Conclusion: Waves, Loops, and Bubbles

It’s in Apple’s DNA that technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our heart sing.1

Steve Jobs, 2011

We are in the midst of new surge of advocacy and support for initiatives to further connect the working worlds of engineering, art, and science. All this is still unfolding, so our understanding of recent events and trends is necessarily impressionistic. Like a surfer inside the barrel, we can’t really evaluate this current wave’s power, profile, and significance until we get more perspective. But it is possible to make some provisional observations while seeing how recent events connect to previous waves of art-and-technology activities.

A gentle caveat lector is in order. I see the current landscape from two angles. On the one hand, I’m a researcher and writer fascinated by the diverse intersections of technology, art, and science as a historical phenomenon. It’s something that has held my interest for nearly a decade. But I am also a history professor based at a large public university. I’ve witnessed some of the events noted here and, like many of my colleagues, I have something at stake in it all.

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Evidence that a new wave of art and technology actually is happening is considerable. It appears in the form of gallery shows, new programs launched at laboratories, universities, and museums, heaps of reports, renewed media attention, and a growing number of corporate-sponsored artist-in-residence programs, to name just a few indicators. One could imagine a new bubble of “SciArt”—one term commonly used among some of the actors—inflating even while I was researching and writing this book.2

Understanding why waves of interest in art-and-technology surge and then retreat requires us, as I’ve argued throughout this book, to take into account the larger economic and cultural contexts. The relative wealth and prosperity of the long 1960s catalyzed that era’s art-and-technology boom. Likewise, public interest, government support, and corporate investment in information and internet-related technologies in the 1990s gave a powerful boost to another wave of art and technology. The wave of activity today also strongly correlates with broader economic circumstances. This time around, however, the renewed interest in art and technology is happening not only because of expanding financial fortunes but also because of broader economic anxieties.

The Great Recession’s warning signs appeared in late 2007 with the crisis in subprime mortgages. Within months, an interlocking ensemble of international economic emergencies reared forth as once-unimaginable bank failures and precipitous stock market declines became the norm.3 To read journalists’ accounts of this period is to see glimpses of a gradual but much greater unraveling. Analysts can seemingly trace almost every contemporary predicament—from the rise of populism and far right movements to increases in economic inequality, a retreat of efforts to address climate change, and the decline of birth rates—back to Great Recession.4 Few institutions were spared the effects of this turmoil and universities were certainly not among them.

The Great Recession dealt especially punishing blows to the economic underpinnings of public universities as endowments sank and state resources evaporated further. At my own school, departments experienced hiring freezes, the staff was “consolidated,” and faculty were given temporary salary cuts (and asked to surrender their office phones, a request with dubious financial impact but good optics). Debate erupted as to whether traditional teaching practices should be creatively disrupted by such innovations as massive, possibly profitable, online courses.5

The global economic distress also helped precipitate renewed attention and funding for STEM education (short for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). As economies and communities recovered from the Great Recession, parents and politicians alike encouraged high school students toward practical careers in science and technology. As a result, many more incoming college freshmen increasingly opted for STEM disciplines. For example, one set of data suggests that between 2009 and 2016 engineering and science fields saw a 43 percent jump in majors.6 While humanities professors were concerned about drops in the number of majors in fields like English, theater, and history, science and engineering faculty faced—as they had in the 1960s—the opposite but equally disruptive problem: too many students.

Popular culture and politicians’ statements about the relative value of certain fields—computer science versus philosophy, for example—catalyzed this trend further. Wells Fargo, for instance, ran a series of advertisements promoting their “Teen Financial Education Day” with headlines such as “A ballerina yesterday. An engineer today.”7 The company apologized but the message was clear: the arts and humanities were not just in crisis but presented poor choices for aspiring students. (Whether such a crisis actually existed was itself a contentious topic.8 The propriety of Wells Fargo promoting fiscal responsibility given its role in the Great Recession is another matter entirely.) Meanwhile, state governors derided the arts and humanities as of lesser value for undergraduates.9 Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, higher education, especially at financially strapped public schools, was misleadingly presented as a zero-sum game in which fields like art history were somehow siphoning support away from STEM fields.10

