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Speaker 1

00:00

So I'll just start by saying Experiments in Art and Technology was a group that was founded in 1966 by the artist Robert Rauschenberg by an engineer named Billy Kluver who was a research scientist at Bell Labs. At that time, literally the heyday or basically it was the heyday of Bell Labs, which was the ground 0 for sort of everything as we know it. None of what we're doing right now would be possible without the invention of the transistor, for example. All of these breakthrough inventions happened at Bell Labs and it was really the center of the telecommunications revolution.

Speaker 1

00:40

So this engineer at Bell gets together with these artists, some of whom are really, you know, prominent at the time. And they are, they've, they've been, they've sort of met each other through some just really almost chance social circles, but also through some art world friends in common. And you know, Jasper Johns needed a neon, wanted a neon light in the shape of a letter, the letter R, for 1 of his paintings and he didn't want a cord running from the painting to an electrical socket. So somehow we got hooked up with Kluver, this engineer from Bell and said, can you do this?

Speaker 1

01:24

Well, it turns out it was kind of a complicated problem at the time. How do you make a battery powered neon light that's small enough to fit behind a painting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, he did it. So they had these various collaborations.

Speaker 1

01:38

But then Rauschenberg and Kluver, the artists and the engineers thought, Why can't we bring this to everyone? Why can't every artist who's curious about making something float have access to an engineer who works on pneumatic technology? So how could you create these collaborations And then how could you even scale them or grow them so that this becomes a mass sort of phenomenon? So they set about trying to basically start to get the word out, to get artists and engineers together.

Speaker 1

02:17

The first real project they did that they undertook was probably 1 of the largest endeavors at the time. It involved over 40 engineers and artists, And it was this performance series that took place in New York at the Armory, which was a huge cavernous space. And basically to get to make the performance, what became the performance pieces, They paired artists, choreographers, musicians, composers, with engineers, most of them from Bell, just because that's... What was that process of pairing them like?

Speaker 1

02:58

Well, it was very tumultuous. So they had meetings. And again, it was very ad hoc. In other words, it was really a word of mouth thing.

Speaker 1

03:06

So, Kluver would bring in friends from Bell, Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman and other artists would bring in friends from their circle. This happened to include John Cage, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer, really people that would become extremely well-known afterward, but were already prominent at the time. So they had freewheeling meetings. They actually held them at a high school in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, which was near the Cleavers' house.

Speaker 1

03:36

They would go up. There were people who lived sort of more upstate, so they would go there. And they were just really trying to literally brainstorm, to bounce ideas off 1 another. And, you know, of course the artists wanted things like, you know, I want a missile that floats.

Speaker 1

03:56

I want, you know, a light bulb that will explode. I want walkie-talkies. I want remote control. I want sound that will respond to the viewer as they're walking through space in real time.

Speaker 1

04:14

And like any tech person knows, non-tech people think technology can do everything all at once already. So they were really just pie in the sky, and I think the engineers were really shocked, but also really enthusiastic because they hadn't had experiences like that in large measure before. So this really created a lot of excitement, it created a lot of tension, there were a lot of fights, a lot of conflict as well, just a lot of pressure because in the end they I think they signed up for creating a very, let's say, ambitious set of performances on a large scale in New York. And at the end of the day, very little was tested or tried out.

Speaker 1

05:04

And there were long delays, nearly 10,000 visitors over the course of these essentially 20 nights.

Speaker 2

05:13

Yeah, so like just so I understand the time frame. They decide like there's this 1 project with a neon behind the painting with a battery. They're like, okay, this is cool.

Speaker 2

05:22

We should have more of this. They then like book the armory like 9 months in advance. Well, I'm

Speaker 1

05:28

fast forwarding. But basically they had proposed, They got together, let's say maybe 10 of them. But really spearheaded by Rauschenberg and Kluver, and then it kind of built a bit.

Speaker 1

05:42

And again, this is just this really almost contingent aspect to it. Kluver is Swedish. There's a Swedish performance festival in Stockholm. And they thought, well, let's apply to do something for that.

