1. Douglas M. Davis, “The New Combine,” Art in America 56, no. (1968): 35.
2. Technically, Live Wire was an eight-foot piece of plastic string attached to a small electric stepper motor, which was controlled by local area network input. Activity in the network activated the string, its motion a function of digital traffic on the network. The piece is alternatively referred to in some forums as Dangling String; I’ve opted to use the artist’s title. Unfortunately, no especially good images of it could be located.
3. Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown, “The Coming Age of Calm Technology,” Xerox PARC (October 5, 1996), http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.129.2275.
4. Biographical information on Jeremijenko comes from several sources, including her current and archived personal web pages which include CVs and press kits as well as Jonah Weiner, “The Artist Who Talks with the Fishes,” New York Times Magazine, June 28, 2013, 18–21, 38, https://nyti.ms/10iRiOy.
5. “The Q&A: Natalie Jeremijenko, thingker,” Economist, September 20, 2010, https://www.economist.com/prospero/2010/09/20/the-q-and-a-natalie-jeremijenko-thingker.
6. Kevin Berger, “The Artist as Mad Scientist,” Salon, June 22, 2006, http://www.salon.com/2006/06/22/natalie/.
7. Mary Lord, “The Scientist as Mad Artist,” ASEE Prism 20, no. 9 (2011): 24.
8. David Chase, “An Engineer for the Avant-Garde,” Yale Alumni Magazine, March/April 2004, http://archive.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2004_03/jeremijenko.html.
9. Courtney Eldridge, “Better Art through Circuitry: Questions for Natalie Jeremijenko,” New York Times Magazine, June 11, 2000, 25, https://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/11/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-61100-questions-for-natalie-jeremijenko-better.html.
10. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). For the other terms, see Scott Hartley’s The Fuzzy and the Techie: Why the Liberal Arts Will Rule the Digital World (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).
11. The term comes from a recent volume, edited by David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner, Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018).
12. Stephen Bann, ed., The Tradition of Constructivism (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 9.
13. Biographical material on Wilfred as well as technical descriptions of his clavilux comes from two catalogs that accompanied shows of his works: Donna M. Stein, Thomas Wilfred: Lumia—A Retrospective Exhibition (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1971) and Keely Orgeman, Lumia: Thomas Wilfred and the Art of Light (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), as well as “Biographical Notes” on Wilfred prepared in the curatorial files of the Museum of Modern Art, New York (TW/MoMA).
14. Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).
15. My terminology here was informed by conversations with my much-missed friend and colleague, Ann Johnson, who described “knowledge communities” in her book Hitting the Brakes: Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge (Durham: Duke University Press: 2009). Also, Cyrus C. M. Mody, Instrumental Community: Probe Microscopy and the Path to Nanotechnology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011).
16. Caroline A. Jones, The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 361.
17. These goals fit into the larger rubric of the 1960s-era “human potential movement,” which Maslow contributed to. Sarah Brouilette, “Antisocial Psychology,” Meditations 26, no. 1–2 (2012–2013): 107–117, https://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/antisocial-psychology.
18. Collaboration itself has been seen by some art historians as a significant theme in art making after 1950. See, for example, Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), as well as the catalog edited by Cynthia Jaffee McCabe, Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1984).
19. Jody Rosen, “Does ‘Creative’ Work Free You from Drudgery, or Just Security?,” New York Times Magazine, February 3, 2019, 9–11, https://nyti.ms/2GcWsXR.
20. Matthew Wisnioski, Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).
21. Allan Kaprow, “Should the Artist Become a Man of the World?,” Art News 63, no. 6 (1964): 34–37, 58–59; Barbara Rose and Irving Sandler, “Sensibility of the Sixties,” Art in America 55, no. 1 (1967): 44–57; also, Jones, The Machine in the Studio.
22. Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg in E.A.T. News 1, no. 2 (June 1, 1967): 1.
23. Quote from Simone Whitman, “Theater and Engineering: An Experiment, 1. Notes by a Participant,” Artforum 5, no. 6 (1967): 28.
24. E.A.T. News 2, no. 1 (March 18, 1968): 1.
25. An excellent exploration of Kepes’s career and work is John R. Blakinger, Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).
26. Michael Rush, New Media in Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2005).
27. Barry M. Katz, Make It New: A History of Silicon Valley Design (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
28. Jon Agar, “What Happened in the Sixties?,” British Journal for the History of Science 41, no. 4 (2008): 567–600, doi:10.1017/S0007087408001179.
29. There are many ways one could bookend the long 1960s. While I’ve chosen one based around technology, a similar one might be based on US politics, starting with Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to the end of the Nixon presidency in 1974.
30. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. 313–314.
31. Cateforis, Duval, and Steiner, Hybrid Practices, 6.
32. Howard Brick, “Optimism of the Mind: Imagining Postindustrial Society in the 1960s and 1970s,” American Quarterly 44, no. 3 (1992): 348–380, doi:10.2307/2712981.
33. For example, the index for the post-1945 volume of Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and David Joselit, Art Since 1900: 1945 to the Present (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2011), doesn’t include “technology” or “science,” nor is there anything more than an occasional oblique mention throughout its 800-plus pages. Another book, an anthology of essays often used in university courses—Amelia Jones, ed., A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006)—includes a section on technology but has notable errors of fact and interpretation. See also, Edward A. Shanken, “Historicizing Art and Technology: Forging a Method and Firing a Canon,” in MediaArtHistories, ed. Oliver Grau (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 43–70.
34. David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, eds., Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226373072.001.0001.
35. Classic studies include Paul Forman, “Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940–1960,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 18, no. 1 (1987): 149–229, doi:10.2307/27757599; Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); and Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
36. Steven Shapin, “The Invisible Technician,” American Scientist 77, no. 6 (1989): 554–563.
37. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).
38. My book expands outward in several directions from scholarship done by my colleague Matthew Wisnioski, whose essay “Why MIT Institutionalized the Avant-Garde: Negotiating Aesthetic Virtue in the Postwar Defense Institute,” Configurations 21, no. 1 (2013): 85–116, doi:10.1353/con.2013.0006, helped galvanize my thinking at the earliest stages of my research.
39. Derek J. de Solla Price. “Is Technology Historically Independent of Science? A Study in Statistical Historiography,” Technology and Culture 6, no. 4 (1965): 553–568.
40. Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” Leonardo 34, no. 1 (2001): 49–54, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/19618, which was originally published in several places, including Something Else Newsletter 1, no. 1 (1966). Fluxus cofounder George Maciunas deployed the term “expanded arts” in the winter 1966 issue of Film Culture.
41. Elenore Lester, “Intermedia: Tune In, Turn On—And Walk Out?,” New York Times, May 12, 1968, https://nyti.ms/1LXAv7W. Fred Turner, in his The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War Two to the Psychedelic Sixties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), proposed the term “surrounds” for these kind of installations, but I find the original term both more explanatory and historically accurate.
42. A distinction further complicated by Steven Shapin in his “Making Art/Discovering Science,” Know 2, no. 2 (2018): 177–205, doi:10.1086/699899. For a sense of how variable and historically fraught the T-word is, see Eric Schatzberg, Technology: A Critical History of a Concept (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).
43. Arthur I. Miller, Colliding Worlds: How Cutting-Edge Science Is Redefining Contemporary Art (New York: Norton, 2014); see also, Leonard Shlain, Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light (New York: William Morrow, 1991); Jill Scott, ed., Artists-in-Labs: Processes of Inquiry (New York: Springer, 2006); and David Edwards, Artscience: Creativity in the Post-Google Generation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). In most of the scholarly literature, the prevailing focus has addressed the art-science nexus. For example, Linda Dalrymple Henderson, The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Caroline A. Jones and Peter Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998). A significant exception to this focus on art and science is the topic of computer-generated art, which has received a great deal of attention to the larger exclusion of other art-technology activity. Some recent book-length treatments include: Hannah B. Higgins and Douglas Kahn, eds., Mainframe Experimentalism: Early Computing and the Foundations of the Digital Arts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Carolyn L. Kane, Chromatic Algorithms: Synthetic Color, Computer Art, and Aesthetics after Code (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); Grant D. Taylor, When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014); and Zabet Patterson, Peripheral Vision: Bell Labs, the S-C 4020, and the Origins of Computer Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
44. A recent and timely look at the landscape of SEAD programs at public universities is Kari Zacharias and Matthew Wisnioski, “Land Grant Hybrids: From Art and Technology to SEAD,” Leonardo 52, no. 3 (2019): 261–270, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/728399.
1. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 16.
2. February 15, 1953 letter from Malina to his parents; Folder 10, Box 22, Papers of Frank J. Malina, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (FM/LOC).
3. The most recent and well-researched examination of Malina’s life, especially his rocketry and political activism in the 1930s, is Fraser MacDonald’s Escape from Earth: A Secret History of the Space Rocket (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019). Malina wrote about his own activities in rocketry in several essays including “America’s First Long Range Missile Program: The ORDCIT Project of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 1943–1946: A Memoir,” in Essays on the History of Rocketry and Astronautics: Proceedings of the Third Through the Sixth History Symposia of the International Academy of Astronautics, Vol. II, NASA CP-2014 (1977): 339–383, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19770026104.pdf. In addition, I’ve drawn on several informative oral history interviews including an October 29, 1968 interview with R. Cargill Hall in the NASA Historical Archives and a December 14, 1978 interview with Mary Terrall in the Archives of the California Institute of Technology.
4. A good overview is Hunter Hollins, “Science and Military Influences on the Ascent of Aerospace Development in Southern California,” Southern California Quarterly 96, no. 4 (2014): 373–404, doi:10.1525/scq.2014.96.4.373.
5. March 6, 1935 and February 2, 1936 letters from Malina to his parents; Folders 5 and 6, Box 21, FM/LOC.
6. Folder 9, Box 14, FM/LOC.
7. James L. Johnson, “Rockets and the Red Scare: Frank Malina and American Missile Development, 1936–1954,” Quest 19 (2012): 30–36; Malina’s involvement with the Communist Party and leftist politics in general while at Caltech is well documented in MacDonald, Escape from Earth.
8. My thanks to Fraser MacDonald for sharing the most recent copy of Malina’s file, which he received in mid-2019.
9. “Art,” undated notes (but likely 1937 or 1938), Folder 14, Box 14, FM/LOC.
10. Galerie Henri Tronche, “Frank J. Malina: Extraits de Presse,” 1953; Folder 1, Box 39, FM/LOC.
11. Undated letter, likely late 1944, from Frank Malina to Liljan Malina; Malina Family Archive.
12. October 8, 1944 and October 13, 1944 letters from Frank Malina to Liljan Malina; Malina Family Archive.
13. April 4, 1946 letter from Frank Malina to Liljan Malina; Malina Family Archive.
14. November 28, 1945 letter from Malina to his parents, Folder 5, Box 22, FM/LOC.
15. This episode is detailed in MacDonald’s Escape from Earth.
16. Malina, “America’s First Long Range Missile Program.”
17. “The Impact of Science on Society,” Impact of Science on Society, 1, no. 1 (1950): 1–2; H. H. Krill de Capello, “The Creation of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,” International Organization 24, no. 1 (1970): 1–30.
18. Julian Huxley, UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy (Washington, DC: Public Affairs, 1947).
19. Sarton’s ideas, presented in his 1931 book The History of Science and the New Humanism, are discussed in Roy Porter, “The Two Cultures Revisited,” Boundary 23, no. 2 (1996): 1–17, doi:10.2307/303805.
20. Huxley, UNESCO, 27–28.
21. Frank J. Malina. “Some Reflections on the Differences between Science and Art” in DATA: Directions in Art, Theory, and Aesthetics, ed. Anthony Hill (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1969), 134–149.
22. January 1, 1953 report in Malina’s FBI file.
23. Correspondence in Folders 6–8, Box 16, FM/LOC.
24. May 31, 1953 letter from Malina to his parents, Folder 10, Box 22, FM/LOC.
25. August 27, 1954 report in Malina’s FBI file.
26. Frank. J. Malina, “Electric Light as a Medium in the Visual Fine Arts: A Memoir,” Leonardo 8, no. 2 (1975): 110, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/599105/summary; see also https://muse.jhu.edu/article/600580/summary.
27. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
28. Galerie Henri Tronche, “Frank J. Malina: Extraits de Presse,” 1953; Folder 1, Box 39, FM/LOC.
29. May 31, 1953 letter from Malina to his parents; Folder 10, Box 22, FM/LOC.
30. Ibid.
31. Galerie Henri Tronche, “Frank J. Malina: Extraits de Presse,” 1953; Folder 1, Box 39, FM/LOC.
32. Gerald Oster and Yasunori Nishijima, “Moiré Patterns,” Scientific American 208, no. 5 (1963): 54–63. Oster, like Malina, was a scientist who also became a professional artist.
33. On “abstract,” see October 25, 1971 letter from Malina to James Gibson; Folder 19, Box 35, FM/LOC. Also, June 11, 1954 letter from Malina to his parents; Folder 11, Box 22, FM/LOC. Malina wasn’t alone in his views. In February 1951, Willem de Kooning gave a talk at MoMA in which he also expressed dislike of “abstract,” a term that came “from the light-tower of philosophers”; Jed Perl, New Art City: Manhattan at Mid-Century (New York City: Vintage, 2005), 121.
34. Frank Popper, “Frank Malina, Artist and Scientist,” unpublished 1963 essay; available at https://www.olats.org/pionniers/malina/arts/monographUS.php; also Malina, “Electric Light as a Medium in the Visual Fine Arts.”
35. Malina, “Electric Light as a Medium in the Visual Fine Arts.”
36. Ralph K. Potter, “New Scientific Tools for the Arts,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 10, no. 2 (1951): 126–134.
37. Jean-Paul Ameline, Denise René, l’intrepid: Une galerie dans l’aventure de l’art abstrait, 1944–1978 (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2001), which accompanied an exhibit of the same name.
38. Malina, “Electric Light as a Medium in the Visual Fine Arts,” 112.
39. December 17, 1955 letter from Malina to his parents; Folder 11, Box 12, FM/LOC.
40. Malina. “Electric Light as a Medium in the Visual Fine Arts.”
41. Frank. J. Malina. “Kinetic Painting: The Lumidyne System.” Leonardo 1, no. 1 (1968): 25–33, doi:10.2307/1571902; see also the February 2007 reprint, Leonardo 40, no. 1 (2007): 81–90, https://dx.doi.org/10.1162/leon.2007.40.1.81.
42. These are described in John R. Blakinger, Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 256–264.
43. Frank J. Malina, “Kinetic Painting,” New Scientist 25, no. 432 (1965): 512–513.
44. Malina. “Electric Light as a Medium in the Visual Fine Arts.”
45. Frank J. Malina, “Some Reflections on the Differences between Science and Art,” draft essay from late 1964; later published with same name in Anthony Hill, ed., DATA: Directions in Art, Theory, and Aesthetics (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1969), 134–149.
46. For example, Thomas Wilfred, “Light and the Artist,” Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism 5, no. 4 (1947): 247–255, doi:10.2307/426131.
47. Inferences based on documents in MoMA’s records, 166.1942.
48. Their correspondence, from February and March 1957, is in Folder 5, Box 39, FM/LOC. In May 1962, Malina’s friend, Martin Summerfield, having just seen Wilfred’s Aspiration at MoMA, wrote to tell him about the artist. Malina replied that he had first learned of Wilfred in 1957 “from a friend who has one of my kinetic paintings. . . . She sent me no detailed information on it. . . . Until recently, I thought that Wilfred was dead.” May 25, 1962 letter from Malina to Summerfield, Folder 7, Box 39, FM/LOC.
49. February 15, 1957 letter from Malina to his parents; Folder 12, Box 22, FM/LOC.
50. May 25, 1962 letter from Malina to Summerfield, Folder 7, Box 39, FM/LOC. Malina’s US patent, issued in 1964, doesn’t include Wilfred in the “References Cited” section.