The slow economic recovery that followed was, of course, unevenly distributed. A growing discourse materialized about the “future of work,” the rise of the “gig economy,” and the “precariat.”11 It’s no coincidence that companies like Uber—the gig economy’s poster child—started operations in 2009. The belief that people, especially high school and university students, needed to acquire both practical talents and a deeper sense of potentially marketable creativity overlapped with the growing popularity of maker spaces and coding camps.12 Make magazine, which promoted entrepreneurship and innovation—traits pitched as essential during the unsteady financial recovery—saw its circulation quadruple in a few short years. Attendance at Maker Faires increased likewise.13 (A surge of economic growth, at least as measured by stock market indices, that spanned the Obama and Trump years may have also contributed to the reported demise of Maker Media, the movement’s most public face, in mid-2019.)14 Meanwhile, economists and other experts debated whether the relentless pursuit of innovation was itself an unalloyed good.15

In the wake of the Great Recession, science and engineering faculty found themselves dealing with the inverse problem their humanities and arts colleagues faced. Enrollments in their fields shot up to often-unsustainable levels as the United States confronted growing economic competition from China. A flurry of new studies about a crisis in STEM education appeared. The National Academy of Sciences alone produced over eighty reports between 2010 and 2018 addressing some aspect of science or engineering education. Of prime concern for educators and policy makers was, as it had been fifty years earlier when the first art-and-technology wave was forming, how and what to teach the next generation of technologists. At the same time, experts believed that incoming college students increasingly wanted their education to have some broader social relevance. So, again, some education professionals saw the integration of the arts into science and engineering curricula as an answer.

If you put “Art” into STEM you, of course, get STEAM. And, starting around 2011, a growing interest in “STEM to STEAM” emerged as a revised approach to education. John Maeda was one of the first prominent proponents of this initiative. Born in 1966 to immigrant parents, he chose to major in Course 6 at MIT (Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) because his father insisted he study something “practical.” Maeda got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT and then enrolled in the Media Lab’s doctoral program. However, he found it to be “more a technology place than an art place . . . so I went away.” He eventually earned a doctorate from Tsukuba University’s Institute of Art and Design, a program influenced by the Bauhaus. While in Japan, he learned about early computer art made in the 1960s at places like Bell Labs. Maeda returned to the United States in the mid-1990s and rejoined the Media Lab—this time as a faculty member—where he managed a research team called the Aesthetics and Computation Group.16 Then, in 2008, Maeda accepted an offer from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) to become its new president. “STEM to STEAM” became his signature initiative while in that position.

In 2011, the National Science Foundation funded a workshop called “Bridging STEM to STEAM” at RISD. The meeting’s participants agreed that a “significant crisis exists in STEM education.” However, it was a problem that “visual artists and visual thinkers” could help resolve.17 After all, Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO and the paradigm of the modern entrepreneur-innovator, had attended Reed College—he took calligraphy courses before dropping out—not MIT. People with skills in the arts, the argument went, could prove valuable to companies and the technologists they employed. Artists, for instance, might help improve communications between technical specialists by helping create “multi-dimensional approaches” to learning.

Although the arts also stood to benefit from such plans, one senses that art primarily existed in such formulations as a resource to improve science and engineering education.18 It certainly wasn’t strictly about helping artists make art. Researchers in the United Kingdom had already highlighted similar concerns. For example, the Wellcome Trust had recently operated a competitive Sciart program. Over the course of a decade, it dispensed some £3 million to scores of visual arts projects that brought artists and scientists together. Wellcome Trust’s main goals in supporting these efforts were to increase the public’s interest in science (and, presumably, their support), while fostering potentially profitable wellsprings of “innovation and creativity.”19 But the program was also, analysts said, “negatively associated with instrumentalization of the arts.”20

In a belt-tightening fiscal environment where the arts were increasingly derided as impractical luxuries, STEAM appeared as an opportunity for them to make a contribution to economic growth in ways policy makers and business executives could understand. In 2014, for example, at the Aspen Ideas Festival, a group of high-profile university leaders, including the heads of Berkeley and Harvard, were asked, “What Letter Should We Add to STEM?” Their unanimous answer was “A.” Maeda, meanwhile, was invited to present his ideas for education reform at Google’s headquarters, TED gatherings, and the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos.21

Advocates for STEM to STEAM started building an infrastructure to promote a transformation in education. Program managers at the National Science Foundation, always anxious about their agency’s contribution to economic competitiveness, provided grants that supported exploratory STEAM programs. In February 2013, a bipartisan congressional caucus coalesced to endorse STEAM.22 That same month, James Langevin, a Democratic congressman from Rhode Island, proposed adding art to STEM fields during the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965. “Art and design,” his resolution said, “provide real solutions for our everyday lives, distinguish United States products in a global marketplace, and create opportunity for economic growth.”23

Evidence, however, suggested the arts and humanities would not be equal partners. In December 2015, I attended a workshop sponsored by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. The spirit of C. P. Snow drifted through the room as university leaders and the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities expressed the need for bridging disciplines and avoiding “us versus them” polarities. Despite such good intentions, the meeting began with a quip from one of the academy’s representatives: “A scientist, an engineer, an artist, and a humanist are on a sinking lifeboat. There are two life vests. Complete the joke!” While everyone laughed, it was pretty clear who would be feeding the fish.