Speaker 1

05:54

That fell through. They, EAT claimed later that it was because The performance festival didn't want to give, they didn't like the idea that the artists would give so much agency to the engineers and that they would kind of be this freewheeling thing. Regardless, that fell through, so then they just thought, okay, how can we produce these performances that we'd already started brainstorming about and everyone's really excited about. And again, Rauschenberg and some of these other artists were quite prominent at the time.

Speaker 1

06:28

So the Armory was suggested as a venue because they wanted to test out literally physical scale. And in the armory there are echo times of up to 5 seconds. So people interested in sound, in remote control, in video, or basically in projection, were interested in this very large physical scale already. So they booked it.

Speaker 1

06:54

But again, I guess part of it is that some of these artists were already quite prominent. And so on opening night for this performance series, you have Senator Jacob Javits and his wife. That's crazy. His wife is a prominent arts patron.

Speaker 1

07:06

You have the sort of who's who of the New York art world, but also of the avant-garde, Demi Monde. And they're all there en masse. And they're all really mad because they're waiting.

Speaker 2

07:17

It's like braking, right?

Speaker 1

07:18

And things aren't working. And so eventually when things did start to work, you know, really extraordinary and interesting things happen. For example, in Rauschenberg's performance piece, To make a long story short, 1 of the technologies they got and used was infrared.

Speaker 1

07:36

And at the time, infrared was a classified military technology. They ended up getting infrared cameras from a Japanese supplier. And so, 1 part of the performance was turning all the lights off and in the dark then training these infrared cameras on hundreds of performers that assembled on the floor of the armory. And so you got these very ghostly spectral images of these people for the audience at large.

Speaker 1

08:06

And again, you know, that was an extraordinary thing that happened. It's like as if today you would have an artist that had access to the Pentagon and was spending time you know toying around there. So that was really unprecedented. And from there, they got momentum even more.

Speaker 1

08:24

They grew to a few hundred people. And then anyone could really become a member. You just signed, you filled out a form and you sent it in. And so at their peak, by around 1970, they had nearly 5,000 members.

Speaker 2

08:40

What did it mean to be a member?

Speaker 1

08:41

So basically to be a member, you could get access to this network. In other words, you could fill out what you're interested in whether you're on whatever field you're in. If you're an artist, you could say, I'm interested in new plastics and holograms and also cybernetics.

Speaker 1

09:05

And then if you were an engineer, you could say, well, this is my disciplinary expertise. I'm also really fascinated by kinetic sculpture or I really like dropping acid.

Speaker 2

09:16

How are people discovering this? This is like pre-internet. They're just like, okay, yeah, I'm into acid.

Speaker 2

09:20

I guess I know how that makes it to your town.

Speaker 1

09:24

So part of the whole thing was outreach, and they made a concerted effort, obviously not only to reach out to artists, but then to go to IEEE, which was the engineering society. Hans Hacke had a booth, was manning a booth there and handing out flyers. So again, It's like, let's take this to the trade fair, to conferences.

Speaker 1

09:49

They gave talks. They did almost like, not really publicity, but let's say tours of schools. The university was, of course, a whole other connector. And what you see as well is this network of what becomes or was a kind of academic military industrial complex.

Speaker 1

10:12

All these people are really in communication And so EAT is basically saying, well, how can we get the word out?

Speaker 2

10:19

So can you explain the actual Rauschenberg piece at the Armory? Because I thought that was particularly cool.

Speaker 1

10:26

Yeah. So Rauschenberg had decided to... He was very interested, again, in, first of all, remote control, this... What he kind of thought of as action at a distance.

Speaker 1

10:42

You know, how can you make something else happen but not be physically tethered to it. He's also interested in sound effects, in sonic, sort of in noise as well as, you know, experiments basically in acoustics. And the other part of it is really almost creating something, let's say, poetic out of people's movements. And he was also interested in games.

Speaker 1

11:13

And at the time, a number of artists had already or were already exploring the sort of structure of the game and it was also very much a conscious reference to game theory even and so all of these layers are definitely you know there. Rauschenberg's piece basically set up in this huge cavernous expanse of the armory a tennis match. But it wasn't a regular tennis match. He set up a tennis court.

