7 Parallel Processing

There is no profit in art beyond its experience.1

Barbara Rose, 1970

By 1969, Stephen Nowlin had tuned in. He had definitely dropped out. But what really turned him on wasn’t the readily available psychedelics to be had as he traveled around coastal California. True, many people his age had, as one writer from the Golden State observed, fled the rational world of science and technology “as if from a place inhabited by plague.” However, it was these very topics which so fascinated the once and future art student.2

Having growing up amid the prosperity that the Cold War aerospace industry had brought to Southern California, in 1966 Nowlin moved to Oakland for studies at the California College of Arts and Crafts. He attended a few Happenings in the Bay Area, experimented with personal video equipment, and made music with electronic synthesizers.3 But none of his art school classes reflected these trends. However, E.A.T.’s ripples had begun to resonate within the West Coast art scene. So, in late 1968, Nowlin literally left his homework on the drawing board and moved back to Southern California.

While working for an architectural firm in Pasadena, Nowlin started hearing about a new art initiative taking shape at the California Institute of Technology. Like MIT’s efforts in the visual arts, the art program at Caltech—a school smaller in terms of students but MIT’s equal in terms of prestige, star researchers, and close ties to the defense establishment—started as a “humanizing move” that could help the school attract and retain students.4 Nowlin soon found employment as a draftsman at an astronomy lab at Caltech and began spending time with people associated with the art initiative.

He quickly realized that many Caltech faculty imagined “The Artist” as some sort of throwback to 1940s-era bohemian stereotypes (picture a solitary artist with easel and beret) and thought of art making as a type of hedonistic therapy, not an actual profession. Years later, Nowlin recalled a campus encounter with physicist Richard Feynman. While Nowlin was on his way to Caltech’s main computing center, where he was learning to write code for making art, the Nobel Prize-winning scientist was headed, sketchbook in hand, to a live-model drawing class. (One can imagine Frank Malina dismissing Feynman’s Degas-like sketches as just like the “nudes, flowers, landscapes, and dead fish” he had rebelled against years earlier.) Eventually, Nowlin returned to school, this time at the California Institute of the Arts where avant-garde experimentation was more encouraged. After earning a BFA and MFA, Nowlin accepted a faculty position at the Art Center College of Design, just a few miles from the arroyo where Malina had done his first rocket experiments decades earlier.

In addition to deepening his appreciation of science and technology as a “more complex kind of beauty,” Nowlin’s experiences with Caltech’s arts program alerted him to more powerful currents surging westward from New York City as well as new forces generated within Southern California. Starting around 1967, engineers, artists, corporate managers, and museum curators initiated two major art-and-technology initiatives rooted in the Los Angeles area. The sheer scale and cost of them ensured an abundance of media coverage. A half century later, these two projects radiate strong signals from the archives that attract a historian’s attention. As with 9 Evenings, this documentation offers a chance to more closely appraise the involvement of engineers along with their artist partners.

Reflecting Billy Klüver’s evolving ideas about the relationship between artists and industry, in 1968 Experiments in Art and Technology formed a partnership with the American soft drink maker, PepsiCo. The company hired E.AT. to design its pavilion in Osaka, Japan for Expo ’70, the first world’s fair held in Asia. Although managed out of E.A.T.’s New York headquarters, a significant amount of the research and development for the Pepsi Pavilion was conducted in and around Los Angeles.

A parallel project was launched by Maurice Tuchman, a young curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). LACMA’s effort—appropriately called the Art and Technology Program—catalyzed dozens of collaborations between artists, corporations, and the engineers who worked for them. Some of the artworks they produced would be shown at Expo ’70, as part of the United States’ official program, and then, a year later, at a major exhibition Tuchman organized at LACMA.

Even though the E.A.T. and LACMA projects were conceived, funded, and managed as separate entities, they happened concurrently, like a computer executing a series of related calculations at the same time. Not surprisingly, considerable cross-pollination occurred between the people associated with the pavilion and the artists and engineers Tuchman brought together. And, of course, all of this activity was taking place as arbiters of culture were striving to position Los Angeles as a new center of contemporary art that might rival the New York establishment.

LACMA’s Art and Technology Program and the Pepsi Pavilion project stand as high points of the art-and-technology movement of the long 1960s. Both efforts happened in the midst of increased scrutiny of the art world’s connections to corporate sponsorship, debates about artists’ ownership of their work, and criticism about the lack of diversity among the artists included in major exhibitions. As the Vietnam War intensified and American economy began to falter, a backlash against technology polarized these reactions further as the art-and-technology movement surged markedly and then just as quickly began to ebb. Even though an increasingly capable community of artists and technologists were securing new institutional footholds, questions arose as to whether large-scale, formal collaborations could still electrify critics and audiences.

Of Kandy Kolors and a Cowboy Curator

For much of the 1960s, calling Los Angeles “artistically barren” was as easy as finding fresh oranges there. Ambitious artists were obliged to travel to New York while the world outside Manhattan was understood as nothing more than overlooked regions at best, centers of talentless provincialism at worst. But, just as any history of the art-and-technology movement that ignores the role of engineers is lacking, so too any history of modern art that focuses only on New York is incomplete.5

At first, the “priestly caste of critics and curators” greeted the emergence of a thriving new community of galleries and studios in Los Angeles “with all the enthusiasm and bonhomie of the sixteenth-century church confronted with a heliocentric universe.”6 One critic, who judged the city a “vital pathology,” categorized art made in Los Angeles as either “sweaty” or “sterile”—a judgment referring to the lurid tableaus of Edward Kienholz and the “desperate prettiness” exemplified by so-called Light and Space artists.7

Well before Stephen Nowlin moved north for art school, his hometown region had started cultivating a thriving arts scene. Led by curator Walter Hopps, a bespectacled, smartly dressed autodidact in art history (his formal schooling was in biochemistry), the Ferus Gallery helped spark the growth of a new creative community based in West Hollywood. Artists, many of them recent transplants to Los Angeles, showed their work at Ferus and the other galleries that began clustering along La Cienega Boulevard. The atmosphere was avowedly masculine, the group’s members expressing themselves through surfing, hot rods, and philandering, as well as their art.

Ties to UCLA’s art department and local art schools where experimentation was encouraged fueled the scene further. Ferus presented Andy Warhol’s first solo show in 1962, the same year that Hopps, his peripatetic nature heightened by his intake of amphetamines, curated the first exhibition of pop art in the United States. Held at the Pasadena Art Museum, the “New Painting of Common Objects” show featured artists from both coasts, including Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ed Ruscha. The next year, Hopps’s retrospective of Marcel Duchamp’s work in Pasadena further riled the locals (often branded as “rich, retired, and reactionary”) but signaled Southern California as an emerging center for modern art.8

New arrivals increased the momentum. In March 1965, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—located about a mile east of La Cienega’s gallery scene—formally opened its doors. Although Time poked fun at its location (“temple on the tar pits”) it promised Angelenos “vastly more substance than was ever to be seen in a DeMille sunset.” In a city both prosperous and growing (and yet also riven by extreme racial and economic inequality—the Watts riots broke out in August 1965), LACMA debuted just as the region seemed “uniquely ready to spend money on culture.”9 This transformation had already been noticed by some mainstream magazines, which pronounced Los Angeles as “second only to New York City as an art market.”10 It offered, in other words, a vastly different arts environment compared to what Frank Malina experienced in the 1930s.