What emerged out of this meeting was an official study conducted by the National Academies and led by David J. Skorton, then the secretary of the Smithsonian. For more than two years, the committee gathered evidence of best practices when it came to integrating the arts and humanities with STEM fields.24 A final “consensus report,” issued in early 2018, once again repurposed Snow’s enduring imagery of the “Two Cultures,” now completely unmoored from any historical context of how the idea first arose and drifted to the United States. The report’s title came from a statement made by Albert Einstein to the leaders of the YMCA in 1937.25 The physicist (who was writing about the corruption of knowledge by fascism, not higher education) stated that religion, the arts, and sciences were “all branches from the same tree.” Reading the report further, one finds statements stating that prominent scientists (i.e., Nobel prize winners and National Academy members) “were significantly more likely to engage in arts . . . and identify as artists than average scientists and the general public.”26 While this data might be true, one might wonder as to its relevance.

One anecdote, however, suggests the challenges of uncritically integrating the arts and sciences. In 2018, I attended a symposium in Washington held in advance of the report’s official release. The event’s opening speaker recalled how Abraham Lincoln—the only American president to hold a patent—approved Congress’ proposal and signed into being the National Academy of Sciences, whose Act of Incorporation states that the academy will “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art” at the behest of the government. This, the speaker (a computer scientist) claimed, was proof that twenty-first-century plans to bring art together with engineering and science sustained an illustrious precedent. What made me squirm was the speaker’s unawareness that, in 1863, “art” didn’t mean painting, dance, or sculpture.27 It meant the mechanical arts, which is to say it meant technology. Honest Abe was not an early supporter of STEAM or even a joiner of two cultures, but he was being enlisted into the discussion anyway.

The first two major waves of art and technology, in the 1960s and 1990s, were spearheaded by charismatic individuals like Billy Klüver and Nicholas Negroponte. Other than Maeda, who left RISD in 2013 for a position at a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, STEAM has produced few such spokespeople to date. Moreover, compared to E.A.T.’s grassroots efforts to connect artists to engineers, STEAM appears much more as a top-down effort with federal agencies and university administrators leading the way. These actors also appear as the primary audiences for the STEAM message. To date, one doesn’t find much discussion of STEAM in the pages of Artforum or other contemporary art journals.28 In the 1990s, excitement about art and technology was firmly linked to anticipation of corporate innovation. Today’s STEAM rhetoric takes this a step further. Projected to have an impact beyond company profits, STEAM is steeped in the rhetoric of advancing broader economic goals, including workforce training and regional development.

At the end of the first art-and-technology wave, engineers were typically scorned as lackeys of the capitalist establishment. Leap ahead fifty years and the situation has reversed. Artists and humanists are the ones most often claiming to be marginalized and pressured to succeed in a competitive marketplace. Meanwhile, the “geek-hero” has continued to accrue cultural capital. Engineer-entrepreneurs—whether Elon Musk or the fictional character Tony Stark (a.k.a., Iron Man from the Marvel Comics universe)—now appear as figures worth emulating. CBS built its hit show The Big Bang Theory around a story line featuring quirky yet likable men and women who were physicists, engineers, and inventors.29 (To be fair, fictional technologists possessing rapacious acquisitiveness and questionable ethics still thrived in popular culture circa 2020.) Something similar can be observed with regard to public attitudes about technology. If the late 1960s can be typecast as a time of technophobia, then the decade after the Great Recession was surely one of technophilia, as “Silicon Valley”—the contemporary synecdoche for “technology”—offered profitable privatized remedies for everything from education to public transportation.

This shift in popular perception about technology carried over to the unease many university-based humanists expressed toward STEAM initiatives. As student radicals in the late 1960s had proclaimed, engineers’ work often reflected and reproduced existing economic and political power structures. New academic fields evolved in the 1970s to offer critical analyses of science and technology. In the twenty-first century, STEAM appeared to disregard much of this scholarship. Rather than reflecting on the social or economic values that contemporary engineering or science advanced, adding the “Arts” to engineering instruction, for example, often appeared as not much more than a superficial patina. STEAM, critics said, rarely placed the broader, purportedly progressive project of technoscience itself at risk by challenging its core assumptions and built-in biases.30 Perhaps STEAM is only inflating a bubble of expectations with hot air or maybe it’s powering an engine of educational reform. While it’s too soon to say what outcomes today’s STEAM initiatives might generate (or whether they will evaporate away), as a historian, I understand it first and foremost as another prototype in the cyclic redesign of engineering education that has been happening since the 1950s.