Speaker 1

11:43

He had the artist Frank Stella, who at the time was actually taking tennis lessons from a tennis instructor named Mimi Konarek. So the tennis instructor and Frank Stella are on the tennis court, and they play a game of tennis. But it so happens that the tennis rackets are actually hot-wired. So each time you hit the ball, a resounding amplified, a microphone would pick up an amplified sound that would resonate throughout the armory, And it triggered a huge bank of lights to be turned off.

Speaker 1

12:20

So with every volley, a successive set of lights would be turned off. So by the end of the game, which has no winner or loser, the armory is in complete darkness. And then that's when these infrared cameras were turned on. And a mass of sort of, they're not really performers, they were people that Rauschenberg sent out sort of vague instructions to, but they were just supposed to gather on the floor and do, maybe make a motion, like pull your ear or touch the person next to you.

Speaker 1

12:53

Just these sort of very vague instructions. So that's what they were doing, assembled on the floor and the image of them via infrared is then projected above on these huge screens. And then at the end of that, they turned 1 spotlight on and the choreographer Simone Forti came out and was being carried and was singing a sort of Italian folk song. So again, this is all, you know, it's not a regular narrative.

Speaker 1

13:25

It doesn't really make any sense. But what it did was really push, It investigated some questions around performance, play, sound, imaging technology, and also the idea that you could have... A performance didn't have to be about a climactic spectacle. It was about some other kind of experience and a kind of experience that the artist hoped you wouldn't have had before.

Speaker 1

13:56

And that, you know, really that was the case. Of course, the first night, the rackets didn't work. So they were... Or the lights, the trigger for the lights didn't work.

Speaker 1

14:07

So they were actually manually turning off the lights. You know, sort of jerry-rigging or retroactively making the piece happen. Later it did. But so, you know, again, it was, it was really a test and an experiment in every sense of the word.

Speaker 1

14:22

And at the time, you know, people didn't really, they didn't really sort of understand that that's what it was. So

Speaker 2

14:31

I've been wondering this the whole time, right? Because it like, so much of this technology was so new, like, to the extent that you had never even seen an infrared camera, right? How are people talking about this art and technology overlap?

Speaker 2

14:45

Because I know, or I think I imagine how people talk about it now, but how are people talking about it at the time?

Speaker 1

14:51

Well, you have a couple different attitudes. 1 is, you know, wonder and astonishment. This is amazing.

Speaker 1

15:03

Isn't this so incredible and exciting? And part of that is a very futurist strain of language, which is, you know, people basically trying to predict what's going to happen and having fun doing so. Just like the artists were in a way as well. But you have a lot of people theorizing about the future of communication, the future of images, the future of human perception.

Speaker 1

15:33

And so there's a lot of literature around that from, you know, at every sort of end of the spectrum. And then there are people who are extremely critical and wary. And at the time, you know, this is the height of the anti-Vietnam protests. This is a moment when, you know, well, 10 years or so after the military-industrial complex is coined as a term, it is a concept that begins to really take root, and Particularly among the avant-garde, among the counterculture, among the very artists that...

Speaker 1

16:05

And some of the engineers that are part of EAT. So they actually came under a lot of flack. I mean, there are articles actually written in Artforum as well as elsewhere that essentially accused EAT of being complicit with, you know, the military and taking that as far as you might even go. So that was also part of why I think EAT had a very conflicted reception at the time and why maybe people haven't heard so much about it since then as well.

Speaker 1

16:37

And you get… it really crystallizes both the utopian and the dystopian attitudes toward technology at the time and what art's role was to either explore that or in fact, critique and negate that.

Speaker 2

16:52

Okay, and so this led to the Automation House, which I have so, what was it exactly? Did you see that part of the video? No, I didn't.

Speaker 2

17:00

That's crazy, okay. So what is it actually called?

Speaker 1

17:04

Oh, Automation House.

Speaker 2

17:05

It's called Automation House. Okay, I wrote that down correctly. So this is like their, the collaboration between, I think I got this right, American Foundation on Automation and Employment.

Speaker 2

17:15

So basically this argument that they were having at the time which is exactly like the same thing as today

Speaker 1

17:21

Yes,

Speaker 2

17:21

like the robots are gonna take your job

Speaker 1

17:23

Yeah,

Speaker 2

17:23

and so it's Kluver and he and the people and I forget the guy's name who is the organizer of that?

Speaker 1

17:30

Oh, Theodore keel.

