scientific imagery.[36] He had also come to understand that the scientists were looking for new ways to describe and visualize their ‘abstract’ experiments which were making science as a whole look more and more like a conceptual construct of mathematical equations. Kepes was convinced that if artists and scientists were to work in a closer communion, it might be possible that artists would work out new visual images that could inspire scientists in their search for new visual models.

Billy (J.William) Klüver was born in Monaco in 1927. He studied at and graduated from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden in 1951, and moved to the United States in 1954 to obtain a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Berkeley. From 1958 to 1968 he was on the Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories, in Murray Hill, New Jersey, as a research engineer specializing in laser technology. But his interests went beyond the research laboratory. Since the early fifties he maintained a friendship with Jean Tinguely, whom he had assisted with his motorized devices, and with Pontus Hultén, director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm then. Hultén was very interested in artistic phenomena that revolved around motion or movement in art and had organized an exhibition Art in Motion in 1961, for which Klüver had put together the American contribution. After the famous event Homage to New York (1960), for which Klüver had assisted Jean Tinguely in building a machine that would destroy itself in the Museum of Modern Art’s garden, he extended his activities to work with other artists during the following six years. He worked on Merce Cunningham’s Variations V, Warhol’s helium-filled ‘clouds,’ Jasper Johns’ paintings with neon lights, Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days, Robert Rauschenberg’s Oracle (1965) and Soundings (1968). Soundings consists of nine 8-foot-high panels with silvered imagery (silk-screen) on plexiglass, in which the viewer at first only sees his own reflection. When the viewer speaks, the work responds to the varying resonant frequencies of a speaker’s voice. For different combinations of words and sounds, different combinations of chairs appear and disappear. Robert Rauschenberg worked with a team of engineers from Bell Laboratories, who designed and wired up the panel for 200 combinations of response. For a while the Bell Laboratories seem indeed to have been a central meeting point for artists and engineers. Klüver: “From 1960 on I brought some 50 to 100 artists through Bell Labs. I don’t know how many. I had a tour to show them what went on, and this mounted an incredible interest in technology. You would read in the newspapers and everywhere else about the advancement in technology. Nobody could have access to it. So the fact that I took them on these picnics out at Bell Labs obviously was memorable. Marcel Duchamp came there. Everybody came there. And that did probably more than anything. Because the artists could see the handson process and that one could actually DO things.”[37]

One can imagine that this atmosphere was particularly fruitful for the circle of New York artists which Klüver frequented and vice versa, sowing the seeds for new relationships between artists, technologists and scientists. He was very interested in art and in what effect the artist could have on technology. Although the scientist’s vision and realization differed widely from that of the artist and engineer in his opinion, because the artist and the engineer were dealing with the physical world, and worked directly toward the solution of a problem, contrary to the scientist, who was trained to understand it, there was never any question about a scientist becoming an artist, or an artist becoming a scientist. There was no doubt in his mind that the artist needed the engineer, because of the growing complexities of technology.

His theoretical statements, whether aesthetic, social or political, were controversial at times. For example, he declared that it makes no difference whether in a purely technocratic society technology really functions in art, in opposition to the machine which must always be a functional object. He still defined art as purely non-functional, a notion that suited the work of Jean Tinguely. Tinguely’s machines are totally dysfunctional indeed. As a collaborator Klüver was basically interested in providing the scientific and technical unit that would make the artist’s idea work. “The function of technology as a material is not to put previous aesthetic concepts into new forms but to provide the basis for a new aesthetic, one that has an organic relationship with the contemporary world,” said Klüver in an interview with Douglas Davis..[38]

New Relationships between Art, Technology and Science

At the time Kepes’s ideas about a civic art appeared quite new in American eyes, because they stood in sharp contrast to the prevailing situation in public sculpture. A brief look reveals that public art was simply defined as an art object located in a public place. It was generally identified with monumental objects, historical personalities, spouting fountain nymphs, or playful animals, that fill in an open spot in a park, a plaza or a bridge. Even the National Endowment for the Arts, founded in 1965, whose original aim was to promote more experimental endeavors in art, initially commissioned well-known artists to create an object-sculpture, and subsequently donated it to a city for siting in a public area. One can hardly blame the NEA for taking this well-intended position, though, since there were hardly any other public art programs in the country at the time.[41] Thus, when György Kepes laid down his ideas toward a civic art, he had something different in mind than these traditional monumental objects which embellished the parks and plazas of so many towns. His suggestions of “water purification kinetic sculptures, which could be framed with water gardens or water parks, providing an intricate interplay of all varieties of water movements and sprays in different densities and shapes,” or “immense transparent structures that give visibility to hydraulic processes, a contained but legible ballet of water racing through obstacles of filters, tinted and purified by chemicals, or moving sluggishly in intricate but legible patterns of transparent containers,” may not even sound strange in our ears. However, they were fantastic and rather idealistic, and the realization appears somewhat naive now. [42]

