Art-and-Technology Projects

A review of Technocrats of the Imagination: Art, Technology, and the Military-Industrial Avant-Garde, John Beck and Ryan Bishop, Duke University Press, 2020.

There is a renewed interest in the United States for art-and-technology projects. Tech firms have money to spend on the arts to buttress their image of cool modernity; universities want to break the barriers between science and the humanities; and artists are looking for material opportunities to explore new modes of working. Recent initiatives mixing art, science, and technology include  the Art+Technology Lab at LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), MIT’s Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST), and the E.A.T. Salon launched by Nokia Bell Labs. In their presentation documents, these institutions make reference to previous experiments in which artists worked with scientists and engineers in universities, private labs, and museums. LACMA’s A+T Lab is the heir to the Art&Technology Program (A&T) launched in 1967 by curator Maurice Tuchman with the involvement of the most famous artists of the period, such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Richard Serra. MIT was the host of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) founded in the same year by György Kepes, who had previously worked with László Moholy-Nagy at the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Bell Labs is where scientist Billy Klüver launched Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) with Robert Rauschenberg in late 1966. Technocrats of the Imagination tells the story of these early initiatives by replacing them in their intellectual and geopolitical context, exposing in particular the link with Cold War R&D and the rising influence of the military-industrial complex. The contradiction between an anti-establishment cultural milieu denouncing technocratic complicity with the Vietnam war and a corporate environment where these collusions were left unchallenged led these art-and-technology projects to their rapid demise. Modern initiatives operate in a different environment, but unquestioned assumptions may lead them to the same fate.

Creativity, collaboration, and experimentation

Why should artists collaborate with scientists and engineers? Then and now, the same arguments are put forward by a class of art curators, tech gurus, and project managers. The art world and the research lab are both characterized by a strategy of continuous innovation, collaborative experimentation, and disciplined creativity. They tend to abolish the boundaries between theory and practice, knowing and doing, individual inspiration and collective work. These tendencies were reinforced in the context of the 1950s and 1960s: in an age of big science and artistic avant-garde framed by integrative paradigms such as cybernetics and information theory, the artist and the engineer seemed to herald a new dawn of democratic organization and shared prosperity. The artist defined himself as a “factory manager” (Andy Warhol) and did not hesitate to don the white coat of the laboratory experimenter. The scientist was engaged in much more than the accumulation of scientific knowledge and science’s contribution was vital for the nation’s wealth and security. Both worked under the assumption that science could enlarge democracy and support the United States’ place in the world, and that American art should be considered on an equal footing with other professional fields of activity. But the shared virtues of creativity, collaboration, and experimentation covered profoundly different ideas of what those terms might mean and how they should be achieved. The conception of experimental collaboration in the arts was heir to a liberal tradition of educational reform emphasizing free expression and self-discovery. By contrast, innovation and experimentation as understood by institutions training and employing scientists followed a model of elite expertise and top-down management. They were also heavily compromised, as John Beck and Ryan Bishop emphasize, by their ties to the military-industrial complex.

Beck and Bishop place the genealogy of the three art-and-tech initiatives under the influence of two currents: John Dewey’s philosophy of democracy and education, and Bauhaus’ approach to artistic-industrial collaborations. The influence of John Dewey over the course of the twentieth century cannot be overemphasized. More than any other public intellectual, Dewey shaped and influenced debates on the relations between science, politics, and society in the United States. His principles of democratic education emphasizing holistic learning and the study of art were applied in Black Mountain College in North Carolina, a liberal arts education institution that left its imprint on a whole generation of future artists and creators (Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Ray Johnson, Ruth Asawa, Robert Motherwell, Dorothea Rockburne, Susan Weil, Buckminster Fuller, Franz Kline, Aaron Siskind, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, etc.) The influence of Dewey’s pragmatism extended beyond the US, notably among German educational reformers, and his notion of “learning by doing” was picked up by the Bauhaus, a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts. In return, Bauhaus furnished Black Mountain College with émigrés educators—Josef and Anni Albers, Xanti Schawinksy, Walter Gropius—and an utopian vision of a post-disciplinary, collectivist education that did not favor one medium or skill set over another. Bauhaus’ afterlife and legacy in the United States also manifests itself in the trajectories of Bauhaus veterans László Moholy-Nagy who created the short-lived Chicago School of Design in 1937, and György Kepes, who taught at MIT and ended up creating the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) in 1967.