51. March 28, 1958 letter from Malina to his parents; Folder 13, Box 22, FM/LOC. The French patent was awarded June 29, 1959. Malina later refiled his application for the US patent; this was awarded as Frank J. Malina, “Lighted, Animated, and Everchanging Picture Arrangement,” US Patent 3,160,975, filed December 11, 1961, issued December 15, 1964, https://patents.google.com/patent/US3160975A/en?oq=US+Patent+3%2c160%2c975; a similar British patent was awarded the same year, titled “Improvements In or Relating to Light-Pattern Generators.”
52. Frank J. Malina, interview by Mary Terrall, December 14, 1978, transcript, Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena, http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/149/.
53. Correspondence between Haley and Malina, the key pieces of which date from June–July 1958, are in Folder 7, Box 2, FM/LOC.
54. November 17, 1960 letter from Malina to his parents; Folder 14, Box 22, FM/LOC.
55. Malina, “Electric Light as a Medium in the Visual Fine Arts.”
56. A detailed (undated but likely 1965 or 1966) description of a “kusic” system, written by Dominique Bouffier, an engineer who worked with Malina, appears in Folder 2, Box 41, FM/LOC.
57. In 1964, for instance, he corresponded with a British psychologist about a French-made device called a “Somnidor,” which used lighted forms on a screen to cure insomniacs; June 8, 1964 letter from J. H. Peel to Malina; Folder 7, Box 41, FM/LOC.
58. Frank J. Malina, “Comments on the Kinetic Mural ‘The Cosmos’ at the Pergamon Press, Oxford,” December 25, 1966, Malina Family Archive.
59. Untitled and undated—likely September 1965—film clip; Malina Family Archive, copy in the author’s files.
60. Malina, “Some Reflections on the Differences between Science and Art”; similar sentiments appear in Malina’s 1964 draft of this essay; Folder 3, Box 42, FM/LOC.
61. Malina, “Some Reflections on the Differences between Science and Art.”
62. Bruce V. Lewenstein, “The Meaning of ‘Public Understanding of Science’ in the United States after World War II,” Public Understanding of Science 1, no. 1 (1992): 45–68, doi:10.1088/0963-6625/1/1/009.
63. “Techniques: Luminal Music,” Time, April 28, 1967, 36, 40–41.
64. Roger F. Malina, in discussion with the author, December 7, 2015; copy in the author’s files.
65. Based on my survey of the Malina family guest books shared by Roger F. Malina.
66. This phrasing, from a self-description by the “defense intellectual” Albert Wohlstetter, applies equally to Malina; see Pamela M. Lee, “Aesthetic Strategist: Albert Wohlstetter, the Cold War, and a Theory of Mid-Century Modernism,” October 138 (Fall 2011): 18n7; see also Pamela M. Lee, Think Tank Aesthetics: Midcentury Modernism, the Cold War, and the Neoliberal Present (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020).
67. Popper’s recollections come from an interview between him and Véronique Wiesinger, which is included in Jean-Paul Ameline, Denise René, l’intrepid: Une galerie dans l’aventure de l’art abstrait, 1944–1978 (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2001).
68. Joseph Nechvatal, “Origins of Virtualism: An Interview with Frank Popper,” Art Journal 63, no. 1 (2004): 62–77, doi:10.1080/00043249.2004.10791116, http://www.eyewithwings.net/nechvatal/popper/intervewww1.html; see also Reg Gadney, “Kinetic Art,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 42, no. 1–2 (2017): 180–192, doi:10.1080/03080188.2017.1297169.
69. Frank Popper, “Kinetic Art and Our Environment,” Granta, April 1964, 12–13.
70. William Moritz, Optical Poetry: The Life and Work of Oskar Fischinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
71. An early example of this juxtaposition is an essay by Jean Cassou, the director of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville in Paris, “Vers un art cinétique,” Prévues, no. 113 (July 1960): 67–71.
72. Hilton Kramer, “One Inventor, One Pasticheur,” New York Times, November 28, 1965, https://nyti.ms/1iIdX2A.
73. Nicolas Schöffer, Le Spatiodynamisme (Paris: Société Française d’Esthétique, 1955).
74. Carlotta Darò, “Nicolas Schöffer and the Cybernetic City,” AA Files, no. 69 (2014): 3–11.
75. Jean Cassou, “Nicolas Schöffer,” in 2 Kinetic Sculptors: Nicolas Schöffer and Jean Tinguely, Jean Cassou, K. G. Hultèn, and Sam Hunter (New York: Jewish Museum, 1966), 17.
76. Contemporary views on Schöffer and his works come from Frank Popper, “Movement & Light in Today’s Art,” UNESCO Courier, September 1963, 13–23; Frank Popper, Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 134–137; and Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968); see also, Stephen Bann, et al., Kinetic Art: Four Essays (St. Albans, England: Motion Books, 1966). A recent perspective is Arnauld Pierre, ed., Nicolas Schöffer: Space, Light, Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018).
77. Frank Popper, “Light and Movement,” Art and Artists 1, no. 1 (1966): 8–11; October 3, 1966 letter from Malina to Popper; Folder 8, Box 41, FM/LOC.
78. George W. Rickey, “The Morphology of Movement: A Study of Kinetic Art,” Art Journal 22, no. 4 (1963): 220–231, doi:10.1080/00043249.1963.10794433.
79. From manifesto and statements included in GRAV and Denise René, eds., Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel: Paris 1962 (Paris: Galerie Denise René, 1962); also quoted in Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture, 282–283.
80. Umberto Eco, “Arte programmata: Arte cinetica, opere moltiplicate, opera aperta,” in Arte programmata: Arte cinetica, opere moltiplicate, opera aperta (Milan: Officina Arte Grafica Lucini, 1962); see also Lindsay Caplan, “From Collective Creation to Creating Collectives: Arte programmata and the Open Work, 1962,” Grey Room 73 (Fall 2018): 55–81.
81. Malina, “Some Reflections on the Differences between Science and Art.”
82. Gadney, “Kinetic Art.”
83. John Canaday, “The Whitney Annual, or ‘How About Next Year?,’” New York Times, December 12, 1965, https://nyti.ms/1Pt6jWQ.
84. “The Movement Movement,” Time, January 28, 1966, 64–69.
1. J. H. McPherson, “How to Manage Creative Engineers,” Mechanical Engineering 87, no. 2 (1965): 33.
2. American Society for Engineering Education, General Education in Engineering: A Report of the Humanistic-Social Research Project (Urbana, IL: American Society for Engineering Education, 1956), 2–3, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001959328.
3. Gary Lee Downey, “Low Cost, Mass Use: American Engineers and the Metrics of Progress,” History and Technology 23, no. 3 (2007): 289–308, doi:10.1080/07341510701300387; Atsushi Akera and Bruce Seely, “A Historical Survey of the Structural Changes in the American System of Engineering Education,” in International Perspectives on Engineering Education: Engineering Education and Practice in Context, ed. Steen Hyldgaard Christensen et al. (New York: Springer, 2015), 1:7–32, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-16169-3_1.
4. Terry S. Reynolds, “The Engineer in 20th-Century America,” in The Engineer in America: A Historical Anthology from Technology and Culture, ed. Terry S. Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 169–190.
5. American Society for Engineering Education, General Education in Engineering, 5.
6. Readers familiar with the history of technology will see my indebtedness in this chapter to Matthew Wisnioski’s work on the intellectual culture of American engineers in the 1960s, especially his book Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012) which, in turn, was based on his dissertation “Engineers and the Intellectual Crisis of Technology, 1957–1973” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2005), ProQuest (305420048).
7. C. P. Snow, “The Two Cultures,” New Statesman and Nation 52, no. 1334 (October 6, 1956): 413–414.
8. The original book was C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959). I’ve drawn on the 1993 edition, which includes an excellent commentary by Stefan Collini as well as Snow’s 1963 reevaluation of his argument. Also, valuable for situating the Two Cultures debate in a larger context is Guy Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
9. Stefan Collini, introduction to The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, by C. P. Snow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xv.
10. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 30–32.
11. F. R. Leavis, “The Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow,” Spectator, March 9, 1962, 297–303.
12. David Edgerton, “C. P. Snow as Anti-Historian of British Science: Revisiting the Technocratic Moment” History of Science 43, no. 2 (2005): 187–208, doi:10.1177/007327530504300205.