The migration of Artforum from San Francisco to Los Angeles provided another sign of the seismic shift under way. Located upstairs from the Ferus Gallery, the magazine brought lots (some said too much) attention to that gallery’s artists, while extolling a style critics branded as the “Finish Fetish.” The term, playing on the supposed superficiality of all things Californian, referenced a popular trend for minimalist artworks meticulously crafted using industrial plastics, resins, and paints. These sculptural works paralleled the “kandy-kolored” shimmer that writer Tom Wolfe found so tantalizing in California’s thriving, custom-car culture. It was a provocative style, to be sure. One (New York) critic, livid after viewing an exhibition of so-called Finish Fetish artists, savaged their work as “fancy baubles for the rich.”11

Art critic Barbara Rose, who had been married to artist Frank Stella in the early 1960s, displayed a more open mind when describing her visit to “our new ‘second city.’” Like Don Draper, the existentially troubled advertising executive from television’s Mad Men, Rose found the “brilliantly sunny, palm-studded, Day-Glo landscape” a welcome alternative to Gotham’s “frigid lofts and littered slums.” Los Angeles artists achieved a “machine-like precision” with “polished, slippery surfaces” that suggested the “pervasive eroticism” of body builders seen at Venice Beach. Overall, she found the city’s galleries thoroughly infused with vibrant popular culture and artworks that promised an “orgiastic future.”12 (One senses that Rose enjoyed her time in Los Angeles.)

Rose’s former classmate, Maurice Tuchman, was one of those people who looked at Los Angeles and saw a sleek transistorized future. To hear Ed Kienholz describe his friend was to imagine a superhero: a “Sebring-trimmed, 18-hour-a-day dynamo,” a curatorial cowboy who learned to drive by barreling his new Ford Mustang down Los Angeles’ freeways, and brought “karate chops of effectiveness” to the city’s art scene (all while pining for his sweetheart, a soap opera actress named Blossom Plumb).13 The reality was only somewhat less epic as Tuchman’s career of curator-as-celebrity traced a boom-and-bust pattern familiar in his new hometown.

Tuchman grew up modestly in the Bronx where he imagined becoming a comic-strip artist while aimlessly taking courses at City College of New York. Then he discovered a facsimile copy of the Book of Kells, a ninth-century illuminated manuscript, and the possibilities of art history seized his attention. He took graduate courses at Columbia University with famed critic Meyer Schapiro and counted Clement Greenberg as a mentor. He intended to focus on medieval art but, lacking requisite skills in Latin, turned to modern and contemporary art. A position at the Guggenheim revealed the ways in which a museum could be a mesmerizing “confluence of art and power, scholarship and money.” He brought this perspective westward in 1964 when, just twenty-seven years old, he joined LACMA’s curatorial staff. Tuchman arrived in Los Angeles “particularly sensitive,” he recalled, to the city’s “futuristic character . . . especially as it is manifested in advanced technology.”14

Despite his new address, Tuchman opted to survey New York’s abstract expressionists for his first major show. The following year, however, he organized a controversial retrospective of Kienholz’s work. Chief catalyst for the uproar was Back Seat Dodge ’38, a lurid sculptural piece made in 1964 that portrayed an anonymous couple having sex amid beer bottles and other detritus inside a truncated auto body. Censorship attempts by local politicians drew lines of visitors that stretched down Wilshire Boulevard. The publicity secured Tuchman’s reputation as an enfant terrible of the museum world. A year later, Kienholz penned his flattering profile of the new “super curator” for the Los Angeles Times. At the essay’s end, the artist signaled his friend’s next move: Tuchman was planning to broker a “historical marriage” that would combine the “talents of the best artists” with “the incredible resources and advanced technology of industry,” an endeavor that would “revamp the face of America, starting with California.”15

Corralling Missy’s Corporations

The “incredible resources” Kienholz referred to were also quite diverse. First, and what most people knew about, were the companies connected with the city’s film and television studios. The Hollywood sign was visible from LACMA, at least on smog free days. Less noticeable but far more economically and demographically important was the aerospace industry. At the peak of the Cold War, aircraft and missile production accounted for a third of the region’s manufacturing jobs. Between 1959 and 1967, these companies, supercharged by the Apollo program and the war in Vietnam, saw employment of engineers and related employees soar nearly 200 percent.16 Just as Billy Klüver saw technologies from Bell Labs as a “palette” he might share with artists, Tuchman viewed Los Angeles, with its vast expanse of corporate wealth and engineers’ technical skills, as a deep reservoir he would draw on.

A few Angelenos had already started tapping this well on their own as new materials and processes slowly diffused from factories to artists’ studios. Around 1965, for example, Larry Bell learned about a vapor deposition process used to apply ultrathin coatings to aircraft canopies and camera lenses. Bell hired a Los Angeles company to fabricate glass panes to his specifications but eventually acquired his own vacuum chamber and, after reading a textbook on thin-film technology, started to experiment.17 Bell assembled these coated pieces of glass into artworks that presented viewers with simultaneous and shifting senses of opacity, iridescence, and transparency. Although the light and space movement was sometimes criticized—as late as 1971, one writer still sneered that it was as easy to succeed as an artist in Los Angeles as it was “to be a stringer of beads”—naysayers seemed unwilling (or incapable) of appreciating the technical acumen needed to produce such visually rich works.18

Los Angeles’ extensive and varied technological ecosystem produced a range of companies and business for artists to connect with. There were, of course, the large and prosperous industrial conglomerates—the sort that Tuchman gravitated to—which employed thousands of engineers, technicians, and other workers. But there were also scores of smaller firms, some of them subcontractors for the larger aerospace companies. For example, Jack Brogan had made furniture in his native Tennessee before moving to Los Angeles in 1958 and opening a specialty fabrication business. Brogan crafted custom-made objects for local companies, including a prototype space station model for a local company that specialized in aircraft engines and environmental systems for NASA’s space vehicles.19 At a LACMA show in 1966, Brogan met artist Robert Irwin who soon hired him to make a series of meticulously crafted acrylic plastic prisms, including a thirty-two-foot-tall, optically clear obelisk, its surface polished to perfection like a telescope’s mirror.20

In 1971, when Tuchman highlighted the final results from his Art and Technology Program, he was circumspect as to where the idea for merging art and industry first originated. But the curator acknowledged he had been “studying the nature and location of corporate resources in California” for some time.21 When he visited the 1966 Venice Biennale, the “irrelevance of most of the art to American life” left Tuchman feeling “disturbed.”22 Other factors shaped his thinking as well. For example, in 1965, the Long Beach campus of the California State University system hosted the International Sculpture Symposium. Months before E.A.T. and 9 Evenings first made national headlines, this innovative show connected artists with local industry.23 For instance, Now, a piece jointly made by sculptor Piotr Kowalski with technicians from North American Aviation, used underwater explosions of dynamite to mold massive sheets of stainless steel into gently curved shapes.