Speaker 2

17:31

Theodore keel. Yeah, they like this building together, right?

Speaker 1

17:35

Yes Yeah,

Speaker 2

17:36

which is the like future of life house like what I don't really understand what it's supposed to be.

Speaker 1

17:43

Well, basically what, this is around in 1968, 1969. EAT had been moving around. They had a loft.

Speaker 1

17:52

They had various places to sort of meet. And they viewed the physical space as actually an important part of what they were doing because as much as they were actually building what would become a real network that was sprawled globally, they also wanted what they called a place to try things out, you know, a testing ground. And so they thought various physical spaces like a loft could be that place. Then they got into, again, through Rauschenberg in large part, talks with this group, the American Foundation on Automation and employment.

Speaker 1

18:31

And Theodore Kiel was the guy who had started this, was the head of this organization, and he was a labor lawyer. He'd actually become well-known for mediating a massive, I think it was a newspaper worker's strike in the early 60s. So suddenly all of these concerns about collective action, about technology and labor, come to the fore. And everyone is really worried that automation is...

Speaker 1

19:03

Robots will take our jobs. John F. Kennedy had said, you know, automation is the greatest threat facing humanity today. And so there was alarm.

Speaker 1

19:13

At the time, it was... They didn't even know about artificial intelligence. So, you know, it was really a widespread fear. And so this group that the labor lawyer was sort of running was actually trying to literally mediate these concerns.

Speaker 1

19:33

And they thought that they could find solutions to not only accept but embrace technology and recognize that it was a reality, that it wasn't going away, but also then somehow change the sphere of labor. So that labor that people could still be employed, it's just that what they did would change. And again, this is obviously incredibly- So

Speaker 2

19:58

it's a very positive utopian view of

Speaker 1

20:00

the people. In some ways, yes. It's almost very practical.

Speaker 1

20:03

They really wanted to try and solve this problem. But then it dovetailed very nicely with what EAT was trying to do, which was to say, How can we pragmatically understand the force of technology in a way that, you know, I think people were really almost willfully blind to. In other words, you reject it and you don't even want to understand it. You can't really understand it and therefore you're just, you know, going to condemn it.

Speaker 1

20:31

So they really wanted to bring people from different knowledge domains, fields of expertise together,

Speaker 2

20:38

and

Speaker 1

20:38

try and solve some of these problems. So they decided to build or renovate a townhouse in New York to create a center for job training, for workshops about automation and technology, for art exhibitions, for EAT to have their kind of headquarters there as well, for classes. And they got 2 young architects to essentially retrofit the building with closed circuit television cameras, video monitors.

Speaker 1

21:13

They had a video workstation there where 1 of the projects they did was actually convert a bunch of really experimental film pieces to video and then do the first cable broadcast of artists' television programming pretty much of all time. And this was in 1970, 71.

Speaker 2

21:35

Okay. Where was it broadcast?

Speaker 1

21:36

It was broadcast on local access, cable access in New York. That's pretty cool. On 2 channels.

Speaker 1

21:41

And they published the schedule in the Village Voice and like I think a few other newspapers. You've got

Speaker 2

21:46

a TV guide.

Speaker 1

21:47

But you'll see it. It's like Andy Warhol's dot, dot, dot. It's being screened at 8 PM on Tuesday.

Speaker 1

21:54

So that was really quite amazing. And so they were trying to create some kind of studio slash laboratory where all these things could happen. But it started to... It again really highlighted how despite all of the tensions and conflicts surrounding their relationships to technology, EAT really did have a social mission and was extremely political and wanted to, you know, change both social and political aspects of life.

Speaker 1

22:29

But it just, let's say from a different vantage point than maybe other artists did at the time.

Speaker 2

22:35

Yeah, because it seems very practical.

Speaker 1

22:37

Right, like... It was, yeah.

Speaker 2

22:39

It was, yeah. Because what ended up happening with the house, which is my concern the

Speaker 1

22:44

whole time? Well, then it was basically became... It eventually became a gallery.

Speaker 2

22:48

Oh, yeah, great.