13. William H. Davenport, The One Culture (New York: Pergamon Press, 1970), 1.
14. J. Tuzo Wilson, “Two Worlds of the Modern Mind that Seldom Meet,” New York Times, January 3, 1960, https://nyti.ms/1kPcp8O.
15. Reactions to Snow’s book in the United States is discussed in Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy, 59–60.
16. John L. Rudolph, Scientists in the Classroom: The Cold War Reconstruction of American Science Education (New York: Palgrave, 2002); David Kaiser, “Cold War Requisitions, Scientific Manpower, and the Production of American Physicists after World War II,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 33, no. 1 (2002): 131–159, doi:10.1525/hsps.2002.33.1.131.
17. “The Discipline of the Scientific Method,” Nature 184, no. 4683 (1959): 295–296; “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” Physics Today 14, no. 9 (1961): 62–63, doi:10.1063/1.3057748; Lloyd Fallers, “C. P. Snow and the Third Culture,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 17, no. 8 (1961): 306–310, doi:10.1080/00963402.1961.11454255.
18. C. P. Snow, The New Men (New York: Scribner, 1954), 176.
19. National Science Foundation, Employment of Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1950–1966 (Washington, DC: US Government and Printing Office, 1968). Also, Ronald Kline, “An Overview of Twenty-Five Years of Electrical and Electronics Engineering in the Proceedings of the IEEE, 1963–1987,” Proceedings of the IEEE 78, no. 3 (1990): 469–485, doi:10.1109/5.52226.
20. T. F. Jones, “Poles and Zeros,” Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 50, no. 2 (1962): 129, doi:10.1109/JRPROC.1962.287971.
21. Responses published in Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 50, no. 6 (1962): 1547–1551, doi:10.1109/JRPROC.1962.288198).
22. James M. Lufkin, “The Implications for Engineers of C. P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures,’” IEEE Transactions on Engineering Writing and Speech 7 no. 3 (1964): 8–15, doi:10.1109/TEWS.1964.4322575.
23. Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), esp. chapter 1.
24. James R. Killian, “The Obligations and Ideals of an Institute of Technology,” April 2, 1949 inaugural address, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mid-Century Convocation on the Social Implications of Scientific Progress records, 1, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Libraries, Department of Distinctive Collections, https://archivesspace.mit.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/55250; see also, Christophe Lécuyer, “The Making of a Science Based Technological University: Karl Compton, James Killian, and the Reform of MIT, 1930–1957,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 23, no. 1 (1992): 153–180.
25. Frederick E. Terman, “Electrical Engineers Are Going Back to Science!” Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers 44, no. 6 (1956): 738–740, doi:10.1109/JRPROC.1956.274963.
26. American Society for Engineering Education, General Education in Engineering, 6.
27. Atsushi Akera, “The MIT Lewis Survey: Creating a Cold War Blueprint for a Technological University” (paper presented at the 119th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, San Antonio, TX, June 12, 2012), https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/8/papers/3854/view. See also, pages 94–96 in Matthew Wisnioski, “Why MIT Institutionalized the Avant-Garde: Negotiating Aesthetic Virtue in the Postwar Defense Institute,” Configurations 21, no. 1 (2013): 85–116, doi:10.1353/con.2013.0006.
28. The idea of fostering “visual literacy” also figured large in the rational for Harvard’s new Center for Visual Studies, which opened in 1963. Kepes declined an initial offer to direct it. See chapter 5 of Anna Vallye, “Design and Politics of Knowledge in America, 1937–1967: Walter Gropius, Gyorgy Kepes” (PhD diss., Columbia University, New York, 2011), ProQuest (868518343).
29. Gyorgy Kepes, Language of Vision (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1944) and The New Landscape in Art and Science (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1956); also, Anna Vallye, “The Middleman: Kepes’s Instruments,” in A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno-Social’ Moment, ed. Arindam Dutta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 144–185.
30. “The Report of the Committee for the Study of the Visual Arts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1952–54,” copy in Folder 11, Box 1, AC 66, MIT/SC.
31. Robert Preusser, “Relating Art to Science and Technology: An Educational Experience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” Leonardo 6, no. 3 (1973): 199–206, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/597214; also, Robert Preusser, interview by Robert Brown, 1991, transcript, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
32. David Kaiser, “Elephant on the Charles: Postwar Growing Pains,” in Becoming MIT: Moments of Decision, ed. David Kaiser (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 103–122.
33. Preusser, “Relating Art to Science and Technology,” 202.
34. Julius A. Stratton, Science and the Educated Man: Selected Speeches of Julius A. Stratton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1966).
35. William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 81.
36. The article Whyte cited was “Interrupting the Great Conversation” by labor journalist George H. Tichenor in the March 1955 issue of Technology Review.
37. Samuel C. Florman, “Engineers and the End of Innocence,” Technology and Culture 10, no. 1 (1969): 14–16.
38. Descriptions from C. C. Furnas and Joe McCarthy, The Engineer (New York: Time, 1966).
39. This idea of sensibility is adapted from several sources, including Susan Sontag’s essay “Notes on Camp,” which appears in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Picador, 1966); Daniel Wickenberg, “What is the History of Sensibilities: On Cultural Histories, Old and New,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 661–684, doi:10.1086/ahr.112.3.661; and George Cotkin, A Feast of Excess: A Cultural History of the New Sensibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
40. Robert Perrucci and Joel E. Gerstl, Profession Without Community: Engineers in American Society (New York: Random House, 1969).
41. National Science Foundation, Employment of Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1950–1966 (Washington, DC: US Government and Printing Office, 1968); Engineers Joint Council, A Profile of the Engineering Profession (New York: Engineers Join Council, 1971).
42. A. Michael McMahon, The Making of a Profession: A Century of Electrical Engineering in America (New York: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, 1984), 257; Furnas and McCarthy, The Engineer, 98.
43. Frederick E. Terman, “Education in 2012 for Communication and Electronics,” Proceedings of the IRE 50, no. 5 (1962): 570–571, doi:10.1109/JRPROC.1962.288363.
44. J. D. Ryder, “Spectral Lines,” IEEE Spectrum 2, no. 1 (1965): 49, doi:10.1109/MSPEC.1965.5531876. Numbers based on IEEE annual reports.
45. This claim, from electrical engineer Ernst Weber, appeared in an advertisement titled “Technical Obsolescence” from Airborne Instrument Laboratory in IEEE Spectrum 3, no. 2 (1966): 5. Similar claims came from leaders in other fields.
46. “Publications: Where They’re Going,” Chemical Engineering Progress 63, no. 3 (1967): 29–34.
47. Published in IEEE Spectrum 4, no. 4 (1967): 133.
48. Advertisement for Sylvania Electronic Systems, IEEE Spectrum 2, no. 9 (1965): 129.
49. Data is from Stanley S. Robin, “The Female in Engineering,” in The Engineers and the Social System, ed. Robert Perrucci and Joel E. Gerstl (New York: Wiley, 1969), as well as Amy Sue Bix’s excellent study of women in engineering Girls Coming to Tech! A History of American Engineering Education for Women (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). On the masculine character of technology and engineering, see Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999).
50. Joseph Whitehill, The Way Up (New York: Dell, 1959); the original title was The Angers of Spring. My thanks to Megan Prelinger for background information on this book.
51. According to Google’s Ngram viewer, sometime between 1968 and 1969, “technology” surpassed both “engineer” and “engineering” in terms of frequency of appearances in books. This impression is confirmed by citation frequencies in the New York Times presented by Wisnioski in Engineers for Change, page 13, a phenomenon he refers to as a “semantic reversal.”
52. “Poles and Zeros,” Proceedings of the IEEE 51, no. 4 (1963): 551, doi:10.1109/PROC.1963.2198.
53. Recounted in “Letters and Comments,” Mechanical Engineering 89, no. 2 (1967): 84.
54. For example, Arnold J. Gully, “The Engineer and the Technician: Their Similarities and Differences,” Chemical Engineering Progress 63, no. 5 (1967): 26–29.
55. For example, of the nearly one million engineers working in the United States in 1966, only 4 percent worked at universities, while industry and the federal government employed the vast majority (80 percent and 15 percent respectively). Data from National Science Foundation, Employment of Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1950–1966. See also, Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), esp. chapters 4–6.