Tuchman and Klüver were not, however, the only people with the foresight to imagine the possibilities that could happen when artists were embedded in industrial settings. In 1966, London-based artists Barbara Steveni and John Latham formed the Artist Placement Group (APG). Robert Adeane, who sat on the board of companies such as Shell, helped Latham and Steveni situate artists within corporate settings. But where Tuchman saw these partnerships in largely instrumental terms, the APG brought a more theoretical and activist-inclined orientation to the table. With the belief that “context is half the work,” APG wanted to see artists function as independent actors, even participating in companies’ decision making. This idealistic goal—one critic labeled it “conceptual engineering”—prompted one IBM executive to remark, “If you [APG] are doing what I think you are doing, I wouldn’t advise my company to have anything to do with you. And if you’re not, you’re not worth taking into account anyway.”24 The APG’s activities, which persisted well into the 1980s, suggest just how much the idea of embedding artists into industrial settings was in the air at the time, and not just in the United States.

A final but critical ingredient helped Tuchman launch his art-and-technology effort: Marilyn B. “Missy” Chandler. The socialite and philanthropist had read Kienholz’s laudatory profile of Tuchman in the Los Angeles Times, which her husband Otis Chandler published. The next day, the influential arts patron wrote Tuchman at his LACMA office and revealed that she had recently “been approached by an exciting new foundation . . . called Experiments in Art and Technology,” which she had learned about through her friend Marian Javits. Chandler also recalled how, at Tuchman’s recent show, “American Sculpture of the Sixties,” she was “startled and delighted” to hear that artists were “most anxious to work” with “local scientific and electronic companies and engineers.”25 Chandler explained how Javits was helping “to bring industries and the artists together” in New York. Likewise, as E.A.T.’s self-christened “West Coast catalyst,” Chandler wanted to gauge possible interest for a “parallel group,” especially as she had the ability to “attract the industries in the area” to such an effort.26

Four years later, the catalog cover for LACMA’s Art and Technology Program featured small portraits of artists and the executives (including Otis Chandler) whose companies had supported them. All were men, and the group was overwhelmingly white. Despite this exclusion, Chandler and her network handily connected Tuchman to executives at companies ranging from Walt Disney Productions to Hughes Aircraft. By the end of 1967, she had helped persuade more than a dozen of them—what Tuchman referred to as “Missy’s Corporations”—to join the effort.27 Tuchman, for his part, came to realize that getting corporate chieftains to donate time and money was one thing. The real work was persuading middle managers to follow through on their bosses’ commitments. A “congenial company representative” or “alert sympathetic engineer” proved a “critical factor” as the artists Tuchman invited to join the program started touring corporate facilities.

When he visited Missy Chandler at her estate in San Marino, Tuchman would have driven past nearby Caltech. “It was just so impressive to me,” he recalled, “the home of geniuses.”28 One of the intellects Tuchman tapped was physicist Richard Feynman. As a consultant to the LACMA project, Feynman sometimes accompanied curators on visits to companies interested in collaborating with an artist. While Tuchman was undoubtedly impressed with Feynman, the physicist—whose appreciation of modern art did not always equal his understanding of science—reacted less positively to some of the artists he met. A few, he later complained, “had absolutely no idea about the real world” and saw technologists as “grand magicians who could make anything.” Even worse were the “absolute fakes” who made “no sense whatsoever.” (James Lee Byars, whose conceptual works flirted with Eastern mysticism, especially annoyed him.) But a few artists, such as Light and Space artist Robert Irwin, expressed ideas that seemed incomprehensible at first but which Feynman eventually found “interesting and wonderful.”29

For a program designed to exploit the resources of Southern California’s corporations and challenge New York’s hegemony in the art world, Tuchman recruited quite a few artists from his old hometown. The report he edited when his initiative ended included material on seventy-six artists. Thirty-four of them were from New York, twenty-two were Angelenos, and nearly all were white men. The notable exception was Frederick Eversley, an African-American engineer-turned-artist who made reflective and translucent sculptures from cast resin and other nontraditional materials. Tuchman, however, only engaged with one woman, Channa Davis, and ultimately her project wasn’t carried out. Scores of other artists (including a “high proportion” of women) sent Tuchman unsolicited proposals, and some of them toured corporate facilities. However, in the end, all of the artists who exhibited their work for the Art and Technology Program had been directly recruited by Tuchman or his associates.30

Tuchman’s original plan was based on a two-part art-and-technology exhibition. One would be historical, demonstrating the “extent to which modern art has been concerned with the implications of the technological revolution.” This would include works from early twentieth-century artists, such as members of the Bauhaus and Russian constructivists. The other part would focus on contemporary collaborations between artists and industry. “It is expected,” he noted, that this alliance “will prove so profitable both to industry and to art that a permanent marriage of the advanced forces” in both areas would occur.31

LACMA’s trustees, many of them corporate executives themselves, hesitated before formally approving Tuchman’s project. Tuchman’s progress reports to them predicted at least $140,000 of support from some twenty companies, each contributing $7,000. By April 1968, the museum’s leaders had acquiesced. In the end, thirty-eight companies contributed some level of funding as the museum created a variety of categories (from “Patron Sponsor” to “Benefactor”) to encourage wider participation. LACMA itself gave generous support for the Art and Technology Program. Because companies also donated equipment, materials, and engineers’ time, estimates of the final outlay for Tuchman’s effort are difficult to make but it’s not unreasonable to think it cost as much as $3 million in today’s currency.32

Tuchman expected some artists to express moral opposition to collaborating “with the temples of Capitalism,” especially “militarily involved industry.” But this issue “never became consequential,” leading Tuchman to publicly compare the “politically conscious artist” of the late 1960s to “Trotsky writing for the Hearst Empire.”33 What many artists did find odd, if not objectionable, was the instrument Tuchman used to bind them to corporate partners. A five-page contract spelled out sponsorship terms, including travel reimbursement and honorarium, the total of which was not to exceed $4,800. More problematic, however, was a clause stipulating that the “principal work of art created” would become the sponsoring company’s property. Companies were asked to sign a similar reciprocal agreement. To be fair, the artists would own “additional” works resulting from the sponsorship and Tuchman encouraged them to “plan their work in series” so as to “acquire most of the results.”34

Guy Williams, a self-taught modernist painter and art teacher, critiqued LACMA’s initiative in the pages of Artforum. While not opposed to art and technology per se, Williams rejected the idea that any museum—let alone “the participating corporations manufacturing for the War Machine”—should decide the future of art. Instead, he suggested archly, maybe LACMA and NASA could jointly send an artist into space thus abolishing “any minor differences that might still exist between science and art.” Or, since LACMA seemed determined to promote “art in service to the Establishment,” perhaps it could partner with the Los Angeles Police Department and the California Flower Growers Association. Together, they could make a giant mechanical cop, covered in flowers and wielding a truncheon to “pound the papier-mâché heads of daisy-plated demonstrators” at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl Parade.35

Tuchman labored to educate their community about his larger goals. Art and Technology, he later said, was “an experiment” (as opposed to “mere ‘art making’”), which needed to “be made coherent and explicit in order to be validated.”36 Hence, the contract. Only Claes Oldenburg, a New York-based artist whose stock was rising rapidly, seems to have offered much spirited opposition. In a long list of counterdemands, Oldenburg noted that LACMA’s program, like E.A.T., would “influence future collaborations.” Therefore, securing an “honorable” contract was “an integral part of the collaboration of art and technology.” His demand was a larger honorarium and first-class plane tickets. The cowboy curator stuck to his guns.