Speaker 1

22:49

So you know, again, it's, it was both practical and really impractical because, you know, many of their ideas, again, or many of their plans, sort of petered out and, and the, I would say 1 of the most amazing and fantastic, but then also cataclysmic events for them was when EAT was commissioned to construct and realize the Pepsi pavilion at the World's Fair in Osaka in 1970. And I think I talked about this.

Speaker 2

23:20

You did.

Speaker 1

23:20

Yeah. But basically, that was the biggest single collaborative project they took on. And it was truly global. I mean, they worked with Japanese artists, engineers, European artists, engineers, obviously American artists, engineers.

Speaker 1

23:35

They tested it in LA, but they created a 180-degree hemispherical mirror dome that was inflated, made out of inflated mylar, essentially, which was the same technology that was being used for the first telecommunications satellites. It's like they would launch a reflective balloon into space and you're literally bouncing waves. Oh, cool. But instead, they used that technology, or essentially through much trial and error, jerry-rigged it so that they could create an inflated mirror dome.

Speaker 1

24:09

And then when you walked inside, there were all of these sound effects, different textures, different projections and performances. But the mirror dome itself created essentially three-dimensional, near holographic, inverted reflections. And you could capture this in photographs. So there are incredible photographs of this as well.

Speaker 1

24:35

But basically, they took on this massive project, and it, by all rights, was actually really created unprecedented experiences that were literally giving you both real and virtual images, as they called them. But Pepsi, to make a long story short, when the pavilion opened to the public, they basically thought, this is too weird.

Speaker 2

25:00

Oh no! And

Speaker 1

25:03

there were also huge budget cost overruns. There was also a fog sculpture surrounding the entire pavilion. I can't even get into all of these things.

Speaker 1

25:14

People thought the fog was a fire. So they sent, the first day they sent, you know, firetrucks screaming. Anyway, Pepsi kind of thought, well, actually, this is really weird. And so there was a breakdown, actually, there was essentially a legal dispute.

Speaker 1

25:32

And at the end of the day, EAT sort of got kicked out of the pavilion. They were literally smuggling their tapes, like their sort of, you know, eight-track tapes for programs out of the pavilion. And the end result is that Pepsi replaced all of these experimental sort of John Cage slash David Tudor composed soundtracks with It's a Small world.

Speaker 2

26:04

And that was effectively enough to like burn everyone out?

Speaker 1

26:07

It was traumatic, I think, for everyone. And I think the whole thing was traumatic. I mean, they still went on for, you know, a number of years.

Speaker 1

26:14

But after, let's say, that really, I think, was tough. And yet, you know, again, I would say it was the... It really demonstrated how global they could be actually, and how they could construct a global team that would create something of a very ambitious scale. And it just… it also just became an object lesson in all of the difficulties, of course, surrounding…

Speaker 2

26:43

Well, because what I had been wondering was that the first thing that got me into this was I was reading the the Conversations with Robert Irwin book. It was amazing. Yes.

Speaker 2

26:54

I love that book. And it's like just like 1 sentence. It talks about him hanging out with Richard Feynman. Do you know much about this?

Speaker 2

27:02

Like, I want to watch that movie. I want to... And it's like so... Such little information online.

Speaker 1

27:09

I don't know if there's footage of it, but... There's a

Speaker 2

27:12

photo of Robert Irwin and Richard Serra. I always mispronounce his name. In like an anechoic chamber.

Speaker 2

27:18

Yes, exactly. And they're like hanging out. But yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 1

27:21

That's a famous sort of interaction where Robert Irwin was experimenting with… basically would shape his work where he's really interested in shutting out all sensation and then he goes on to create works that explore the Gonsfeld or this perceptual limit in the same way that an anechoic chamber does. But yeah, Richard Feynman was a member of EAT, so was Robert Irwin, So were a lot of physicists. Again, was part of this kind of crazy network of people.

Speaker 1

27:51

And what was great was that there were a lot of, not a lot, but there were definitely a number of analogous collaboration programs that were like EAT, often modeled after that, it. 1 was this program where Irwin was sort of meeting a lot of these people through. It was for an exhibition at LACMA, the LA County Museum of Art. And it was called Art and Technology.

Speaker 1

28:17

It was all very confusing.

Speaker 2

28:19

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1

28:19

But it was basically for an exhibition. So they were very much inspired by EAT, but this exhibition was sort of like the end point. So in other words, you would commission all these collaborations.