Bauhaus in America

It was Moholy-Nagy who originated the idea to stimulate interactions among artists, scientists, and technologists in order to spearhead creativity and innovation. His Hungarian compatriot and associate at the School of Design took the idea to the MIT, an institution whose motto mens et manus (“mind and hand”) echoed Dewey’s and Bauhaus’ devotion to “learning by doing” and “experience as experimentation.” MIT was a full research-based science university awash with money from government contracts and military R&D. Research teams working on ‘Big Science’ projects included not just scientists but engineers, administrators, and technicians collaborating together in a structured manner. Kepes’ tenure at MIT between 1946 and 1977 was characterized by a commitment to science and technology and a belief in the virtues of the unintended consequences of chance encounters leading to breakthrough innovations. His interdisciplinary teachings were structured around the principles of vision, visual technologies, and their social implications. Many disciplines were mobilized, including Gestalt psychology, systems theory, physiology, linguistics, architecture, art, design, music, and perception theory. Transdisciplinarity, holistic approaches, and the eclectic mix of science, technology, and artistic disciplines was in the air in the late sixties and influenced the counterculture as well as artistic creation. The same eclecticism presided over the creation of CAVS, a center dedicated to all aspects related to vision and visual technologies. Drawing in important artists and thinkers, including many Black Mountain alumni, CAVS laid the groundwork for subsequent MIT ventures such as the influential Media Lab, founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte, and the Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST). It was in such environment that experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek pondered the possibility of creating an “electronic paintbrush” to complement the electronic pen used in early man/machine interfaces.

The industrial corporation, the research university, and the private lab were the three nodes of the military-industrial complex. Hailed by Fortune magazine as “The World’s Greatest Industrial Laboratory,” the Bell Labs’ research center at Murray Hill in New Jersey was conceived along the lines of a miniature college or university. The laboratories themselves were physically flexible, with no fixed partitions and rooms so that they could be partitioned, assembled, and taken apart at short notice. Bell Laboratories cultivated creativity and innovation: researchers working at Bell Labs were credited with the development of the transistor, the laser, the photovoltaic cell, information theory, and the first computer programs to play electronic music. The proximity of New York City, which had become the capital of the art world, and the presence of an arts college at the neighboring Rutgers University, facilitated the rapprochement between the scientific avant-garde working at Murray Hill and the contemporary art world. Artists and musicians were offered organized tours of Bell Labs as a mean of opening dialogue and providing a sense of how technology could be harnessed for artistic creativity. Early realizations include Edgar Varèse’s Déserts (1950-54), an atonal piece that was described as “music in the time of the H-bomb”; Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960), a self-constructing and self-destructing sculpture mechanism that performed for 27 minutes during a public performance in the Sculpture Garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; and Robert Rauschenberg’s Oracle (1962-65), a five-part found-metal assemblage with five concealed radios and electronic components now displayed at the Pompidou Center in Paris. Also influential was the 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, a series of performances that mixed avant-garde theatre, dance, music, and new technologies. In 1967, the engineer and project manager Billy Klüver set up the Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a collaborative project matching avant-garde artists and Bell Lab researchers that attracted the application of more than 6000 artists, scientists and engineers. But the project soon foundered due to poor management and lack of funds.