56. Quotes from chapter 16 of Whyte, The Organization Man.
57. David Kaiser, “The Postwar Suburbanization of American Physics,” American Quarterly 56, no. 4 (2004): 851–888; also, David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival (New York: Norton, 2011).
58. IEEE Spectrum, 5, no. 3 (1968): 199.
59. IEEE Spectrum, 4, no. 6 (1967): 37.
60. Mechanical Engineer, 89, no. 2 (1967): 147, emphasis in original.
61. IEEE Spectrum, 1, no. 3 (1964): 270.
62. IEEE Spectrum, 2, no. 3 (1965): 296.
63. IEEE Spectrum, 3, no. 5 (1966): 119.
64. These appeared in the July 1965 and September 1965 issues of IEEE Spectrum, pages 141 and 129 respectively.
65. IEEE Spectrum, 4, no. 1 (1967): 121.
66. IEEE Spectrum, 3, no. 2 (1966): 145.
67. Rob Pope, Creativity: Theory, History, and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2005); Nadine Weidman, “Between the Counterculture and the Corporation: Abraham Maslow and Humanistic Psychology in the 1960s,” in Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture, ed. David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 109–141, doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226373072.003.0004.
68. Jamie Cohen-Cole, “The Creative American: Cold War Salons, Social Science, and the Cure for Modern Society,” Isis 100, no. 2 (2009): 219–262, doi:10.1086/599554.
69. Taher A. Razik, Bibliography of Creativity Studies and Related Areas (Buffalo: State University of New York, 1965).
70. Published as Calvin W. Taylor and Frank Barron, eds., Scientific Creativity: Its Recognition and Development (New York: Wiley, 1963).
71. Daniel S. Greenberg, “Let’s Hold a Conference: Herewith an Imaginary Dialog between the Collector and His Quarry,” Science 144, no. 3623 (1964): 1204–1205.
72. Quotes from Susan Sontag, “The One Culture and the New Sensibility,” in Against Interpretation and other Essays (New York: Picador, 1966), 293–304.
1. “I Believed in the Art World as the Only Serious World that Existed,” Billy Klüver, interview by Edward Shanken, in Artists as Inventors, Inventors as Artists, ed. Dieter Daniels and Barbara U. Schmidt (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2008), 176–181.
2. Information on and reaction to the 1965 blackout comes from several sources, including David E. Nye, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), a special November 19, 1965 issue of Life devoted to the event, and A. M. Rosenthal and Arthur Gelb, eds., The Night the Lights Went Out (New York: Signet, 1965).
3. “Notes and Comment,” New Yorker, November 20, 1965, 43–47, 44.
4. Description is from Calvin Tomkins’s notes; IV. C. 20, CT/MoMA.
5. The text of Klüver’s January 28, 1966 talk can be found in a number of locations, including files for 1966 in Experiments in Art and Technology records, EAT/AAA.
6. Grace Glueck, “Scientist Brings Art to His Work: Billy Klüver’s Skill Goes into Friends’ Creations,” New York Times, December 17, 1965, https://nyti.ms/1HhLLPV; David Bourdon, “Sculptures in Motion,” Life, August 12, 1966, 40–49, 47.
7. Before his death in 2004, Klüver prepared several autobiographical essays that accompanied his writings. A copy of this document, titled “Art and Technology: Collected Writings of Billy Klüver,” was kindly provided to me by Julie Martin. Many of these essays were later published (in Swedish) in a book titled Teknologi För Livet: Om Experiments in Art and Technology (Stockholm: Schultz Förlag, 2004). As I’m working with the original English versions, my references to Klüver’s essays are referred to here as “BK/CW.”
8. Fredrik Gustafsson, “Swedish Cinema of the 1940s, a New Wave,” in A Companion to Nordic Cinema, ed. Mette Hjort and Ursula Lindqvist (New York: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 313–332, doi:10.1002/9781118475300.ch14.
9. “Early Years: From Monaco to the United States,” in BK/CW.
10. “Early Years: From Monaco to the United States,” in BK/CW. Alfvén’s 1966 book Sagan om den stora Datamaskinen appeared under the pseudonym Olof Johannesson. Published in English two years later as The Tale of the Big Computer, it described a future society where all aspects of life are controlled by computers.
11. Norma Loewen, “Experiments in Art and Technology: A Descriptive History of the Organization” (PhD diss., New York University, 1975), 13, ProQuest (287918505).
12. These devices, called backward-wave oscillators, had been developed at the Paris-based company where Klüver had briefly worked. His doctoral dissertation was completed as Johan Wilhelm Klüver, “Backward-Wave Interaction in Beam-Type Magnetron Amplifiers” (PhD diss., Department of Electrical Engineering, University of California at Berkeley, 1957), ProQuest (302015270).
13. Scott MacDonald, Art in Cinema: Documents toward a History of a Film Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006).
14. “Notes on ‘Fragment on Man and the System,’” BK/CW.
15. Billy Klüver, “Fragment on Man and the System,” The Hasty Papers 1, no. 1 (1960): 45; also, Alfred Leslie, The Hasty Papers, special millennium ed. (Austin: Host, 1999).
16. Job offer letters dated 1957 and 1958; BK/JM.
17. A. Michael Noll, “Bell System R&D Activities: The Impact of Divestiture,” Telecommunications Policy 11, no. 2 (1987): 161–178, doi:10.1016/0308-5961(87)90024-3.
18. A. Michael Noll, “Memories: A Personal History of Bell Telephone Laboratories” (working paper, Quello Center, Michigan State University, East Lansing, 2015), 1, http://noll.uscannenberg.org/. Drafts of Noll’s recollections and other materials from him at the Huntington Library (AMN/HL) are a limited but useful source. Many histories of Bell Labs have been written, including Jon Gertner, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation (New York: Penguin, 2012).
19. Unfortunately, despite his involvement in several high-profile projects and his fantastically diverse career, the archival record for Pierce is frustratingly scant. A. Michael Noll donated some materials to the Huntington Library which I consulted (JP/HL), and there is a similarly small collection at Stanford University’s archive.
20. Undated statement from John R. Pierce, likely mid-1967; Folder 18, Box 4, EAT/GRI; a similar version appears in E.A.T. News 1, no. 3 (November 1, 1967); Box 138, EAT/GRI. See also, Jeff Gates, “Computers and Art,” Eye Level (blog), Smithsonian American Art Museum, March 23, 2015, https://americanart.si.edu/blog-post/445/computers-and-art.
21. Kathy Battista, “E.A.T.—The Spirit of Collaboration,” in E.A.T.: Experiments in Art and Technology, ed. Sabine Breitwieser (Cologne: Walther König, 2016), 9.
22. A recent look at how cosmological research was situated in the context of both corporate as well as national security interests is Kendrick Oliver, “‘The Lucky Start Toward Today’s Cosmology’? Serendipity, the ‘Big Bang’ Theory, and the Science of Radio Noise in Cold War America,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 49, no. 2 (2019): 151–193, doi:10.1525/hsns.2019.49.2.151.
23. J. R. Pierce, “Portrait of the Machine as a Young Artist,” Playboy 12, no. 6 (June 1965): 148–150, 182, 184.
24. Noll presented his work in a psychological journal as “Human or Machine: A Subjective Comparison of Piet Mondrian’s ‘Composition with Lines’ and a Computer-Generated Picture,” Psychological Record 16, no. 1 (1966): 1–10, doi:10.1007/BF03393635.
25. Jud Yalkut, “Art and Technology of Nam June Paik,” Arts Magazine, April 1968, 51.
26. Paik’s “sonata” was prepared sometime in 1965; from materials in the Nam June Paik collection (NJK/AAA), published in We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik, ed. John G. Harnhardt, Gregory Zinman, and Edith Decker-Phillips (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019), 100–114.
27. December 15, 1964 letter from Klüver to Pierce; BK/JM, emphasis in original.
28. Comment from Klüver’s personal recollections, circa 2000; BK/CW.
29. John Canaday, “Machine Tries to Die for Its Art,” New York Times, March 18, 1960, https://nyti.ms/1XTOTFN.
30. For full description of Homage to New York see MoMA’s March 18, 1960 press release, https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/2634/releases/MOMA_1960_0033_27.pdf. A fragment of Tinguely’s piece was secured by MoMA staff and later exhibited at the 2017 exhibition Robert Rauschenberg: Among Friends.