Gradually, word began to circulate about LACMA’s new program. Grace Glueck at the New York Times had been writing mostly favorable articles about art and technology since profiling Klüver in 1965. Besides highlighting “art world luminaries”—Roy Lichtenstein, Rauschenberg, and a joint effort by Robert Irwin and James Turrell—LACMA had recruited, Glueck stressed its “experimental” nature. “If the imagination of corporation personnel can’t co-exist with the artist’s creativity,” Tuchman told her, “then we’ll learn that maybe artists should stay in their own studios.”37 On the West Coast, critic Henry J. Seldis applauded Tuchman’s “selectivity” in the face of an “increased tempo of art-technological experimentations” that served to both “expand the artist’s options and to open the engineer’s mind.” There still remained, Seldis noted, the challenge of distinguishing between “undeniable creative advances and sensational gadgeteering novelty.” Klüver would have approved of Seldis’s suggestion that these collaborations could ultimately help technology “move closer to the core of human existence.”38

The existence of two prominent art-and-technology efforts running in parallel naturally invited comparisons. At first inspection, E.A.T. and LACMA’s Art and Technology Program appeared similar. From a technical perspective, the input of electrical engineers would prove central as the work of art, in both senses, was electrified. The premise of collaboration was central to both efforts that were, their advocates said, best understood as experiments with final outcomes difficult to predict. Likewise, the emphasis in both endeavors was on the creative process itself, not the product (as Klüver had said, “We’re not interested in art”). However, as a curator, Tuchman was certainly eager to see “production of very good and original art” as he, more than E.A.T., took a more elitist position as to who was a good artist.39

As he contacted industry leaders to secure support for his program, Tuchman deployed rationales similar to what Klüver and Rauschenberg had used for E.A.T. Funding for the arts, he noted, remained miserly but corporate largesse could address this. Meanwhile, “exposure to creative personalities” might benefit companies “in both direct and subtle ways.”40 Sensing an opportunity that transcended passive patronage, Business Week reported how company leaders were starting to see sponsorship of artists as a way for “conveying the excitement of engineering and scientific advances to the public.” Making a comparison to industry’s investment in curiosity-driven research, some executives pointed to value in supporting artist-engineer partnerships. “Anything that might come out of electronics, technology, and art,” one manager at RCA noted, “is something we ought to have a stake in.” Having an artist-in-residence could likewise boost company morale, suggested Lockheed’s president, while artist-engineer partnerships could have a “catalytic effect on each other’s ideas.”41

Although the motivations expressed by their corporate patrons might have been similar, nonetheless E.A.T. and LACMA were pursuing different strategies.42 For starters, E.A.T.’s supporters were constantly on the prowl for money to support the group’s growing ambitions. Tuchman, on the other hand, had the implicit backing of a major museum and wealthy patrons. In principle, E.A.T. presented itself as a neutral matchmaker, willing to connect just about any serious artist with an engineer or technician. Tuchman, meanwhile, already had a list of well-established artists in mind whom he sought to entice into his project. Seen another way, E.A.T. sought to establish pairings between individuals whereas LACMA’s program aimed to connect specific artists with corporations—what Tuchman termed the “one artist-one company nexus”—such that calling his initiative Art and Industry would have been just as appropriate.43

At the more fundamental level, Klüver and Tuchman expressed dissimilar attitudes toward engineers and scientists. For Klüver, of course, technologists were an essential component who could benefit personally and professionally by partnering with artists. Tuchman’s invitations were not extended to engineers but rather their managers and bosses. In reading his report, one senses an obligation on the part of the technologists to follow their orders.44 The “incredible resources” Tuchman saw in California was less about engineers’ professional skills than it was deep corporate pockets. Years later, he still identified artists as “superior people” vis-à-vis the engineers they partnered with.45 Consequently (except for luminaries like Feynman) Tuchman tended to treat the technologists who participated in LACMA’s project more as functionaries following company orders—invisible technicians—rather than equal partners.

In 1969, Tuchman’s initiative received a new burst of publicity after he was contacted by the United States Information Agency (USIA). This Cold War-created organization carried out “public diplomacy” using radio broadcasts and traveling exhibits. World’s fairs and expos had long been a tool of “soft power” for conveying cultural values and economic prowess.46 USIA officials were in the midst of planning the United States’ official pavilion at the upcoming Expo ’70 extravaganza in Osaka, Japan. Architect and designer Jack Masey—who helped set the stage for the famous 1959 Kitchen Debate between Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the American International Exhibition in Moscow—was spearheading the efforts.47 (Coincidentally, Julie Martin, a member of E.A.T.’s staff who later shared in a domestic partnership with Billy Klüver, was a student guide at the Moscow exhibition.) Individual exhibits planned for the US Pavilion in 1970 included moon rocks and other artifacts from the Apollo program. All of this would be housed within a giant futuristic building, oval-shaped and covered by an enormous inflatable roof, through which USIA expected millions of visitors to circulate.48

The question for American propagandists was how to make their pavilion stand out among the pack of other “quivering, flashing, pulsing, and shimmering exhibits” they expected.49 Articles in the New York Times had brought Tuchman’s Art and Technology Program to Masey’s attention and, after Nixon’s election, boosters from California (the new president’s home turf) lobbied for the state’s prominent representation at Osaka.50 Some Nixon supporters even suggested that the marriage of art and technology resonated with Nixon’s campaign promise to “Bring Us Together.”51 With exhibit space to fill and a rapidly growing arts museum now representing the Los Angeles region, Tuchman and Masey were soon negotiating terms.

By summer’s end in 1969, LACMA announced that some pieces the Art and Technology Program produced would be included in a “New Art” show and placed in the official American pavilion at Osaka. The news came with two caveats. First, Tuchman’s art-and-technology show at LACMA, originally planned for 1970, would have to be postponed a year. That part was easy. More challenging was the fact that the American pavilion would open in less than a year. For a “Bronx cowboy with fantastic vision” who had “climbed aboard an already saddled Los Angeles, whipped off the blindfold, and yelled, ‘Let ’er buck!’” Osaka offered Tuchman a chance to show off his curatorial skills. But it didn’t mean the ride wouldn’t be bumpy.52

A Divinity of Wonders

The art-and-technology movement drew people to it for many reasons. Its focus on experimentation and collaboration attracted some devotees. The possibilities inherent in working with new materials and processes pulled in others. And, for many, merging art and technology offered opportunities for personal growth and professional development. For physicist Elsa M. Garmire, all of these factors enticed her to join the burgeoning art-and-technology community emerging in Southern California.

