Experiments in Art and Technology
The group operated by facilitating person-to-person contacts between artists and engineers, rather than defining a formal process for cooperation.
initiated and carried out projects that expanded the role of the artist in contemporary society and helped explore the separation of the individual from technological change.
[4] Ten New York artists worked with 30 engineers and scientists from the world-renowned Bell Telephone Laboratories to create groundbreaking performances that incorporated new technology.
[5] Notable engineers involved include: Bela Julesz, Billy Klüver, Max Mathews, John Pierce, Manfred Schroeder, and Fred Waldhauer.
These art performances still resonate today as forerunners of the close and rapidly evolving relationship between artists and technology.
[9] Speeches were delivered by Robert Rauschenberg and others, including John Pierce, Executive Director of Bell Labs.
artists and engineers collaborated to design and program an immersive dome that included a fog sculpture by Fujiko Nakaya.
On the terrace surrounding the Pepsi Pavilion were seven of Robert Breer's Floats, six-foot high kinetic sculptures that moved around at less than 2 feet per minute, while emitting sounds.
activity has entered the canons of performance art, experimental noise music and theater, bridging the gap from the eras of Dada, Fluxus and the Happenings/Actions of the 1960s, through the current generation of digital artists for whom multimedia and technology are the norm.
[17][18][19] In 1972 Billy Klüver, Barbara Rose and Julie Martin edited the book Pavilion, that documented the design and construction of the E.A.T.
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.
This grew out of their dissatisfaction with the centralized control created by their existing matching program that paired artists up with scientists and engineers through E.A.T.
As art historian and curator Michelle Kuo has traced, these forms included timeshare computer data banks, direct telex networks, notched cards, and a printed directory.
Most of these proposals were abandoned due to logistical difficulties, and the final form was a printable directory, but the project demonstrated their interest in facilitating decentralized communications networks through emerging technologies.
[28][29] Begun on December 18, 1970, the project ran until April 8, 1971, during which time many school groups visited in addition to the general public.
The two sites were connected by a number of technologies, including ten telephones, two teleprinters, two fax machines, and two telewriters, each of which facilitated a slightly different form of communication.
Children were invited to explore these different means of instantaneous visual and textual interaction freely as the project specifically denied any explicit pedagogical goals.
The first performance of the Human Digital Orchestra was at the first Claude Shannon Centennial Conference on the Future of the Information Age on April 28, 2016.
[36] The Human Digital Orchestra performed for the second time at the Propeller Fest conference in Hoboken, New Jersey, on May 20, 2016,[37] in a collaboration with Beatie Wolfe.