31. Harold Hodges, interview by Cameron Vanderscoff, November 9, 2014, transcript, Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project, Columbia Center for Oral History Research, New York, http://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/artist/oral-history/harold-hodges.
32. Billy Klüver, interview by Calvin Tomkins, January 18, 1961, IV. C. 20, CT/MoMA.
33. Canaday, “Machine Tries to Die for Its Art.”
34. John Canaday, “Odd Kind of Art,” New York Times, March 27, 1960, https://nyti.ms/1PqXAo3.
35. “Tinguely’s Contraption,” Nation, March 26, 1960, 267.
36. Klüver’s essay was reprinted in several places in the 1960s; it first appeared in the short-lived publication ZERO 1 (1961): 168–171.
37. Hultén’s show was billed as Bewogen Beweging in Amsterdam and in Stockholm as Rörelse I Konsten.
38. See, for example, George Rickey, “The Kinetic International,” Arts Magazine, September 1961, 16–21.
39. Patrik Andersson, “Rörelse i konsten: The Art of Re-Assemblage,” Konsthistorisk tidskrift/Journal of Art History 78, no. 4 (2009): 178–192, doi:10.1080/00233600903461396; this account also draws on Klüver’s own recollections, CW/BK.
40. Among the many excellent descriptions of pop art is chapter 3 of Thomas Crow, The Rise of the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
41. Billy Klüver, interview by Anne Collins Goodyear, January 13, 1999. Duchamp’s influences on Klüver are presented in Goodyear’s exhaustively researched study “The Relationship of Art to Science and Technology in the United States, 1957–1971: Five Case Studies” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2002), 207–211, ProQuest (305503573). For a broader sense of Duchamp’s interest in science and technology, see Linda D. Henderson’s Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), while Calvin Tomkin’s Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996) is an excellent, accessible introduction to the artist.
42. Robert Lebel, Marcel Duchamp, trans. George H. Hamilton (New York: Paragraphic, 1959), 29.
43. Klüver in Anice Kandell, ed., Art 1963: A New Vocabulary (Philadelphia: Fine Arts Committee of the Arts Council of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association, 1962), 3.
44. Klüver quoted in Douglas Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration Between Science, Technology, and Art (New York: Praeger, 1973), 140.
45. Billy Klüver, interview by Anne Collins Goodyear, January 13, 1999.
46. Billy Klüver, “The Arts and Science Club” (unpublished manuscript, September 28, 1962); CW/BK.
47. Jean M. White, “Eruption of Pop Art Slated for this Week,” Washington Post, April 14, 1963.
48. Billy Klüver “Happenings,” Konstrevy 39 (1962) and “Bakelsen som Kunst (Pastry as Art),” Vi (Stockholm) 51, no. 9 (1964): 11–13. Information on Adorno’s involvement in the pop art world comes from John Anderson, “What Happened in Washington,” Washington City Paper, March 12, 2012, http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/arts/museums-galleries/blog/13077263/what-happened-in-washington.
49. Klüver’s recollections come from Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, “Four Difficult Pieces,” Art in America 79, no. 7 (1991): 80–99, 138. A modified version of this essay, with some additional information, appears as “Working with Rauschenberg,” in Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, ed. Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997), 310–327.
50. Robert Rauschenberg, quoted in Billy Klüver, Record of Interviews with Artists Participating in the “Popular Image” Exhibition (Washington, DC: Washington Gallery of Art, 1963).
51. Barbara Rose, Rauschenberg: An Interview with Robert Rauschenberg (New York: Vintage, 1987), 67.
52. Klüver and Martin, “Four Difficult Pieces.”
53. Sally Banes, Democracy’s Body: Judson Dance Theatre, 1962–1964 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983) as well as Ana Janevski and Thomas J. Lax, eds., Judson Dance Theatre: The Work Is Never Done (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2018).
54. Allen Hughes reviewed the show twice: “Dance: Created on Stage,” New York Times, July 24, 1965, https://nyti.ms/1MNxflg, and “Leaps and Credenzas,” New York Times, August 1, 1965, https://nyti.ms/1iHQm28.
55. Signaling a take on Susan Sontag’s “New Sensibility,” this article was published as Barbara Rose and Irving Sandler, “Sensibility of the Sixties,” Art in America 55, no. 1 (1967): 44–57.
56. Rose and Sandler, “Sensibility of the Sixties,” 48, 44, and 49.
57. Allan Kaprow, “Should the Artist Become a Man of the World?,” Art News 63, no. 6 (1964): 34–37, 58–59.
58. See essays in James Elkin’s edited collection Artists with PhDs: On the New Doctoral Degree in Studio Art (Washington, DC: New Academia, 2014).
59. Kaprow, “Should the Artist Become a Man of the World?,” 59.
60. Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
61. Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
62. Anna Dezeuze, “The 1960s: A Decade out of Bounds,” in A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, ed. Amelia Jones (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 38–59.
63. Quote from Nan Piene, “Editorial: Patronage and Democracy,” Art in America 55, no. 2 (1967): 1. This piece appeared in an issue devoted to the question of artists and patronage.
64. Jay Jacobs, “What the Federal Arts Program Really Means,” Art in America 55, no. 2 (1967): 25–26, 28–29.
65. William Hackman, Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties (New York: Other, 2015).
66. Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962–1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2000).
67. Rose and Sandler, “Sensibility of the Sixties,” 47, 49.
68. Kaprow, “Should the Artist Become a Man of the World?,” 59.
69. Barbara Rose, “Shall We Have a Renaissance?,” Art in America 55, no. 2 (1967): 30–39.
70. Howard Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture in the 1960s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). Although the term “postindustrial society” is most commonly associated with Daniel Bell’s 1973 book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, scholars began using it as early as the late 1950s.
71. Quote from Alain Touraine, The Post-Industrial Society, trans. Leonard Mayhew (New York: Random House, 1973), 5. See also, Howard Brick, “Optimism of the Mind: Imagining Postindustrial Society in the 1960s and 1970s,” American Quarterly 44, no. 3 (1992): 348–380, doi:10.2307/2712981.
1. Quote from Herb A. Schneider, “A View from Central” (unpublished manuscript, October 1966); Folder 1, Box 4, EAT/GRI.
2. May 27 and June 18, 1980 letters between Klüver and Tomkins; Folder 50, Box 120, EAT/GRI.
3. Calvin Tomkins, “Onward and Upward with the Arts: E.A.T.,” New Yorker, October 3, 1970, 83–133.
4. The book project is discussed in a October 29, 1966 letter from Carroll Bowen, of the MIT Press, to Klüver and subsequent correspondence; Folders 21 and 22, Box 1, EAT/GRI. The rapid pace of E.A.T.’s growth helped put the project into hibernation. In the early 1970s, Harriet DeLong revived it as an edited book, corresponding with at least two different presses. In a bizarre turn of events (terrifying to this author), the manuscript, or at least parts of it, were lost in mail exchanges between DeLong and the MIT Press. Consequently, her book never materialized. However, a draft is preserved in the archives of the Getty Research Institute (Box 1, EAT/GRI), which is replete with valuable primary source material. Hereafter, I refer to this as “DeLong” and, where possible, note page numbers as they appear in the GRI material.
5. I’ve especially relied on two doctoral dissertations that examine 9 Evenings. One is Norma Loewen’s “Experiments in Art and Technology: A Descriptive History of the Organization” (PhD diss., New York University, 1975), ProQuest (287918505), which was based on her access to participants and original documents (some of which have since disappeared). The other is Anne Collins Goodyear’s much more comprehensive analysis, “The Relationship of Art to Science and Technology in the United States, 1957–1971: Five Case Studies” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2002), ProQuest (305503573). In addition, several curators have revisited 9 Evenings, such as Catherine Morris’s exhibition at MIT’s LIST Visual Arts Center; see Catherine Morris, ed., 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966 (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006).