Born in 1939, Garmire grew up around Buffalo, New York. Her father was a chemical engineer and her mother taught music. The launch of Sputnik in October 1957, during her freshman year at Radcliffe College, brought renewed public attention and lots of federal funding to science and engineering. But Garmire had decided years earlier to pursue a science career, a decision which made her stand out among classmates who tended to gravitate toward the humanities. Garmire remained in Cambridge for graduate work in physics at MIT. Her advisor, Charles H. Townes, was a key figure in the invention of the laser, research which earned him a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964. Garmire’s own research on ruby lasers—chosen partly because of the “fascinatingly beautiful” red light they made and also because the topic itself was so new—required her to design and build clever lab experiments. In August 1965, two weeks after her first child was born, Garmire defended her dissertation. The next year, she and her husband (also a physicist) moved to Caltech where she took up a postdoctoral appointment in electrical engineering.53

Her new academic environment was markedly different from what she had experienced at MIT. When Garmire arrived in Pasadena, the school had only a few women graduate students and no women undergraduates. Just as Caltech’s leaders fretted over how to boost the school’s offerings in the humanities, admitting women was framed primarily in terms of placating the school’s male students. Women, they reasoned, offered potential social partners for male students while their “liberal-arts-mind” could expand the intellectual horizons for Caltech’s “eunuchs of science.”54 Her husband—he was on Caltech’s tenure track, though she wasn’t—worked long hours and Garmire had few friends and no other women scientists at Caltech to provide mentorship. With a marginal and temporary position in an engineering department, Garmire found Caltech unsatisfying. She set up her own laser laboratory but judged her results “not terribly impressive” compared to what she had been used to at MIT. Feeling “stifled and unsuccessful” Garmire started to look for more satisfying outlets for her skills.55

Garmire learned about E.A.T. in 1968 from Barbara T. Smith, an artist from Southern California who was acquainted with members of the Judson Dance Theatre. Smith had recently started making avant-garde art using a Xerox copy machine she had installed in her Pasadena dining room. One of the first American artists to experiment with this new technology, Smith combined images of family photographs, food, household objects, and her own body into a series of handmade books she titled Coffins. Smith was also in the midst of a career switch and a difficult divorce, personal conditions which must have resonated with Garmire.56 One day in 1968, Smith stopped by unannounced at Caltech and asked Garmire to show her a laser.

Garmire herself was starting to experiment with using her optics equipment outside of the traditional laboratory context. For example, with help from a Caltech student, she moved an argon laser, a sophisticated piece of equipment not normally deployed outdoors, to the base of Millikan Library. She directed its beam up the side of Caltech’s tallest building to a mirror on the roof where it was reflected back to a second mirror on the ground, sending the beam off into the night sky. (Regulations forbidding this sort of activity had yet to be written.) As she later recalled, the whole exercise was “true to my understanding of the concept of ‘process, not product.’”57

Garmire’s interest was piqued further in the summer of 1968 when an E.A.T. representative visited Los Angeles. Garmire gave a holography demonstration and, in turn, learned that E.A.T. wanted to hire a technical director for its East Coast office. Tied at the time to California, Garmire suggested a compromise. She would keep her position at Caltech while working part-time for E.A.T. As she wrote in her cover letter, she didn’t share the belief “that science is the best answer to the problems of the world,” but rather thought that using technology “in a non-logical artistic way” could offer open-minded scientists “new directions of thought.”58

When Klüver learned of Garmire’s interest, he invited her to join a panel titled “Art and Science—Will There Be a Difference?” at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. One of two panels on art and science held that year, Garmire found herself sharing the microphone with Klüver, Gyorgy Kepes, and Jack Nolan. They were joined by Mel Bochner, whom E.A.T. had just placed at a northern New Jersey company as an artist-in-residence, and Robert Whitman, whose recent experiments with lasers as a new art medium secured him coverage in Time.59 The publicity stirred by the now-iconic “Earthrise” photo Apollo astronauts had recently captured prompted Garmire to remark that the public’s appreciation of NASA would be enhanced if the space agency included artists on its missions. Scientists and engineers, she said, too often approached problems by adopting restrictive boundary conditions that simplified their complexity. Artists, as she understood them, adopted no such limitations, a practice that might offer technologists a “more expansive view.”60

Garmire later recounted how she “entered the world of art at the very top.” Through Klüver, she soon met Robert Rauschenberg, who was regularly making trips to Gemini G.E.L., a new printmaking workshop in Los Angeles, and gave him a tour of Caltech’s labs. Rauschenberg, in turn, introduced her to such artists as Ed Ruscha and Claes Oldenburg and helped get her invitations to parties where artists gathered.61 The expansion of Garmire’s social and professional worlds coincided with the establishment of E.A.T.’s chapter in Los Angeles. Once organized, E.A.T./L.A., as it became known, quickly became one of the most active local groups, drawing in some 500 artists, students (including Stephen Nowlin), engineers, and curators from the region.62

Garmire helped organize one of the chapter’s first major activities, an event which coincided with the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969. Members of E.A.T./L.A. presented the “Cybernetic Moon Landing Celebration” as a “multi-media environmental performance” that would “artistically express the significance of the historic moon landing.”63 Joining Garmire in the effort was Ruth Baker, an artist interested in lasers and film who would soon become the chapter’s new president, and Caroline Hinkley. Also married to a Caltech scientist, Hinkley disliked the patronizing way the school treated women. Likewise, she was trying to balance domestic and career obligations (in this case, finishing an MFA degree at nearby Claremont Graduate University while pregnant with her first child). For Hinkley, the traditional painting and drawing techniques she was learning were starting to pale in comparison to what the merger of art, science, and technology offered.64

The lunar landing celebration took place on Caltech’s campus as Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin were preparing to descend to the moon’s surface. (A similar multimedia celebration took place in New York’s Central Park but on an even larger scale.)65 Compared to the “dust-mote efficiency of Apollo 11,” the Pasadena event was “all pleasant [and] poetic.” Barbara Smith constructed a long corridor using white cloth banners onto which she projected lunar images accompanied by electronically generated sounds. Acrobats lit by “motion-stopping strobe flashes” tumbled through it, giving their interpretation of floating through space. In a campus stairwell, dancer Steve Paxton, who had participated in 9 Evenings, lay motionless to the sound of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata while dressed all in blue and illuminated by spotlight. Meanwhile, Garmire, wearing a gold lamé suit, displayed a multicolored “laser wall” she had designed. Its blue, green, and red beams appeared solid, “sometimes metallic, utterly straight [and] infinitely long.” Overall, a reporter concluded, the result was a “dreamy kind of fun that was nothing if not moony.”66

When she first approached E.A.T. about a job, Garmire stressed that she was no “amateur artist” seeking to dabble. Instead, she described herself “purely a professional engineer” who wanted to make “our technology available to artists.” Over time, Garmire recalled how involvement with E.A.T. “enlarged my own personal definition of art.”67 She also started to give greater consideration to the relationship between technology and society. In 1969, she wrote a short essay for a new “Technological Studies Program” at a local state college campus. Titled “Ruminations of an Engineer,” Garmire admitted that trying to “comprehend technological wonders through technical education” had become “hopeless.” Systems were too complex and technological change too “rapid and incomprehensible,” while, in classrooms, engineering students confronted “intellectual inertia.” A remedy could be found, however, in “technological art.” Finding irrelevant and irreverent uses for technology offered a “first step toward eliminating this divinity of technological wonders.”68 Echoing Klüver’s long-standing claim, Garmire maintained that artistic practices could humanize technological systems as well as the engineers entrusted to manage them.