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During the 1960s-era wave of art-and-technology initiatives, advocates like Gyorgy Kepes, Frank Malina, and Billy Klüver promoted the idea that artists could help unveil something about the character of modern technology, perhaps even helping change it. “Technology needs to be revealed,” Klüver once said, “and looked at.”31 After all, Klüver had helped Jean Tinguely build Homage to New York as a commentary about how people believed technology should work. Even if collaborations between engineers and artists often avoided making overt political or social statements, it was thought that they could show aspects of modern technology to their audiences, perhaps just by simply making new tools like lasers or computers appear less threatening and more familiar.

Today, the technologies that induce wonder and dread are very different. Reflecting larger political and social developments, topics such as state surveillance, artificial intelligence, data mining, and online privacy have come to dominate contemporary discourse about technology. Trevor Paglen is one of the most successful artists of the past decade who is working to reveal the power and omnipresence of these technologies. Over the past decade, Paglen’s artworks and installations brought him widespread attention, including profiles in the New Yorker, a 2017 MacArthur genius grant, and a midcareer survey at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum in 2018.

Born in 1974, at the tail end of the first art-and-technology wave, Paglen grew up on and near military bases in the United States and Germany. After finishing his undergraduate degree, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago before returning to Berkeley to complete his PhD in geography. While working on his doctorate, Paglen became fascinated by the physical spaces rendered unknowable on contemporary maps, such as those denoting military test sites. For more than a decade, Paglen experimented with a combination of high-power lenses and cameras, some affixed to telescopes, to reveal the secret infrastructure of orbiting reconnaissance satellites and classified military installations. As he put it, this was all about “showing what invisibility looks like.”32 Some of his most uncanny photos, taken legally from a great distance, were blurry and distorted images of defense contractors disembarking from unmarked shuttle planes at a secure Las Vegas airport terminal. Another picture, Untitled (Reaper Drone), was featured on the cover of Artforum.33 It appears at first glance as an impressionistic wash of colors from a desert sunrise. But once the small indistinct black shape—a missile-carrying drone—is seen, the viewer’s perspective is altered and it becomes quite difficult not to see it.

Paglen gradually shifted his activities to capturing the materiality of the internet. Taking images of underwater fiber-optic cables at banal, right-in-front-of-us locations in Hawaii or Long Island shows how digital infrastructure comes ashore and then disappears.34 Whereas artists like Jean Tinguely wanted to reveal technology’s absurdity, Paglen’s work suggested the mundane yet menacingly omnipresent nature of today’s communication and surveillance tools. Some of his imagery was featured in the 2014 Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour about Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency’s illegal reconnaissance programs.

Although Paglen’s work was about technology, his early projects did not use technology as an artistic medium in same manner as, say, someone like Rockne Krebs had done with lasers. But gradually a more intense engagement with technology as both subject and material emerged in his work. An example of this is Autonomy Cube, a project Paglen unveiled in 2014 in Germany. Its appearance—a cube of thick transparent Plexiglas, about fifteen inches per side, sitting on a white pedestal—referenced Hans Haacke’s famous Condensation Cube. In his 1963 work, the artist placed a small amount of water inside a cube that responded to feedback from the outside air temperature, condensing on the interior walls to form streaks and patterns.

Paglen designed Autonomy Cube, however, to be used as well as seen. Inside its plastic walls are four large circuit boards linked by cables. The cube’s electronics create Wi-Fi hotspots that anyone can use to connect to the internet. However, Autonomy Cube directs this internet traffic onto the Tor network, a system of volunteer computers that encrypts and anonymizes internet traffic. “What I want art to do,” Paglen said in 2012, “is help us see who we are now.”35 By integrating the host institution and those visitors connecting to it into a larger privacy-oriented internet infrastructure, Autonomy Cube addresses the pervasive nature of internet surveillance as well as the challenges of privacy.36

When I was writing a draft of this chapter, Paglen was preparing to launch—literally—his most ambitious project. Executed in collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art and Global Western, an aerospace company, Orbital Reflector is designed as a nonfunctional satellite. Comparable in some ways to one of the inflatable communications satellites of the 1960s (the type that served as prototypes for the Pepsi Pavilion’s mirror dome), engineers built Paglen’s satellite as a polyethylene balloon coated with reflective titanium dioxide and packed as the payload of a small CubeSat. Once orbiting some 360 miles above Earth, a carbon dioxide cartridge would inflate the object so that it will be visible to the naked eye as it circles the planet once every ninety minutes or so. After about three months in orbit, the one-hundred-foot-long, diamond-shaped satellite would then fall out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.

