Billy Klüver
Johan Wilhelm Klüver (November 11, 1927 – January 10, 2004)[1] was an American electrical engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories who founded Experiments in Art and Technology.
In 1952, at age 25, working for a large electronics company in France, Klüver helped install a television antenna on top of the Eiffel Tower and devised an underwater TV camera for Jacques Cousteau's expeditions.
He served as Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering, at the University of California, Berkeley, 1957–58 and from 1958 to 1968 he was a Member of Technical Staff at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill.
He published numerous technical and scientific papers on, among others, small signal power conservation in electron beams, backward-wave magnetron amplifiers and infra-red lasers.
Klüver then worked on Robert Rauschenberg’s environmental sound sculpture called Oracle; and later with Yvonne Rainer on her dance in House of My Body.
From April to June 2003 a Japanese version was shown at a large exhibition at the NTT Intercommunication Center (ICC) in Tokyo which also included a number of object/artifacts and documents and E.A.T.
In 1978 Klüver began to work with his wife Julie Martin[5] on a research project on the evolution of the art community in Montparnasse from 1880 to 1930.
In 1989 the book Kiki's Paris was published in the United States, and subsequently appeared in France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and Japan.
Klüver and Julie Martin edited and annotated the original English translation of Kiki's Memoirs', published in 1930, but banned by U.S. Customs from the United States.
Brazil), was based on a group of photographs taken at lunch on a sunny afternoon in Montparnasse in 1916 by Jean Cocteau, of Pablo Picasso and Modigliani and friends including André Salmon, Max Jacob and Pâquerette, a model for the designer Paul Poiret.
While Klüver in 1978 was researching material on the artists of Montparnasse in the 1910s and 1920s for Kiki’s Paris, he started collecting photographs of the period, noticing some that appeared to have been made together, with people dressed the same in each.
The images provided further clues; a uniformed man suggested that it was during WW1, the foliage on the trees indicated late spring or summer, and he recognised the awning of the Café de la Rotonde.
Using maps, making photographs and by physically measuring the buildings, their ledges or window insets, he calculated the sun's positions and plotted the results to get a spread of three weeks, with the most probable date being August 12.
The Rotonde, the Dome, and a restaurant at the corner of boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse formed a town square, where the vegetable sellers stopped their small carts and grass grew between the paving stones ….
[8] Reviewer Roy R. Behrens described Klüver's reconstruction in A Day With Picasso as "nearly as complete and fascinating as the forensic analysis of a crime scene.