Garmire was already putting some of these ideas into practice. She found that she could shine beams from lasers in her lab through different diffraction media and then photograph the results or record the images directly on photosensitive paper. The static images she generated (Garmire called them “lasergrams”), with their luminous and amorphous mingling of colors, resembled snapshots of works made by artists like Thomas Wilfred or Frank Malina. After experimenting with various processes in her lab, Garmire exhibited her work at a gallery in West Hollywood not far from where the now-defunct Ferus Gallery once was.69 Although the aesthetics were judged “conventional,” one art critic noted that laser art, with its “twisting webs of geometric color,” nonetheless possessed “an aura of technological romance.”70 Garmire had done her experiments very much in the romantic tradition of the lone artist in her atelier (in this case, however, a lab at one of the world’s preeminent research institutes and surrounded by expensive instruments). However, Garmire had also become deeply involved with a massive new art-and-technology initiative, one much more in the spirit of the Big Science projects that her fellow Cold War engineers and physicists knew all too well.

Pepsi’s Got a Lot to Give

Billy Klüver touted the new opportunities that would arise when corporations supported the making of new art, rather than just investing in old art. But, in his 1968 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, Klüver had mentioned no specific companies by name. However, just about a month before his talk, an announcement in the New York Times signaled a momentous new project for Klüver and his colleagues. Nestled amid a dance review and an advertisement for a speed reading course, was news that PepsiCo International had given Experiments in Art and Technology a modest grant of $25,000 “to explore educational techniques for communicating with young people.”71 By the time Pepsi ended its relationship with E.A.T., the company’s investment had climbed to over $1.2 million. This support enabled the art-and-technology group to undertake a project vastly more complex than anything attempted before. It also strained E.A.T.’s still-maturing ability to mediate effectively between artists, engineers, and industry.

In ex post facto accounts, some writers (including Klüver) portrayed E.A.T.’s engagement with Pepsi as a reluctant, even random act. But E.A.T. clearly saw Expo ’70 as a timely opportunity.72 As early as February 1968, E.A.T. reached out to Jack Masey, who was deep in the throes of planning the official pavilion for the United States. Masey, obviously, had considerable influence over what the US exhibition would include. An internal memo, copied to Klüver and Rauschenberg, noted that “Masey says we must do at once a huge exhibit which will be a wow and he will take it! Maybe.” However, Masey noted that his organization probably wouldn’t select any art for Osaka that “hadn’t proved itself first here at home.”73 But if E.A.T. could then pull off some other highly visible project at Expo ’70, it would validate E.A.T.’s role as a cultural broker. Helping humanize technology for millions of the fair’s visitors might also, with any luck, give the organization greater financial stability.

Pepsi executives also perceived Expo ’70 as an opportunity. In return for advice on how to manage the fair’s dining concessions, Expo ’70 organizers in Japan had given the company, which had less than 10 percent of the soft drink market in that country, permission to construct an independent building set apart from the main Festival Plaza. (Only two other American companies, Eastman Kodak and IBM, were likewise favored.) Moreover, Pepsi received a prime location where the company’s pavilion would serve as a natural meeting place for the millions of people streaming in to experience Expo ’70.

Overseeing this quid pro quo was Alan Pottasch, head of Pepsi’s Japanese branch. He had been the driving force behind the company’s successful “Pepsi Generation” advertising campaign, with its jingle: “You’ve got a lot to live / And Pepsi’s got a lot to give.” Pottasch hired a venerable Japanese construction firm to design and build the basic shell for the Pepsi Pavilion. The company’s architect produced a striking design that improvised on the geodesic domes Buckminster Fuller had popularized in the 1960s. A 120-foot-diameter structure, made of white plastic panels over a steel frame, presented a faceted exterior that one artist described as a “Buckled Fuller dome.” However, the low opinion E.A.T. members had of the building’s appearance—“we all hated that dome,” said one member—would later catalyze the creation of the pavilion’s most noteworthy visual signatures.74

Already primed to participate in Expo ’70, E.A.T.’s collaboration with Pepsi began as a conversation between two neighbors in the suburbs outside of Manhattan. David Thomas, a company vice president who had been handed the Pepsi Pavilion project, was stumped. His company’s last major exposition had been produced by the Walt Disney Corporation. While quite popular, Disney’s “It’s a Small World” attraction, for the 1964 New York World’s Fair, exceeded Pepsi’s original budget by several million dollars. This added to a sense of unease among Pepsi executives who were already coping with a corporate culture where vice presidents were regularly hired and fired. To keep things simple and cheap, the company’s initial plan was an auditorium where film screenings and music concerts could be held. Pottasch even suggested hiring Disney again. Thomas, however, argued this was a “terrible idea” that wouldn’t charm the youth market Pepsi wanted to reach.75

Pepsi wasn’t the first company to consider working with contemporary artists in order to produce a spectacle for an international exposition. For Expo ’58—the world’s fair in Brussels—the Dutch electronics company Phillips contracted with Le Corbusier for its pavilion. The project, largely overseen by the Greek architect and composer Iannis Xenakis, evolved into a multimedia spectacle presented inside an innovative building made of precast and curved concrete shells with over 300 speakers fixed to its interior walls. The visual imagery visitors experienced inside, some of it by filmmaker Philippe Agostini, was accompanied by a six-minute piece of experimental music called Poème électronique that Edgard Varèse had composed. In seeing their pavilion built, Philips’s executives had to balance company interests and budgets with the artists’ ambitious objectives, information that might have benefitted Pepsi’s leaders.76

Professional artist Robert Breer lived near David Thomas. His father had designed the streamlined Chrysler Airflow, an iconic modernist form that artist Claes Oldenburg later appropriated for one of his soft sculptures. Born in 1926, Breer grew up, “surrounded by engineers” and even studied the subject himself at Stanford before becoming an experimental filmmaker and sculptor. In 1955, while living in Paris, Breer exhibited some of his work in “Le Mouvement,” the show at Denise René’s gallery that influenced Frank Malina. Breer had known Klüver for years but 9 Evenings had left him wary about big collaborations. Moreover, he disliked the hype and commercialism that came with fairs like Expo ’70 so he was open to unconventional, perhaps more contemplative, ideas.77

When Thomas and Breer first talked, the artist was in the midst of fabricating an art series called Floats. These Styrofoam sculptures were self-propelled by hidden, battery-powered motors such that they seemed to hover just above the ground. If they encountered resistance when they moved about, they could reverse their almost imperceptible motion. Carefully placed to encourage a meditative state, Jack Burnham once likened them to the stones in the rock garden at Ryōan-ji Temple in Kyoto. Rock music, sculptures as rocks, and a shared interest in Japanese culture (Thomas’s father had briefly been a Shinto priest in Kyoto) started to coalesce as they spoke. Breer knew Klüver had extensive experience interacting with companies and described how E.A.T. could operate as “some kind of buffer” between the various stakeholders. Klüver, meanwhile, was preparing to quit Bell Labs and work full time as E.A.T.’s president. So, when Breer contacted him in mid-September, the phone call immediately got his attention.78

What David Thomas heard about E.A.T. intrigued him. Klüver made it clear from the outset that his group didn’t intend to outfit some modish dance hall with a psychedelic light show to accompany rock concerts. Although reluctant to discuss specifics, Klüver intimated that something “interesting” could probably be done for $350,000. The Pepsi executive countered with a more generous budget proposal: half a million dollars, just “to be safe.”79 Working with Pepsi, of course, would present many interfaces—between artists and technologists; between Pepsi and E.A.T.; and between scores of American businesspeople, engineers, architects, journalists, and artists, as well as their Japanese counterparts. Klüver suggested at first that E.A.T’s role best be limited to mediating and managing activities as E.A.T. was more of “an experiment in organization” rather than a group for hire that made art objects per se.80

A few weeks later, Klüver and Breer took Thomas to the Electric Circus in the East Village. Part discotheque, part experimental theater, the hipper-than-hip nightclub served its guests a trippy cocktail of imagery and sounds. On some nights, Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable took over the space with the Velvet Underground acting as the house band.81 By coincidence, at a bottlers’ convention in Manhattan that autumn, Thomas also experienced a performance by USCO (derived from its longer name, “The Company of Us”). This was an art collective that blended the avant-garde with psychedelia and hippy mysticism via light shows and surround sound effects.82 Thomas, slowly dropping the idea of Pepsi’s pavilion as a dance hall, began to imagine that some combination of the Electric Circus and USCO—with E.A.T. managing the process—could produce something acceptable to his bosses.