Paglen envisioned Orbital Reflector as a way to draw people’s attention upward and consider the almost always unseen web of satellites—some commercial, others classified—whirling overhead us all the time. This would reveal outer space not as a black void but a bustling infrastructure, barely out of our sight and saturated with technology. Like Autonomy Cube, Orbital Reflector was meant to show an “opposite world” in which technological artifacts are built with different values in mind.37 Putting a nonfunctional object into space, one critic said, resembled the “simple gesture of a child releasing a balloon into the sky.”38

In early December 2018, I hiked up to a small mountain peak in the foothills above Santa Barbara. Right on time, the SpaceX rocket carrying Paglen’s payload lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, some sixty miles to the northwest. It was a bright, sunny day with crystal-clear visibility so I could track the rocket until it disappeared from sight a few minutes later. By using the whole sky as a canvas, I imagined works like Orbital Reflector as a step beyond monumental land art pieces like Robert Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty from 1970, or James Turrell’s Roden Crater. And, of course, there is considerable irony when seen in the context of Paglen’s career trajectory, from photographing satellites to placing his own object into orbit. But, more than anything, I wondered what Frank Malina, whose engineering research had laid the foundation for modern rocketry, would have said about the whole endeavor.

The scale and expense of projects like Orbital Reflector—its total price, including launch, approached $1.5 million—loops us back to the ambitions of Big Art projects like E.A.T.’s pavilion. It was art realized with advanced technology, a spectacle which millions of people might be able to briefly ponder. However, the unexpected shutdown of the federal government in late 2018 delayed official permission for the in-orbit inflation of Paglen’s sculpture. Ultimately, Paglen’s project was doomed to be adrift in space.39 But, regardless of critics’ interpretations or their ultimate fate, projects like Autonomy Cube and Orbital Reflector would be impossible without assistance from a cohort of programmers and other engineers. Art at this scale and complexity still needs the expertise of technologists.

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More than fifty years have passed since the first major wave of art and technology rose, crested, and subsided. In looking to explain and promote it, advocates often referenced Italian futurism, Russian constructivism, Black Mountain College, or the Bauhaus as exemplars of how artists could work with technology. Likewise, today’s artists, engineers, curators, and companies have looked back to the wave of the sixties, deploying the past as a resource to justify and promote new initiatives. The experiences and infrastructures earlier waves left behind provide an antenna of sorts, which contemporary art-and-technology entrepreneurs can use to broadcast new signals about creative collaboration.

In December 2013, for example, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art unveiled its new Art + Technology Lab. Connected to this were sizable grants available to individual artists who would “take purposeful risks in order to explore new boundaries in both art and science.”40 (Technology and science, as in the past, appear as transposable categories.) LACMA’s previous experiment in this area provided both lineage and legitimacy for the museum’s new effort. “In 1967, LACMA introduced the Art and Technology Program to inspire collaborations with artists and industry,” the museum’s chief executive explained, “Nearly 50 years later, we’ve updated the program to encompass the entrepreneurial spirit defining so many industries.” In this telling, Maurice Tuchman’s original project appeared as both uncontroversial and, if not an outright success, a beta version which had returned useful information.41

In its original incarnation, Tuchman’s Art and Technology Program provided a high-profile vehicle for the curator, the museum, and sponsoring companies to display themselves on an international scale. When LACMA rebooted the program, new motives appeared. Innovation, and the “maker spaces” where ordinary people could acquire skills to become individual entrepreneurs, were especially valued after the Great Recession. Los Angeles County administrators, perhaps sensing an opportunity to appear responsive to this trend, provided the museum with $300,000 in seed money to jumpstart the Art + Technology Lab. Participating artist John Gerrard—his work uses large-scale, real-time computer simulations to explore energy infrastructures—suggested a similar rationale, intimating that artists were compelled to be more involved with technology or else “they would just continue to make luxury goods.” (Recall similar statements Robert Rauschenberg made in 1967 when E.A.T. was formally launched.) Finally, the program’s location within an internationally known art museum would also self-consciously distinguish it from the growing number of corporate-sponsored artist residencies.42

The program’s new patrons revealed how much the industrial landscape of Los Angeles had transformed since the late 1960s. Gone were the behemoth defense contractors that made equally outsized products like jet airplanes, missile systems, and nuclear reactors. The new sponsors, firms like Google and Accenture, were primarily content companies that focused on the collection and management of data and information. (SpaceX was one of the few participating companies whose employees still made “things,” in the traditional sense.)