From New York to Los Angeles and to the world

Place matters for artistic innovation, as it does for scientific discovery and technological breakthrough. During the twentieth century, the center of the advanced art world shifted from Paris to New York. Yet there was also a marked increase in the geographic origins of innovative artists. When he became the first curator of twentieth-century art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), part of Maurice Tuchman’s mission was to put LA on the art map as “the center of a new civilization.” He did so by partnering with business organizations to sponsor an Art & Technology exhibition in 1971, with the participation of high-profile artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, and Andy Warhol. But at that time public opinion had already shifted away from the technocratic model of corporate liberalism, and the exhibition was a flop. Another Californian experiment sponsored by LACMA was the creation of artist-in-residence positions at RAND and the Hudson Institute, two think tanks working mostly for the government sector and tasked with: “thinking about the unthinkable.” But the New York-based sculptor John Chamberlain and the conceptual artist James Lee Byars had a difficult time adapting to their new environment. The first sent a memo to all RAND staff stating: “I’m searching for ANSWERS. Not questions! If you have any, will you please fill it below”: the incomprehension was total, and the memo fell flat. The second set up a “World Question Center” and invited the public to submit any kind of questions that would then be answered by a panel of intellectuals, artists, and scientists. But as the two authors of Technocrats of the Imagination comment: “If Byars could have included Stein, Einstein, and Wittgenstein in his teleconference, what might they have been permitted to say, given the serious limitations of the format? An expert is an expert is an expert.”

Twentieth century art was advanced by new institutions on the art scene: the Salons and group exhibitions of independent art collectives, the private art gallery, the art critique magazine, the contemporary art museum, and the international art biennale. World exhibitions also played a key role in the globalization of advanced art, and the American presence in these global events often displayed art-and-technology projects. Billy Klüver and the E.A.T. program at Bell Labs engineered the American pavilion for the Osaka World’s Fair, Expo ’70, in partnership with PepsiCo. The RAND Corporation was pivotal for displaying US advanced technology abroad in exhibitions of science, urbanism, postwar visions of the future, and consumer society. The Eames Office, a design studio based in Venice, California, was commissioned to contribute to the USIA-sponsored US pavilion at the 1959 Moscow World’s Fair and the Montreal Expo ’67, and designed the IBM pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. The aim of these exhibitions was geopolitical: they were to display America’s might at its most spectacular, and to offer a glimpse of the future in which technology played a key part. They were conceived as artist-led immersive environments in the tradition of the Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art” of the Bauhaus, and played a pioneering role in the development of multimedia installations and video art. Charles and Ray Eames were “cultural ambassadors” for the Cold War representation of the United States, and their design creations aligned with the political agenda the US government wished to communicate. The Eames Office made important cutting-edge documentaries such as Powers of Ten (1968), a short film dealing with the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding or subtracting one zero, or Think (1964), a multiscreen film in a large, egg-shaped structure called the Ovoid Theater that stood high above the canopy and central structure of the IBM pavilion at the New York World’s Fair.

Corporate neoliberalism

John Beck and Ryan Bishop focus their analysis on the ideological underpinnings and geopolitical ramifications of these art-and-technology projects. They argue that, contrary to their forward-looking ambitions and futuristic visions, MIT’s CAVS, Bell Lab’s E.A.T., and LACMA’s A&T’s program were behind their times. In the late 1960s, antiwar sentiment had hardened public opinion against corporations and technology more generally. The positions of the scientist and the engineer were compromised by their participation in the military-industrial complex:  “science and technology had come to be seen by many as sinister, nihilistic, and death-driven.” The idea that US corporations could plausibly collaborate with artists to create new worlds of social progress was now evidence of complicity and corruption—technology was the problem and not the solution. The political climate made it impossible to justify what was now summarily dismissed as “industry-sponsored art.” In this politically charged context, art and technology projects had very little to say about politics, American foreign policy, or the Cold War in general. Technocrats of the Imagination concludes with a comparison between these late-1960s projects and recent reenactments such as MIT’s CAST, LACMA’s A+T Lab, and Nokia’s E.A.T. Salon. Contrary to their predecessors, these new projects operate in a neoliberal environment driven by private corporations in which the sense of dedication to the public good that animated scientists and artists from the previous generation has all but disappeared. As the authors argue, the recent art-and-tech reboot “cannot be separated from or understood outside the deregulated labor market under neoliberalism that has demanded increased worker flexibility, adaptability, and entrepreneurialism.” The avant-garde artist’s new partner is not the white-coated scientist or the lab engineer, but the tech entrepreneur who claims the heritage of counterculture to advance techno-utopianism and radical individualism. Their claim of “hippie modernism” and their appropriation of the 1960s’ avant-garde is based on historical amnesia, against which this book provides a useful remedy.