6. Frank Rose, “The Big Bang of Art and Tech in New York,” New York Times, November 6, 2015, https://nyti.ms/1WD280j.
7. Billy Klüver, “Theatre and Engineering: An Experiment—2. Notes by an Engineer,” Artforum 5, no. 6 (1967): 31–33.
8. Herb Schneider, “A View from Central,” (unpublished manuscript, October 1966); Folder 1, Box 4, EAT/GRI.
9. Billy Klüver, “Outline for ‘Engineering in Art,’” October 1965; September 29, 1969 letter from Bruce Strasser to Klüver; both BK/JM. Also, additional quotes from manuscript—now presumably lost—appear in Loewen’s “Experiments in Art and Technology,” 40–43.
10. March 7, 1966 letter from Klüver to Walter Gutman, Document 3 in DeLong; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
11. Hay’s recollections are in notes about 9 Evenings collected throughout 1966 by dancer Simone Forti. Titled “A View of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering,” they are archived in Box 1, EAT/GRI.
12. DeLong, 2.6; Box 1, EAT/GRI. Klüver’s “Theatre and Engineering” tells a similar variation.
13. These materials formed the basis for an article Forti published under her married name: Simone Whitman, “Theatre and Engineering: An Experiment 1. Notes by a Participant.” Artforum 5, no. 6 (1967): 26–30.
14. Forti, “A View of 9 Evenings,” 2.
15. Ibid., 7–8.
16. Overall, Klüver estimated that the engineers volunteered some 8,500 hours in all; a breakdown of this is in DeLong, 17.8–9; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
17. Quote comes from transcript of E.A.T.’s first open-house meeting, November 20, 1966; DeLong, 21.5; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
18. Klüver, quoted in Loewen, “Experiments in Art and Technology,” 55.
19. Schneider, “A View from Central.”
20. From a series of questionnaires filled out by participants after 9 Evenings; DeLong, Chapter 17; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
21. Schneider, “A View from Central.”
22. Klüver’s public relations instructions given in August 1966; DeLong, 2.16; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
23. Klüver, “Theatre and Engineering,” 31.
24. Billy Klüver, “Remarks to the Press,” September 29, 1966; EAT/AAA.
25. May 11, 1966 letter from Franklin Konigsberg (who served as the group’s legal advisor) to Knut Wiggen; listed as Document 2 in DeLong; final cost estimates appear at the end of DeLong’s manuscript; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
26. On September 20, 1966, David Rockefeller gave a speech entitled “Culture and the Corporation,” which was the founding address of the Business Committee for the Arts; David Rockefeller, “Culture and the Corporation” (speech, 50th Anniversary Conference of the National Industrial Conference Board [now known as The Conference Board], New York, September 20, 1966), https://www.americansforthearts.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2016/events/rockefeller/David%20Rockefeller%20speech%201966.pdf?utm_source=MagnetMail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=jgaines@artsusa.org&utm_content=BCAnoteworthy_11_2_16&utm_campaign=BCA%20Noteworthy%20November%202016.
27. March 24, 1966 letter from Klüver to Boyd Compton; listed as Document 2 in DeLong, Box 1, EAT/GRI.
28. August 24, 1966 letter from Scheweber to Konigsberg; Loewen, “Experiments in Art and Technology,” 67.
29. March 7, 1966 letter from Klüver to Gutman; listed as Document 3 in DeLong, Box 1, EAT/GRI.
30. April 8, 1966 letter from Klüver to Pierce; 1966 files, EAT/AAA.
31. Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, “Working with Rauschenberg,” in Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, ed. Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997), 314–315. “Mar. 11—Notes from Meeting” from Klüver’s diary and notes; Box 2, EAT/GRI; statement by Rauschenberg in DeLong, 2.10; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
32. Klüver’s views come from an undated manuscript he wrote, probably in April 1966 that is quoted in Loewen, “Experiments in Art and Technology,” 57–58; statements by the Swedes are in DeLong, 2.7 to 2.10, Box 1, EAT/GRI.
33. The initial descriptions are in a July 23, 1966 document that Klüver sent to Stockholm; Document 5 in DeLong, Box 1, EAT/GRI.
34. Forti, “A View of 9 Evenings,” 15.
35. Telegrams described in DeLong, 2.14; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
36. Barbara Rose’s chapter “The Armory Show: Success by Scandal” in her book American Art Since 1900: A Critical History (New York: Praeger, 1967) gives an especially interesting perspective given that Rose also wrote extensively and (often) positively about the art-and-technology movement.
37. The article featuring Klüver appeared as David Bourdon, “A Good Janitor Becomes as Important as a Curator,” Life, August 12, 1966, 45–47, 49, along with a longer piece that focused on kinetic art.
38. Forti, “A View of 9 Evenings,” 15.
39. Details on the Armory space from “The Armory,” on the 69th Regiment’s official website, accessed October 15, 2017, http://www.sixtyninth.net/armory.html.
40. Brian O’Doherty, “New York: 9 Armored Nights” Art and Artists 1, no. 9 (1966): 14–17.
41. Forti, “A View of 9 Evenings,” 15.
42. DeLong, 17.4; EAT/GRI.
43. Klüver, “Theatre and Engineering,” 33.
44. Lucy Lippard, “Total Theatre?,” Art International 11, no. 1 (1967): 39; Gloria Bryant, “The Switched-On Theater,” Reporter (November/December 1966): 11–16.
45. Between 1960 and 1967, AT&T’s defense contracts totaled some $4 billion; Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 253.
46. Klüver’s August 23, 1966 memo to Ruder and Finn is in DeLong, 2.7; EAT/GRI.
47. March 7, 1966 letter from Klüver to Gutman; listed as Document 3 in DeLong; EAT/GRI.
48. January 31, 1973 statement by John Pierce; DeLong, 16.25; EAT/GRI.
49. Hay’s plans are presented in the original 1966 program for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering and also reproduced in Morris, 9 Evenings Reconsidered; see also Alex Hay, interview by Alessandra Nicifero, December 8, 2014, transcript, Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project, Columbia Center for Oral History Research, New York, https://www.rauschenbergfoundation.org/artist/oral-history/alex-hay.
50. Art historian Clarisse Bardiot discusses this as part of her exhaustive online multimedia exploration of 9 Evenings, Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology official website, http://www.fondation-langlois.org/html/e/page.php?NumPage=572; text copies, which Bardiot graciously provided, are in the author’s collection. Hereafter cited as Bardiot, 9 Evenings.
51. Hay’s Grass Field is described and documented in Part 6 of DeLong; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
52. Alex Hay, interview by Simone Forti, September 17, 1966, DeLong 6.4; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
53. L. J. (“Robby”) Robinson, “Preparations for Alex Hay’s Piece,” DeLong, 6.6; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
54. Ibid.
55. Lippard, “Total Theatre?,” 39–44.
56. John T. Correll, “Igloo White,” Air Force Magazine, November 2004, 56–61, http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2004/November%202004/1104igloo.aspx; Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 3–5.
57. Heilos’s recollections are in DeLong, 8.8; Box 1, EAT/GRI; while their phosphor discovery is in J. D. McGee and L. J. Heilos, “Visual Display of Infrared Laser Output on Thermographic Phosphor Screens,” IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics 3, no. 1 (1967): 31, doi:10.1109/JQE.1967.1074365.
58. Herb Schneider, “A Systems Approach to Robert Rauschenberg’s Open Score,” DeLong, 8.15; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
59. Fred D. Waldhauer, interview by Julie Martin, August 4, 1991, transcript in the author’s files.
60. “Technology and the Arts,” Reporter, April 1966, 16–19.
61. Fred D. Waldhauer, “Proportional Control System for the Festival of Art and Engineering,” (unpublished manuscript, September 19, 1966); Folder 15, Box 2, EAT/GRI.