Some of the artists LACMA chose from the pool of applicants directly addressed controversies that dogged Tuchman’s original program a half century earlier. For instance, Annina Rüst was startled when she first saw the cover of Tuchman’s Art and Technology report with its array of white, male faces. In LACMA’s archives, she also found an image of protestors wearing masks with Tuchman’s face and carrying balloons that asked “Where are the women and minorities?” As an exercise in feminist social practice, Rüst’s artwork—she titled it A Piece of the Pie Chart—addressed the pervasive underrepresentation of women in the workforce. Using a robotic arm and a computer workstation, her assembly line-like installation imprinted pie charts on actual pastries that showed lopsided gender ratios at technology companies and art museums. The installation also produced mailing labels so one could mail a custom-made pie to the organization associated with its data. In Leonardo, Rüst described her goal of combining technologies often branded as masculine with activities stereotyped as feminine, like baking.43

LACMA’s rebooted program set out to protect the artist’s intellectual property—they would own whatever they produced—and ensure that artists were not providing free labor toward the design and development of corporate products. However, given that artists were again directly collaborating with high-tech companies, issues about the balance of secrecy, openness, and ownership remained. For example, artist John Craig Freeman created an augmented reality piece for Art + Technology. When he described his work in Leonardo, Freeman noted that companies’ “proprietary, often secret, profit motivation” inevitably resulted in some level of “inherent tension,” despite everyone’s best intentions.44

While the artists were clearly the stars in Tuchman’s program, his Report gave engineers like John Forkner and Larry Hubby the opportunity to describe their technical contributions as well as record their experiences working alongside artists. In the new version, artists weren’t typically paired directly with an engineer or even a single specific company. With the museum playing the role of mediator—shades of E.A.T.—an artist could access expertise from several sponsoring firms (and their engineers) while continuing to work from their own studios. Where Tuchman had based his version on one-to-one relationships between artists and engineers, the twenty-first-century reboot didn’t explicitly treat the engineers and the artists as cocreators.45 Although collaboration and process remained central, the mode and method had changed.

LACMA wasn’t the only museum using an example from the past to construct a new art-and-technology initiative. In 2015, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco referenced and reimagined E.A.T. with its exhibition “New Experiments in Art and Technology” (NEAT). Proving Nam June Paik’s earlier prediction, the artworks for NEAT showed how “computer programming is understood as a new tool or technology that many artists use, not essentially unlike a paintbrush or pencil.”46 The introduction, for instance, of Arduino—small, inexpensive, and easy to program microcontroller boards based on open-source design—gave artists a basic, standardized tool to realize more complex projects. David Mellis, one of the Arduino software developers and a Media Lab alum, noted, “It makes it easier for [artists] to work with engineers and say ‘This is what I want to do.’ I don’t think it’s replacing the engineer. It’s just facilitating that collaboration.”47 However, one key difference from other art-and-technology efforts was NEAT’s stated intent to serve as a “celebration of the individual digital artist” as a creator who was “free from direct corporate control . . . and the current climate of Silicon Valley relations with artists.”48

This jab was aimed at a dominant trend of the new art-and-technology wave. After 2010, a welter of new artist-in-residence programs emerged, many of them funded by companies based in the Bay Area. Businesses such as Autodesk, Facebook, and Adobe all launched programs to bring artists onto their corporate campuses and, in some cases, interact with their technologists. Facebook, for example, supported artists who would create site-specific pieces for its corporate buildings around the globe that might reflect or even challenge the company’s (sometimes questionable) values.49 Drew Bennett, an artist Facebook hired in 2012 to run the residency program, made a parallel between the work of visiting artists’ and the company’s coders. “The engineering mindset is one of hacking. The engineer is taking what’s available to them and improving and realizing what you can do with it,” he said, “the artist is doing the same.”50