Speaker 1

28:30

They paired...

Speaker 2

28:31

But it was this very corporate thing, right? Like there are all these companies and like...

Speaker 1

28:34

Yes. But EAT was also embroiled with all of these companies as well, like Lockheed Martin. You know, basically the aerospace industry in Southern California. Like the Jet Propulsion laboratory.

Speaker 1

28:45

That's where Irwin went. So they did the same thing. They paired artists with engineers. But it was ultimately to end up back in the museum.

Speaker 1

28:53

That's what I find really fascinating. And then to me the difference is that EAT, it took the opposite trajectory. It tried to explode in scale and could not be confined by the museum. It did not fit into any of the traditional institutions.

Speaker 2

29:08

Did everything they built, was it all site-specific?

Speaker 1

29:11

Not necessarily. I mean, you know, part of what they wanted to do and what they did create was almost even a set of equipment. So for example, you could go check out the weird hybrid control panel that had been invented essentially or engineered for this other performance.

Speaker 1

29:33

Now it just exists there. You can go take it and it's like a library. You can check it out and use it for something else. And yet the other thing is that often what they created does not conform to traditional genres of sculpture or painting or drawings.

Speaker 1

29:51

And so a lot of what they made was either lost or some of it sitting in disrepair in like an engineer's garage somewhere or an artist's studio. And so the paper trail, so to speak, well, they left a voluminous paper trail, but not a trail of, let's say, traditional art objects. And that's, I think, also part of why it's been hard for people to wrap their heads around what this was or what they did.

Speaker 2

30:16

But this is like an ongoing issue in the art world, right? Like maintaining all this stuff. Yes.

Speaker 2

30:21

I mean, even... I don't know the history of it nearly like you do, but like all the Tang Lee stuff, the things that break themselves,

Speaker 1

30:28

which

Speaker 2

30:29

are amazing,

Speaker 1

30:29

but they're

Speaker 2

30:30

like... The museum kind of takes the fun out of it because there'll be like a red button that you can hit like once an hour. And then all like this thing will just dance and so they fall apart.

Speaker 1

30:38

If, yeah. And there are many, it's funny, there are a lot of exhibitions even nowadays where those things still don't, aren't working or like the technicians, the conservators have to come and, you know, sort of they're always panicked. But Tengli actually was really 1 of the first works that Kluver, the EAT engineer, they collaborated on a piece that was basically a kinetic sculpture that destroyed itself in the Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden in 1960.

Speaker 1

31:05

And of course, it didn't really... It sort of just short-circuited. So it was, again, supposed to be, I think, kind of spectacular, and in the end, it just kind of fizzled out. But That was 1 of Kluver's first collaborations with an artist.

Speaker 1

31:18

But yes, so the idea of incorporating new technologies and new materials, or even unorthodox materials and unorthodox technologies, that is a really interesting problem for the production of art, especially starting around the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and even more so now, of course, with, you know, God knows what, you know, an artist is using Bitcoin. I have no idea what they're going to do in the future.

Speaker 2

31:41

You wouldn't believe the questions you got on Twitter, by the way. Like people are sending in stuff. It's very, it's like tech.

Speaker 2

31:46

It was definitely a blockchain related question.

Speaker 1

31:48

Oh no! I'm going to have to frantically Wikipedia that again. But just to sort of finish that thought, I think what was really amazing specifically about some of what EAT made, and this is present in, for example, a lot of Rauschenberg's own collaborative artworks from the time that he made with Kluver under the auspices of EAT, is that Rauschenberg said, look, I'm making this thing with a transistor radio right now, and they've done all these complex things to it to make the effects they want.

Speaker 1

32:24

At the time, in the 60s, transistor radio was not a mass technology. It had just come onto the market. It was a very new thing. Fast forward to the 90s, this piece, which is a sort of sculpture that has these radios embedded in it, is acquired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Speaker 1

32:42

Well, the Centre Pompidou is a very funny building. Again, to make a long story short, it's a very weird piece of architecture, but it acts like a Faraday cage. So it was blocking all signal. Also at the time that they had constructed the piece in the 60s, in the mid-60s, AM was like FM and FM was like AM in terms of programming.