Klüver, meanwhile, had begun to reconsider E.A.T.’s responsibility. The engineer noted privately, “Let’s assume we can get what we want from Pepsi if we make the suggestions early.” He told Thomas that Bell Labs could build better equipment than what USCO offered as he realized that managing other groups, especially those which he believed took commercial advantage of artists’ ideas, might not be the best role for E.A.T. As an alternative arrangement, E.A.T. could gather well-known artists who would jointly design “an integrated environment” for Pepsi. Then, the company could take over the project with E.A.T. offering advice as needed. But, despite Klüver’s insistence that E.A.T. didn’t intend to compete for Pepsi’s patronage, that was indeed what happened.83 In November, Pepsi asked E.A.T. and the Electric Circus to present their ideas to company executives a month later.

Robert Breer, increasingly intrigued, assembled a core group of artists. Besides himself, this included musician David Tudor and artist Robert Whitman. Poet-artist Gerd Stern from USCO occasionally joined brainstorming sessions while Klüver brought in engineers Fred Waldhauer and John Pan from Bell Labs. Forrest “Frosty” Myers was a new addition. Born in Southern California, Myers had recently moved to New York where he joined E.A.T. and established himself as a promising experimental sculptor with the Park Place group, an arts collective that incorporated mathematical and scientific concepts in their work.84 Breer knew of his experiments making sculptural forms via large searchlights. Like Robert Whitman and Elsa Garmire, Myers also saw artistic potential in the steady, intense glow of light that lasers provided. Sketches he made as early as 1963 show he was aware of their possibility as a future art medium. In the summer of 1967, he realized this with a site-specific work he designed for the New York nightclub Max’s Kansas City. One idea he had was to generate a laser beam at his studio and send it two blocks away, down Park Avenue South, to the famous nightclub where it would hit a mirror attached to a jukebox. Vibrating at a frequency that changed with whatever song was playing, the result would be an ever-changing light show projected on the club’s back wall.85 Eventually, Myers’s installation “played” nightly at Max’s, helping entertain guests well into the 1970s.

Naturally, the artists’ ideas reflected their current activities. Myers was experimenting at the time with outdoor installations using searchlights, Breer had his slowly moving cybernetic floats, and Whitman was increasingly intrigued with lasers, optics, and visual perception. The engineers added some ideas of their own that caught the artists off guard. John Pan, an African-American engineer who worked on digital transmission systems, proposed creating “international love nooks on the dome” and adding “wind tunnels and waterfalls,” which visitors could use to enter the pavilion.86 But everyone accepted Whitman’s basic premise that, unlike the 1964 world’s fair, the pavilion should not be “a morally degrading experience.” Instead, making the pavilion’s design and the visitors’ experience flexible—sort of an aesthetic “choose-your-own adventure”—was both desirable and democratic.87 In a sense, what the artists and engineers were proposing was an “anti-pavilion,” an adaptable and experimental space that expressed irreverent, noncommercial, and antiauthoritarian values. They even briefly proposed that the dome itself should be painted black, the opposite of Pepsi’s design and a color long-associated with anarchy. For a conservative corporation like PepsiCo—Calvin Tomkins described the company’s leadership as “very right wing” and full of “Agnew Republicans”—E.A.T.’s rebellious attitude portended future friction.88

Despite agreeing on basic principles, Breer recalled the group’s first meetings “were hard on the various egos.” Each artist pushed his own vision and disparaged competing ones until “we were barely cordial.”89 Finally, with time running out before their presentation to Pepsi’s executives, two new ingredients helped the artists and engineers move beyond their stalemate. Jack Masey suggested that Klüver meet with John Pearce, a young architect who had gotten his degree from Yale only a few years earlier. Pearce, who had been working temporarily on Masey’s project, had actually been to Osaka and inspected the site where Pepsi’s pavilion would be built. The architect quickly realized that Breer and the others were in over their heads. “They didn’t seem to realize they were really building a building,” he later said, as nothing other than Pepsi’s basic quasi-geodesic design had been approved. This, he suggested, could be turned to their advantage as it gave the artists and engineers lots of options. Pearce also described the site for the entire expo, which resembled a bowl with small lakes in the middle and the various national and corporate pavilions situated on the slopes. The Pepsi Pavilion, he said, would occupy a “beautiful position,” relatively isolated in an open area with great potential “to be recognized and appreciated.”90

As the artists continued to dither, Klüver added the second key ingredient and invited Robert Rauschenberg to participate. As he had with other E.A.T. projects, Rauschenberg encouraged everyone to imagine beyond their own ideas and experience. For example, they were still thinking almost entirely in visual terms. “We’re all painters,” Klüver recalled him saying, “so let’s do something non-painterly.” What emerged from the rejuvenated design process was the notion of the pavilion as an “invisible environment,” where visual inputs would be accompanied with other impressions to create a total sensory sensation.91 This idea resonated with Pearce, who liked the idea of visitors creating their own personal experience, whereas the other pavilions for Expo ’70 were based more on “shoving people through on moving belts.”92 This idea of “environment” also resonated with Japanese artists, some of whom would later work with E.AT. on the pavilion, experimenting themselves with “intermedia art.”93

Rauschenberg’s intervention prompted a flood of fresh suggestions. Why not make areas where the temperature changed? Perhaps build pods that functioned as anechoic chambers, creating spaces of total silence. Maybe the floor inside the pavilion could have zones where one heard particular sounds or where rear-screen projections might give visitors the experience of “walking over” flames, clouds, or fish. What if the floor itself could be faintly sloped so that visitors would subconsciously become more aware, even unsettled, by their surroundings? But central to all of these ideas was E.A.T’s determination to create a space where visitors could choose what to experience. Such an experience would remain, as Myers called it, “pure.” By this, he meant that the artists and engineers “could maintain aesthetic control” and “there wouldn’t be ‘Buy Pepsi’ all over everything.” The pavilion would offer “no tricks, just a whole experience.”94 As E.A.T. later learned, translating abstract concepts like “purity” and “total environment” into Japanese challenged Pepsi’s public relations team. The company briefly considered naming their exhibition the “Sensosphere” until a Japanese collaborator pointed out that “sensō” in Japanese means “war.”95

Over the next few weeks, Breer, Myers, and Pearce, with Klüver functioning as a mediator, worked out the pavilion’s basic design. They all agreed that the crumpled-looking exterior was ugly and boring. So, why not hide it? Someone suggested shrouding it with machine-made clouds. No one was sure how to do this but the engineers assured the artists it was possible. And, once the detested dome was hidden, some sort of interplay, Myers suggested, between light and fog would be visually striking, especially at night. Among the shafts of light and swirling clouds they imagined, Breer’s slowly moving floats would create a shifting visual impression that was subtle, yet powerful.