As I’m writing this, scores of art-and-technology programs at companies and universities are supporting some form of creative collaboration.51 This ensemble included the twenty-first century’s successor to the legendary research facility where Billy Klüver and many of the original E.A.T. engineers worked. In 2016, to coincide with Experiments in Art and Technology’s fiftieth anniversary, Nokia Bell Labs announced a new program, but one with the same name. Like LACMA’s reboot, the telecommunications company contrasted earlier art-and-technology efforts with its contemporary effort. The company’s chief technology officer noted that although E.A.T. had been “a little dormant for the past decades” (something of an understatement), the organization had once been very “avant-garde . . . well ahead of its time.”52 While blending art and technology might offer Nokia an opportunity to claim a foothold on the “new frontier” of “multimedia sensory art experiences,” it also linked the company back to Bell Labs’ golden years of corporate innovation.53

Other even more recent events have looped some of the main actors in art-and-technology’s waves back to the past in outright disturbing ways. In the early 1970s, some artists and art critics attacked the art-and-technology movement for unethical behavior when it came to accepting patronage. Fifty years later, journalists reported extensively on how Joi Ito, as director of MIT’s Media Lab, had, over several years, accepted over $1.5 million from disgraced financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. At least one professor at the Media Lab—artist Neri Oxman—accepted financial gifts from Epstein, while other lab members resigned in protest.54 At a rancorous and emotional meeting in September 2019, Ito’s attempts at apology were derailed by statements from Nicholas Negroponte. The lab’s founder claimed he saw nothing wrong with Ito’s actions. “I told Joi to take the money,” he reportedly said, “and I would do it again.”55 Supporters of the Media Lab wanly noted that academicians had long accepted money from “dubious characters,” while Negroponte himself boasted of having solicited donations from “scoundrels.” While hardly a persuasive defense, one could nonetheless draw a thread between critics’ claims of amorality or worse when it came to funding art and technology a half century ago and this contemporary controversy.

The landscape of art and technology and that of publishing itself had transformed in the half century since Frank Malina began assembling Leonardo’s first issues in his Paris studio. Although the number of individuals and institutions accessing the publication via subscriptions had not changed substantially since the 1970s, its electronic circulation was now much larger. The majority of readers were still from North America and Europe but there was also a growing readership from such places as India, South Korea, and Brazil. Between June 2017 and June 2018, people viewed or downloaded some 500,000 articles and abstracts from Leonardo, placing the journal in the top 20 percent of arts publications.56 In addition to the flagship publication, there was also a supplement devoted to “aesthetic and technical issues in music and the sonic arts,” an online-only “electronic almanac,” and a book series with more than seventy titles.

By 2018, when Leonardo celebrated its fiftieth birthday, the journal had expanded well beyond publications to encompass an international network of people interested in the nexus of art, science, and technology. At sites across North America and Europe, as well as in China, Iran, and Brazil, thousands of people each year attended Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) events. These brought artists, engineers, and scientists together for informal lectures and public demonstrations. In a sense, they continued, albeit on a larger scale, the evening salons that Frank Malina had enjoyed hosting in his Paris house.

Leonardo’s sprawling set of events and publications—managed from Massachusetts, California, Texas, and two sites in the United Kingdom—signaled a new geographical landscape for art and technology. In the 1960s, the first wave of art and technology had surged in only a few major cities and much of this creative electricity linked back to New York’s (relatively small) avant-garde art scene. The hubs of activity shifted over time as Los Angeles and then Silicon Valley became important nodes. Its size has changed as well. In the 1960s, the most active members of the art-and-technology community could have easily fit into a few of the era’s jumbo jets. In the still-expanding wave of art and technology, the landscape of activities and actors has become more global, networked, and diverse. Today’s art-and-technology community as well as the people and patrons drawn to its work, seem to be both everywhere and in increasing numbers.

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In the 1960s, advocates saw art and technology as an instrument to make new art but also to advance other goals. This alliance would give artists access to new tools and resources while affording engineers access to a new creative partners. Bankrolled by industrial patrons, art and technology could help ordinary citizens better appreciate and adapt to an era of rapid technological change. Creative collaborations might provide a model for improved relations between management and labor. For university administrators, art and technology could help humanize engineers through a more balanced curriculum while still producing highly trained technologists. For business executives, art-and-technology partnerships offered a relatively inexpensive way to burnish corporate images, appease intellectually restless employees, and perhaps profit from future innovation. In all cases, the language of repairing breaches and building bridges between two allegedly estranged cultures provided potent motivation and rhetorical justification for collaboration. Forging this “mutual agreement,” as Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg wrote in 1967, between engineers, artists, and industry would ideally “avoid the waste of a cultural revolution,” a resonant sentiment when revolutions of all kinds were happening around the planet.

