Art and Technology

Welcome to the Art and Technology Resource Page!

Background

"Art and Technology" refers to a period in the 1960s when there was a strong generalized aesthetic interest in the metaphysics of technology. While there have been many periods over the last several centuries in which people have praised technology, the Art and Technology movement evolved primarily in the United States in a period in which consumer, computer, and communications technologies witnessed unprecedented growth.

A number of artists, critics, and social commentators were interested in better understanding how these new technologies affected their daily lives. Interestingly, companies such as AT&T, IBM, and Xerox were experimenting with creating new open laboratories for their engineers and scientists that gave them unprecedented levels of freedom. The laboratories in which these engineers and scientists worked became more like artist's studios, and their employers expected them to create new uses for technologies that could be sold to members of a rapidly expanding consumer culture.

Some of these scientists and engineers began to reconceive their role as more akin to that of an artist. One of the scientists, Billy Klüver, who worked out of AT&T's Bell Labs, sought to reach out to artists to help artists gain access to the amazing wealth of technologies being created in his laboratory. While Klüver was not able to convince AT&T to directly work with artists, he did found, along with Robert Rauschenberg, a group called Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T. Klüver's organization was based in New York City and actually evolved out of a 1966 collaboration between artists and engineers called "9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering."

E.A.T.'s ultimate goal was to be a resource for artists and engineers: a kind of clearing house in which artists and engineers with similar interests could meet. The organization also sponsored art events with the New York Museum of Modern Art and sent a contingent of artists to the 1970 World's Fair in Osaka, Japan. While E.A.T. was based in New York, artists in other cities throughout the United States, Japan, and Europe were also interested in the blending of art and technology. Member artists started chapters in cities such as Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, among others. E.A.T.'s greatest success, however, was its concerted efforts in matching artists and engineers.

E.A.T. was not the only resource for artists. A number of museums were interested enough in technology to create exhibitions focusing on the theme. For example, the Jewish Museum in New York sponsored an exhibition called Software, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art created an entire program, simply called Art and Technology, to help artists work with companies.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)'s Art and Technology Program was the brainchild of their Senior Modern Art Curator, Maurice Tuchman. Tuchman launched the program at about the same time as Klüver founded E.A.T. Unlike Klüver, however, Tuchman was less interested in making a long-term organization devoted directly to fostering connections between artists and engineers. Instead, Tuchman wanted to directly recruit companies in the Southern California region interested in offering their workshop floors to artists for a period of time. Los Angeles had experienced rapid growth since World War II and much of the defense and aerospace industry for the country had located there. Tuchman considered these industries, along with the entertainment industry, as great resources for artists.

Tuchman got solid commitments from companies such as IBM, the Walt Disney Company, Universal Studios, Kaiser Industries, Hewlett Packard, and American Cement to participate in the program. He then recruited artists to participate in the experiment to bring artists to the workshop floor of these companies. The caliber of artists Tuchman was able to recruit is rather phenomenal: LACMA invited Robert Morris, Jules Olitski, Richard Serra, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Eduardo Paolozzi, Tony Smith, Robert Irwin, and sixty other artists.

Christopher R. de Fay is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan and is writing his dissertation on the subject of the Los Angeles Art and Technology Program. He currently resides in Los Angeles, California and can be reached via email at crdefay "at" umich.edu.