Although Kepes showed great foresight concerning the environmental problems that were looming ahead, the solutions he offered were either too general and vague or too comprehensive. Even if his ideas appeared a little vague and utopian, a problem which was enhanced by a language that lacked a more precise definition of his civic art, it is to Kepes’s credit that he saw that the existing public art forms had reached a dead end. He was one of the first artists who understood that a new direction was needed, and that this direction had to go together with a new function for the visual arts and artists. It should be noted, though, that György Kepes’s visions about a harmoniously functioning human ecology, which he thought could be achieved by resolving the major disturbances of both the individual as well as communal aspects of our lives, were similar to the messages in contemporary anthropology, psychology, or the applied sciences. For anthropologists had begun to study ‘primitive man’ as part of all-embracing social, cultural and natural cosmic surroundings. The applied sciences had started to present thought models of dynamic interconnectedness of seemingly disparate processes and systems, particularly in fields such as computer technology, electronics and communication networks. Simultaneously, Marshall Mcluhan ventilated his utopian ideas about the world as a “global village,” functioning harmoniously with the “tribal drums” of electric (electronic) communications.[43] The Club of Rome, founded in 1968, set out to create an understanding for the interdependence of political, social, economic, scientific, technological, ecological and cultural aspects of our current worldwide problems, introducing a systems approach as a method to get a handle on what they considered the future scenario of the world. This is also its main merit. The Club introduced a global approach, which was in itself positive but not purposeful. Meanwhile its strategy has evolved into a less comprehensive one, which does not propose to solve the totality of these problems, but deals with certain issues separately as one aspect of a set of related problems. Yet in the sixties meteorologists still thought they could change and control the climates of the earth, and economic scientists argued that they could control national economic situations. Only recently scientists and politicians seem to understand the significance of the enormous task before us somewhat better, and propose solutions and treatments for single issues, which are now treated as a complex of interacting forces or actions.

As a professional engineer working in a research laboratory for communication technologies, Billy Klüver understood directly the consequences that a rapid spread of technical information might have, and its possible influence on the human environment. His fear was that art, the art-intellectual world, would move further and further away from technology, and get more and more frustrated in not being able to handle its complexities. In 1967 Billy Klüver founded Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) together with Robert Rauschenberg, convinced that a working relationship between engineers, technicians and artists, in which both would have an equal share in the creative process, would further the understanding of each other’s worlds, and in so doing shape a relationship that would create possibilities which would benefit society as a whole. If the artist were to learn about the possibilities of technology, and the engineer were stimulated by the ideas of the artist, both might learn to understand each other’s language. He hoped that this might conceivably lead to an increased awareness of the current positions and processes of the artist and engineer respectively, and ultimately to a renewed reflection on art’s and technology’s function in society. He envisioned that it might even lead to a true concern with the larger, environmental issues of the earth.[44] Klüver speculated that the main future influence of art and technology could be in the area of environmental issues. He hoped that by using technology as material the artist could develop a new aesthetic that would have an organic relationship with the contemporary world. What this in fact implied, was a new definition of the artist’s role in society. For no one could defy the environmental consequences of technological change any longer, he wrote.[45] Both Kepes and Klüver felt that artists had to take responsibility in a social restructuring of society by educating the public through a new visual aesthetics, and in order to do so they would have to leave the studio, reorient themselves and enter into a dialogue with the real world. The prevailing idealistic concept underlying these ideas was that artists were indeed the group of people who were the first ones to detect necessities for change and react. They were guided by the ideal that art could really influence the developments to come. Klüver’s consideration was that, by participating creatively in industrial and communal processes, they could exert some power and possibly influence decision-making and things to come. For him, this meant not so much that the traditional function of art was totally abandoned, but that art would play a truly functional role in the changing of societal structures..[46]

In contrast, Jack Burnham’s vision moved beyond the existing, when he envisioned a function of art in what he called a “post-biological logic for technological development,” if “survival, adaptation, and regeneration form the cornerstones of biological existence, it may be that culture is fundamentally a means for implementing qualitative transformations of man’s biological status.” Burnham continued: “Art, then, and the whole image-making drive may be a means for preparing man for physical and mental changes which he will in time make upon himself. Sculpture, functioning so, becomes a kind of physical radar signal preparing the human race thousands (or now perhaps scores) of years in advance”[47]. Burnham’s teleology already envisioned a world living by biochemical engineering and genetics, i.e. a world in which the traditional art object or sculpture would have lost its function. It was clear to Burnham that the visual arts were beginning to adapt to a new situation indeed, when one set out to draw parallels between the developments in the sciences and technology and the visual arts, as he did in his book, Beyond Modern Sculpture (1968). His view was that art had already changed from being an “objet d’art” to a “système d’art,” which implied that the new art work or sculpture was characterized by a set of relationships, and no longer defined by its boundaries, according to the concepts of the general system theory and cybernetics, which were rapidly gaining popularity. He found his theory confirmed in the work of Hans Haacke, Robert Morris and Dennis Oppenheim, who were no longer making objects with a well-defined frame, but chose to make natural processes or actions in the environment the content of the art work.

He went as far as to state that the new technologies might lead to a dissolution of art as we define it, and he tried to demonstrate this idea organizing an exhibition, Software (1970), to show the different creative possibilities of computer-based art. In the introduction to the catalogue, he explained that “Software is not specifically a demonstration of engineering know-how, not for that matter an art exhibition. Rather in a limited sense, it demonstrates the effects of contemporary control and communication techniques in the hands of artists... Software makes no distinctions between art and non-art... Hence, the goal of Software is to focus on... information processing systems and their devices.”[48] For Burnham, there was no doubt - then - that the information and communication technologies would soon permeate our daily existence and change our aesthetic perception. Also, Burnham held the opinion that, if artists wanted to have an influence on this process, they would have to research how information is controlled, who has power over and access to it, how information processing would affect the psychological outlook of the average human being on questions of protection of information, of ownership, of privacy, and so forth, in short, how the technology at large functions.[49]

Like Klüver and Kepes, Burnham too stated that it was the task of the artist to take responsibility for the well-being and continued existence of life upon earth. But contrary to the others, he was very specific in his theoretical assumptions that the new function for the artist was to be found in the communications technologies and information networks and toward a functional aesthetic (Benjamin Buchloh’s term), as it was developed by, for example, Hans Haacke, in a society dominated by information systems.