Inside the pavilion, the artists’ imperative again was to hide the dome’s faceted structure. Here, Robert Whitman drew on his recent experimentation with optical effects. For example, the Jewish Museum in New York had just displayed an innovative piece called Pond he had made with Eric Rawson and a dozen other engineers at Bell Labs.96 Whitman used sheets of Mylar stretched across a large frame that, thanks to electronics Rawson and his colleagues built, gently vibrated. The distorting effect was enhanced by flickering strobes while banal words and phrases were projected onto the mirrors or played through loudspeakers.97 As viewers could see themselves amid the oscillations of sound and light, the effect was one of “gentle narcissism.”98 For the pavilion, Whitman suggested it include some sort of reflecting surface. This idea grew in importance until their conception of much of the dome’s interior space centered around the presence of a large, hemispherical mirror. Properly built, the mirror would produce what a physicist would call “real images”—three-dimensional projections of objects or people appearing to hang suspended in space—which would visually blur the line between the real and illusory world.

In early December, the two contenders for the pavilion presented their ideas at Pepsi’s Manhattan headquarters. The Electric Circus group, led by owner Stanton Freeman, a Canadian who previously had made high-fidelity audio equipment, gave its pitch first. Freeman arrived with scale models, written descriptions, and a two-hour exposition that was “very, very polished, a brilliant performance.”99 At least until the Pepsi executives asked about the cost, to which Freeman told them that nothing interesting could be done for less than a million dollars. (He was later found guilty for conspiring to smuggle cocaine into the United States.) Outraged and embarrassed, David Thomas waited anxiously to see what E.A.T. would present.

Thomas had been quietly nudging things in Klüver’s favor by filtering the press coverage his colleagues read about E.A.T. Besides emphasizing the concrete elements of E.A.T.’s proposal, and not the conceptual ones, he stressed that, by 1970, a pavilion that offered just a fancy light show with dance music would seem déclassé. E.A.T., on the other hand, he said was “really in tune with contemporary art and artists.” Nonetheless, E.A.T. representatives gave an apparently unrehearsed presentation that was, Thomas recalled, a “masterpiece of ineptitude.” Myers, Breer, and Whitman—long haired, mustached, and attired in decidedly non-button-down garb—drew baffled stares from staff in the company’s offices while their verbal descriptions of what they wanted to do didn’t always agree. The group brought only a few “rough and fanciful” drawings while Klüver spoke abstractly about the “necessity of humanizing technology” and building an “invisible environment.”

However, when the E.A.T. group took some Pepsi executives over to MoMA, the atmosphere shifted. Klüver walked the businessmen through Hultén’s “Machine” exhibit. While he talked about the show, the engineer stopped to repair a malfunctioning piece with a handy pair of pliers, an intervention that surprised the Pepsi people. Robert Rauschenberg joined the group at lunch. The artist—now quite famous—impressed Alan Pottasch who especially liked Rauschenberg’s technically sophisticated work called Soundings, recently made with E.A.T.-affiliated engineers, that was on display.100

Back at Pepsi’s office, Pottasch asked Klüver and his colleagues for a budget. They didn’t have one. Baffled, the executives gave them some time to prepare a draft. A few hours later, Klüver and the artists presented a short handwritten estimate: the hardware would cost some $468,000 (with another $70,000 included as contingency) while E.A.T.’s consulting fees and salaries would add another $321,000. Their total estimate was $859,000.101 Pepsi countered that their ideal was about $300,000 less than this and Klüver indicated this might be possible. A few days, later, Thomas broke the bad news to the Electric Circus people—E.A.T. would build the pavilion.

At this point, one would expect that someone at Pepsi would have prepared a formal contract setting out the terms, scope, and budget for E.A.T.’s work. Oddly, this essential task seems to have slipped through the cracks. A few days after E.A.T.’s presentation, Pottasch asked internally for a “crystallization” of E.A.T.’s proposal—“all we have now is an ‘environment’”—and a breakdown of costs and schedule, but a copy of this request wasn’t sent to Klüver. Among the thousands of pages preserved from the pavilion project, the most contract-like document is a June 1969 letter from Pepsi stating that E.A.T. “shall develop, design, and complete” the pavilion, but here the cost appears as $1,235,000 (almost $400,000 more than the ceiling discussed six months earlier).102 Moreover, Thomas was quickly replaced in New York by the “shark-like” Pottasch, leaving E.A.T. without its most sympathetic contact.103 “I don’t think there was ever a decision made about anything,” Klüver later recalled, “I sometimes think they just slid into it.”104

Pottasch later reflected that Pepsi differed from companies like General Motors or RCA, which used fairs and expositions to showcase their new models and product designs. Soft drinks didn’t change from year to year so companies like Pepsi relied much more on branding and marketing. While it wasn’t necessary to show a particular thing at Expo ’70, it was “important to get across certain concepts” like “bigness,” a sense of novelty, and the idea of “community.”105 Like E.A.T., Pepsi had its own intangibles it wanted to present to the public. Just as its advertising jingle said, Pepsi definitely had a lot to give.

Klüver and Rauschenberg symbolically repaid the company for its largesse a few months later when they nominated Pepsi for a “Business in the Arts” award. Their letter praised Pepsi in language sympathetic to E.A.T.’s perspective. Because Pepsi had “approached E.A.T.”—a curious interpretation of the partnership’s origins—an exciting new alliance had formed that would allow Japanese and American artists and engineers “to experiment” with building a “versatile environment.”106 Pepsi received an honorable mention and E.A.T. continued to pivot toward the corporate world while its individual artist-engineer pairings became less prominent.

Some months later, Klüver updated a group of executives, artists, and curators in Los Angeles about the pavilion project. “E.A.T. is interested in Pepsi-Cola, not in art,” he said, “our organization tries to interest, seduce, and involve industry in the process of making art.”107 By 1969, this carefully orchestrated seduction had fashioned a ménage à trois of artists, engineers, and industry leaders (although, given the top-down approach used by both Klüver and Tuchman, perhaps “arranged marriage” is a better metaphor). Of course, engineers were long accustomed to working with (and around) middle management. Now, a cadre of artists—once in hell, but now in business, as Allan Kaprow had observed—could try to add this new skill to their tool box.

Even as they maintained a close eye on what the other was doing, Klüver and Tuchman adopted different organizational strategies. Klüver had wagered E.A.T’s future on one company and expanded his New York-based operation into a web that spread to California and then Japan. Tuchman, meanwhile, diversified his portfolio and persuaded dozens of companies to join his museum’s technoaesthetic project. Despite their distinctive approaches, Klüver and Tuchman based their parallel projects on similar ideals, such as process, collaboration, and experimentation. But in the coming months, resolving banal problems of logistics, management, and communication assumed equal, if not greater, importance. Making the art, they said, mattered more than the art made. Now, with financial commitments and media attention mounting—and deadlines looming—corporate executives, art critics, and fair goers alike wondered what they would see.