Speaker 1

33:03

So AM had more pop music, etc. FM had more sort of news, blah, blah, blah. Rauschenberg wanted to... I think at the time it was FM and then so they wanted to switch it to AM as well.

Speaker 1

33:15

Anyway, let's just say that in the 90s they had to do this whole retrofitting and then successively update the radios and receivers in this piece over time to the point where now there are digital radios and receivers in the sculpture, in this metal sculpture from 1965. And Rauschenberg said, that's great, do whatever you want to do. And in a way, he's taking this idea of the ready-made, which is this revolutionary 20th century idea, and he's saying the ready-made itself can be updated. It can sort of change and adapt to technological obsolescence.

Speaker 1

33:52

And that is really fascinating and groundbreaking.

Speaker 2

33:57

Well, it's particularly interesting when you take the modern eye and bring it into these exhibits where like things that are supposed to represent the future now look like this kitsch retro. Yes. Like there's the, I forget what it's called, but it's the, at the Tate, that big tower of TVs.

Speaker 1

34:13

Yes, the Nam June Paik. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2

34:16

And you look at it and you're like, oh, this is like cool, like, oh, and very 1984-esque. But I don't think it's intended or was intended that way.

Speaker 1

34:24

It wasn't, but some... So many artists... Again, it's a sliding scale.

Speaker 1

34:30

Many artists at the time are actually interested in obsolete technologies and in exploring those. At the same time, there are other artists who are interested in the newest, latest thing, and that's what they want. A question I often ask artists that are alive still is, you know, if you could do it all over again, would you use a different technology to achieve the effect that you wanted back then? And some say, yes.

Speaker 1

34:54

I've even heard an artist say, yes, I actually want to take back my works that are in the museum and change them and put them back, which museums really don't want.

Speaker 2

35:03

No takebacks.

Speaker 1

35:04

But again, it points up this crazy contradiction or this conundrum that people are facing. Some artists say, no, I wouldn't change a thing. I want it to reflect that medium, that sort of form of the time and that's something I want to preserve.

Speaker 1

35:23

So it just depends on what you were trying to do and what questions you were trying to ask.

Speaker 2

35:30

Okay. Do you have thoughts? So Kat and I both went to Venice this year. We did.

Speaker 2

35:34

We did. That's really… It's very weird. We are. I'll be clear.

Speaker 2

35:39

It was the first 1 of those I've ever been to.

Speaker 1

35:42

It's a big… Yeah.

Speaker 2

35:44

It

Speaker 1

35:44

only happens every 2 years.

Speaker 2

35:46

And so you went, right? Because you wrote a review.

Speaker 1

35:49

Yeah, we had a whole, yeah, series of pieces.

Speaker 2

35:53

And there's a distinct lack of technology at this 1, right?

Speaker 1

35:58

That's an interesting question. I wouldn't, you know, that again I think points to what maybe has changed between, let's say, the mid-60s and now, which is that, of course, consumer technology has expanded to the extent that everyone has a computer in their pocket. So it's so ubiquitous that in a way, I wouldn't say that the Biennale, for example, was devoid of technology, I think it was everywhere in a lot of different ways.

Speaker 1

36:23

But this exhibition in particular, was focusing on, let's say, an investigation of ideas about primitivism, about indigenous cultures, about nature, about spirituality. And those are definitely things that, you know, in a way that explains why you saw a lot of, let's say, more traditional craft or form in the show. So you're totally right. It's just that I would say, A, we often don't notice it as much because it's not foregrounded as the raison d'etre of an artwork.

Speaker 1

37:02

It's just there. And on the flip side, yes, it might, I would say that people are interested right now in exploring the flip side of the acceleration of technology and its omnipresence, they're interested in also slowing things down in other kinds of perception or in even countering some of the kinds of media saturation

Speaker 2

37:30

that we have. I did love sharpening a MacBook Air. Like that guy.

Speaker 1

37:33

Well, I literally just thought of that. Yeah, Shimabuku. Yeah, that's so great.

Speaker 2

37:37

What is it? The Snow Monkeys Remember Snow, too?

Speaker 1

37:40

Exactly. That guy's the best. I just was thinking that, actually. It was 1 of my favorite pieces, or 2 pieces in the show.

