E.A.T and EAT some more
There is a recording
in the archives of The Andy Warhol Museum from the day that Billy Klüver,
founder of "Experiments in Art and Technology", went over to the
Factory to deploy the art project that he had developed in partnership with
Andy Warhol. Warhol's "floating sculpture" experiment consisted
of helium inflated silver balloons, or pillows; silver presumably to match
the interior decor of the Factory. However, the first deployment of the floating
sculpture did not take place inside the Factory, but rather on the roof of
the building. Some of you may have a mental picture of the photographs taken
that day. What is astounding about the audio recording (Warhol referred to
his tape recorder as his "wife" and recorded everything, from phone
calls to conversations over lunch) is the ecstatic pleasure in Warhol's voice
as Klüver inflates the balloons and tethers them out into the New York
sky: "Oh my! ... It's beautiful! ... Look at that! ... Oh Billy! ...
Oh! ... Oh!..."
It's as
near to orgasmic as one ever hears the soft-spoken Warhol get. E.A.T., as
it is known, was formed in 1966 out of a desire, in Klüver's words, to
"develop an effective collaboration between engineer and artist. The
raison d'etre of E.A.T. is the possibility of a work which is not the preconception
of either the engineer or the artist, but is the result of the exploration
of the human interaction between them."
The joint projects developed over a decade between Klüver and artists
such as Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, John Cage and Jasper Johns
were first seen in performances in New York (Tinguely in the garden at the
Museum of Modern Art, Rauschenberg at the Armory) and later in an exhibition
called Some More Beginnings (at the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA) and lastly at
the Pepsi-Cola pavilion at the World Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan. What Warhol's
tape makes palpable is the sheer pleasure the E.A.T. artists gained from being
teamed up with engineers to produce art work.
One can only guess that Tinguely must have got a charge from the execution
of his self-destructing kinetic sculpture. Over thirty years later those of
us interested in media arts still recognize the importance of E.A.T. and are
grateful that the works of art are well documented and that Klüver is
organizing his archives. These collaborations signal an early moment in the
Art and Technology movement of the late twentieth-century. But what should
we make of the surprising realization that the artists' access to technology
and mechanics in creation of their art proved to be entertaining as well as
"effective"? Did they even suspect that might be an outcome? It
is in part for this reason that we've decided to call this forum EAT, in reference
to Klüver's E.A.T., but changing the "experiment" for "entertainment."
Society is increasingly aware of how technology has made daily, lived activities
- both at work and at play - more pleasurable and entertaining. The question
remains, what has technology done to art production? What should we make of
today's artists who are also engineers such as Natalie Jeremijenko who runs
the engineering design lab at Yale, or even Charles Ray, a sculptor who certainly
thinks like an engineer. What of the proliferation of artists who turn to
engineers to create ever more seductive pieces (I think of Rodney Graham's
videos or Dan Graham's environments)? Has technology made today's art more
entertaining? Has technology made entertainment more entertaining? More artful?
As Klüver hoped with his E.A.T., so we hope of ours, that it will not
prioritize either the art, the entertainment or the technology (namely, neither
the engineer nor the artist) but instead will result in a similar exploration
of the interactions between the three.
Media theorist and philosopher, Pierre Lévy writes of cyberculture
that in it "everyone is asked to become a singular operator, qualitatively
different, in the transformation of the universal and untotalizable hyperdocument.
A continuum extends between the visitor and the engineer of virtual worlds,
between those who are content merely to visit and those who will design systems
or sculpt data. ... It is up to our social actors and cultural activists to
take advantage of it."
Consider then, the EAT online forum, just such an Experiment in Art and Technology
- as movement towards the creation of an entertaining cyberculture.
We hope that together, with each of your unique perspectives on the art on
view, or anything else you fancy, we might engineer a dialogue that causes
even the most soft-spoken of you to cry out with orgasmic pleasure.
Sarah Cook EAT Organizer