Whether we envision art-and-technology alliances occurring and reoccurring as loops, bubbles, or waves, they were never about just “art” or “technology.” Since the 1960s, this Snow-like dichotomy has been gradually replaced with the more accurate “art is technology.” Indeed, over time, categories like art, technology, engineer, and artist proved anything but static. Historically contingent, their fluidity reflects broader trends and transformations. These included the continued redesign of higher education, the development and availability of new technologies, and the critical role that economic conditions played in catalyzing, amplifying, and attenuating art-and-technology waves.

In the 1960s, the prevailing attitude was that technologists and artists inhabited two disparate and incommensurate cultures. Today, the imagery of gaps and divides still proves a durable presence in academicians’ reports and journalists’ articles when it comes to writing about science, art, and technology. But the successive art-and-technology movements reveal that engineers and artists can forge communities where they collaborate and create together. Once depicted as worlds apart, these sometimes looked alike not just in their mutual expertise with particular technologies but also in shared values, such as entrepreneurship, adaptability, and a willingness to experiment across disciplinary boundaries.

When we reassess the history of art and technology’s practitioners, we’re likewise encouraged to think about what they produce. The fusion of art and engineering created objects with a weird ontological status. The products and processes of engineers’ and artists’ collaborations were, without a doubt, engineering. But curators and art critics circa 1970 were often reticent to accept what artists and technologists had made as art. Perhaps this hesitancy is changing. In 2017, when the Museum of Modern Art hosted a major retrospective of Robert Rauschenberg’s six-decades-long career, its galleries were full of works he made with members of E.A.T. Curators of the show—subtitled “Among Friends”—accurately portrayed the artist’s interactions with engineers as a long and productive relationship, not some brief fling. Old prejudices remain, however. A year later, Christie’s, the New York auction house, displayed a computer-generated portrait alongside now-conventional pop art works by Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein. Computer scientists and the auction house seemed delighted when it eventually sold for over $430,000, but some artists and art historians cried foul. “It’s just so strange,” groused one critic, suggesting technological art still retained its shades of liminality.57

In the various waves of art and technology that have surged forth since the 1960s, issues as to professional identity persistently lingered. Was someone an engineer, an artist, or a hybrid practitioner? Did such distinctions even matter? But, regardless of one’s self-identification, it was a foregone conclusion that whoever made the art was, if nothing else, a person. But an even more ontologically precarious question than “is it art?” has arisen. In June 2019, the University of Oxford opened a controversial exhibition titled “Unsecured Futures.” The original works displayed were “made” by Ai-Da, the “world’s first ultrarealistic humanoid AI robot artist.” Ai-Da’s art resulted from a collaboration of computer scientists, roboticists, and artists orchestrated by a British gallery director. Ai-Da’s paintings, for example, were created using algorithms and artificial neural nets, which plotted image coordinates onto a Cartesian plane. Human artist Suzie Emery then added oil paint to create the final works, a process that prompted critiques that a robot was getting credit for pieces ultimately made by a woman artist. Ai-Da, its creators say, is an “astute mirror of contemporary currents,” supposedly sparking discussions about the nature of technological choices and creative capacity.58 Hype aside, collectors reportedly paid more than $1 million for Ai-Da’s works.

It’s now the early spring of 2020 and the current wave of art and technology shows no sign of ebbing. Record gains in the US stock markets suggest yet again how the confluence of art, technology, and science is tied to broader conditions and currents. Last summer, the Getty Foundation announced that the new theme for its formidable Pacific Standard Time initiative would be “Art × Science × LA.” Over the next five years, the institution said it would invest $15 million or more to fund exhibitions in the Los Angeles area that explore how “art and science have shared moments of unity, conflict, and mutual insight.”59 The Getty pitched its enterprise as especially well timed given concerns about the pervasive influence and implementation of new technologies (like robots and artificial intelligence). As in previous art-and-technology waves, the best artworks would, ideally, not just exploit technology but reveal something new and surprising about our relations with it.

In 1969, James Seawright, an engineer turned sculptor, told an audience at the Guggenheim Museum that “art is, after all, only a record of people in a time, and this is the time of technology.”60 Today is also a time of technology. Just as art reflects an era’s prevailing sensibilities, our technologies reveal our hopes, fears, and ambitions. In their intermingled histories, we see artists acting as inventors, engineers becoming artists, and all of them working toward personal fulfillment, professional success, and sometimes even commercial innovation. Understanding and appreciating these waves of collaboration—how they begin, the art they generate, and how they dissipate—enlightens our understanding of the broader histories of both art and technology. Today, as in the past, new communities of engineers and artists continue to come together and make art work.