Speaker 1

37:46

And yeah, exactly. So again, such a simple idea with the snow monkeys, but of course, that's video. But then with the sharpening the MacBook Air, again, a very simple idea, but very extremely sharp. So

Speaker 2

37:59

in thinking about like the legacy of EAT,

Speaker 1

38:01

who

Speaker 2

38:02

do you think is doing some of the most interesting work in that intersection of

Speaker 1

38:07

art and technology? Again I would say what's exciting in a sense is that so many artists have so much more access to advanced technology simply because of the proliferation of these advanced technologies in everyday life. On the flip side, I would say the cloisters in which technology is actually being sort of produced or created now are still in many ways as walled off to, you know, the guy on the street as they were before.

Speaker 1

38:44

So Some of the artists that I think are really either A, pushing the boundaries of what art and technology can do together, but also of really looking at technologies or making it a point to try and engage technologies that most ordinary people or artists wouldn't really have access to. 1 of them is Trevor Paglen, who, for example, he... Well, he's kind of a crazy guy. He has a series of incredible photographs that are basically taken from remote sites and with very special camera technology of drone planes.

Speaker 2

39:28

So

Speaker 1

39:28

there are these beautiful photographs often of an incredibly brilliant night sky, and then there's a tiny speck and it's a drone. He has to do all of these things to get that sort of picture. And what he's doing in many different ways, and in lots of other projects as well, is to try and render visible or sensible to us things that are absolutely not visible to us normally, or even physically.

Speaker 1

39:56

So for example, he is really interested in all of these automated technologies that are post-vision, so to speak. Literally things that we cannot visualize because they don't take place in an optical realm. So how do you start to even talk about it or engage it or make someone somehow get some sense of what those processes are. And he's really someone who I think has done that.

Speaker 2

40:28

Yeah, I was just about to jump into some of these questions from Twitter. This is definitely a new experience for me. I will say.

Speaker 2

40:36

I mean, this is a new experience for us too. I should retype some of these questions because it makes me sound like I can't read. Although I have like a fourth grade reading level probably. I'm sure not.

Speaker 2

40:47

Okay, so there, this Anna Sophia Almagro, I also butcher everyone's name, she asked a question about blockchain. Are you at it? Yeah, I don't mean to be patronizing, like what's your level of in the know?

Speaker 1

41:03

We actually published a piece about Bitcoin and the blockchain. It was a media study. It was by a media studies person.

Speaker 1

41:12

And I will say I relied on a lot of help because my, as I mentioned, literally just by coincidence, my partner is a technologist and actually the rest of my family are all scientists and engineers as well, which is explain something, I guess. But We had to do a lot of research to make sure we were accurately characterizing the technology and yeah, I learned a lot obviously when we worked on that piece. Okay,

Speaker 2

41:39

so you're on board. Then I have a question for you. Yes, yeah.

Speaker 1

41:41

Although, you know, this is like a year and a

Speaker 2

41:44

half, 2 years ago, so

Speaker 1

41:45

you can test my recall.

Speaker 2

41:48

It's a, well, Kat and I can jump in at any point. So is blockchain being used to track authenticity in art? So meaning digital art.

Speaker 1

41:58

Wow, not to my knowledge yet. Not to my knowledge yet.

Speaker 2

42:02

I don't think I've heard. I've heard of 1. Really?

Speaker 2

42:05

1 project. Yeah, because you get the idea, right? So it's tracking authenticity. And that is my interpretation is that it's incredibly difficult to create valuable digital art if it's A, like, you know, falling apart, because like, you know, your browser is no longer compatible.

Speaker 2

42:22

But also, you know, if you like Photoshop paint something, you can just duplicate it infinitely.

Speaker 1

42:27

Right.

Speaker 2

42:28

So you have the signature on this, the original. Okay, so maybe, maybe not.

Speaker 1

42:33

I mean, it, to me, I, not to my knowledge yet, but I haven't really looked into it in this way. And I guess, again, what I would say is that it's an incredibly, Well, it's a very intuitive, but it's also a perverse idea because I think a lot of artists right now who are exploring something like the blockchain are interested in disrupting... Well, that's a terrible word to use, so scratch that.