62. Dave Tomkins, How to Wreck a Nice Beach: The Vocoder from World War Two to Hip-Hop (New York: Stop Smiling, 2011).
63. Bardiot, 9 Evenings; Robert Kieronski, “Vochrome-Vochomator,” May 6, 1966 technical memorandum, DeLong, 9.15; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
64. Herb Schneider, “Proportional Control Device,” emphasis in original, DeLong, 9.8; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
65. Peter Hirsch, “The Doppler Sonar,” undated essay, DeLong, 12.9; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
66. Per Biorn, interview by Julie Martin, August 25, 2004; transcript in the author’s files.
67. Dick Wolff, “Response to Questionnaire,” undated, but likely late 1966; Folder 16, Box 2, EAT/GRI.
68. On Cage and engineering, see Richard H. Brown, “The Spirit inside Each Object: John Cage, Oskar Fischinger, and the ‘Future’ of Music,” Journal of the Society for American Music 6, no. 1 (2012): 83–113, doi:10.1017/S1752196311000411.
69. Kris Paulsen, Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).
70. Claude S. Fischer, America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
71. April 8, 1966 letter from Klüver to Pierce; 1966 files, EAT/AAA.
72. Dick Higgins, “Intermedia,” Leonardo 34, no. 1 (2001): 49–54, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/19618; originally published in Something Else Newsletter 1, no. 1 (1966).
73. From Fahlström’s comments on his piece in the original 9 Evenings program.
74. Billy Klüver, “To the Engineers,” September 16, 1966 memo; Folder 12, Box 4, EAT/GRI.
75. Agatha Hughes and Thomas Hughes, eds., Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); as well as Thomas Hughes, Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects that Changed the Modern World (New York: Vintage, 1998).
76. Alternatively, the equipment was sometimes also called the “Theatre Environmental Modular Electronic,” or THEME. Klüver’s comment and description comes from a memo dated July 23, 1966, listed as Document 5 in DeLong; Box 1, EAT/GRI. For a more technical description see, Nat Snyderman, “The New Imp Theatre,” Electronic News, August 22, 1966, 24.
77. “Technology for Art’s Sake,” September 14, 1966 press release; EAT/AAA; John Gruen, “Art Meets Technology,” World Journal Tribune, October 2, 1966, 22, 28; copy in DeLong, Box 1, EAT/GRI.
78. The original request as well as the temporary radio station license, appear as Document 8 in DeLong; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
79. Klüver quoted in Forti, “A View of 9 Evenings,” 14.
80. August 23, 1966 memo from Klüver to Ruder and Finn, DeLong, 2.17; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
81. March 1973 statement by Tudor; DeLong, 16.0; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
82. Clarisse Bardiot, “The Diagrams of 9 Evenings,” 45–53, as well as interview with Schneider; both in 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966, ed. Catherine Morris (Cambridge, MA: MIT List Visual Arts Center, 2006).
83. Herb Schneider, “A Glimpse or More at Some Technical Aspects Not Seen by the Third Partner of Nine Evenings—The Public” (unpublished manuscript, October 1966); Folder 1, Box 4 EAT/GRI.
84. Herb Schneider, “Nine Evenings—A View From Central,” (unpublished manuscript, October 1966); Folder 1, Box 4 EAT/GRI.
85. Schneider, “A Glimpse or More at Some Technical Aspects Not Seen by the Third Partner of Nine Evenings.”
86. Schneider, “Nine Evenings.”
87. Forti, “A View of 9 Evenings,” 21. Robby Robinson, “At the Armory,” DeLong, 19.3; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
88. “Technical Equipment, 9 Evenings,” undated memo, ca. November 1966; Folder 15, Box 2, EAT/GRI.
89. Publicity materials for 9 Evenings can be found in the “1966” folder of EAT/AAA as well as Folders 7–10, Box 3, EAT/GRI.
90. August and September 1966 press releases; EAT/AAA.
91. Quotes come from September 28, 1966 press release and Klüver’s remarks on September 29, 1966; EAT/AAA.
92. Gruen, “Art Meets Technology”; copy in DeLong, Box 1, EAT/GRI.
93. A version of this is in Box 3, EAT/GRI; images also can be seen at “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering,” Monoskop, accessed November 22, 2019, https://monoskop.org/9_Evenings:_Theatre_and_Engineering.
94. Richard Kostelanetz, “The Artist as Playwright and Engineer,” New York Times Magazine, October 9, 1966, 32–34, 114, 119–121, 124, https://nyti.ms/1iYk2bh.
95. Forti, “A View of 9 Evenings,” 19.
96. Patrick O’Connor, “‘Theatre, Engineering’ Less than Pleasing,” Jersey Journal, October 17, 1966; Grace Glueck, “Arts and Engineering Mixing It Up at the Armory,” New York Times, October 14, 1966, https://nyti.ms/1PF7enh.
97. Forti, “A View of 9 Evenings,” 21.
1. From November 29, 1967 remarks to North Carolina State Art Society; EAT/AAA.
2. Clive Barnes, “Dance: Village Disaster,” New York Times, January 11, 1965, https://nyti.ms/1RSJY4u.
3. Quotes from two articles Barnes wrote for the New York Times: “Dance or Something at the Armory,” October 15, 1966, https://nyti.ms/1N0EHJQ; and “Happening: Ineffable Night at Armory,” October 17, 1966, https://nyti.ms/1N0G2R9.
4. Robby Robinson, “What Really Happened at the Armory,” unpublished manuscript, likely November 1966; Folder 17, Box 3, EAT/GRI.
5. Quotes come from a draft, in Box 2, EAT/GRI that Klüver wrote in November 1966; this was later was published as “Theatre and Engineering: An Experiment—2. Notes by an Engineer” Artforum 5, no. 6 (1967): 31–33.
6. Nat Snyderman, “Engineering Goes to the Theatre,” Electronic News, October 17, 1966, 6; John J. O’Connor, “The Gallery: Art Meets Science,” Wall Street Journal, October 21, 1966.
7. Jill Johnston, “Post-Mortem,” Village Voice, December 15, 1966.
8. Herb Schneider, “Drafts and Notes,” undated but likely late October 1966; Folder 1, Box 4, E.A.T. /GRI.
9. Norma Loewen, “Experiments in Art and Technology: A Descriptive History of the Organization” (PhD diss., New York University, 1975), 90, ProQuest (287918505); Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, “Working with Rauschenberg,” in Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospective, ed. Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1997), 316–317.
10. E.A.T.’s certificate of incorporation is provided as Document XII in DeLong, Box 1, EAT/GRI; Klüver in E.A.T. News 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1967): 2; EAT/AAA.
11. Max V. Mathews, untitled and undated essay, likely mid-1967; EAT/AAA.
12. February 27, 1967 letter from Walter Gutman to Klüver, DeLong 16.20; Box 1, EAT/GRI.
13. Billy Klüver, “To the Engineers Who Participated in Nine Evenings,” undated memo but likely late October 1966; Folder 12, Box 4, EAT/GRI.
14. “Meeting Invitation,” November 1966; Folder 12, Box 4, EAT/GRI.
15. Brian O’Doherty’s quotes and other material in this section come from DeLong, section 21, titled “The 10th Evening”; Box 1, EAT/GRI; also, descriptions of the event in Loewen, “Experiments in Art and Technology,” 92–94, and materials in Folder 25, Box 9, EAT/GRI.
16. From Schneider’s notes for the meeting; Folder 25, Box 9, EAT/GRI.
17. Melissa Ho, ed., Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 66.
18. Schneemann and Flynn’s recollections in E.A.T. News, 1, no. 2 (June 1, 1967): 15–18
19. Erica Levin, “Sounding Snows: Bodily Static and the Politics of Visibility during the Vietnam War,” in Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s, ed. David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 113–124.
20. E.A.T. News 1, no. 2 (June 1, 1967): 17.
21. March 17, 1967 statement from Klüver and Rauschenberg; Folder 3, Box 3; Undated, hand-written statement by Rauschenberg; Folder 18, Box 4, both EAT/GRI.
22. E.A.T. News 1, no. 1 (January 1, 1967): 17.
23. Included with March 17, 1967 letter from Klüver to “Friends of E.A.T.”; Folder 3, Box 3, EAT/GRI.
24. Undated and untitled draft essay, likely March 17, 1967 letter from Klüver to “Friends of E.A.T.”; Folder 3, Box 3, EAT/GRI.
25. Douglas M. Davis, “The New Combine,” Art in America 56, no. 1 (1968): 37.
26. Roderick Nordell, “‘We’re Not Interested in Art,’ the Man Said,” Christian Science Monitor, May 13, 1968.
27. July 17, 1967 letter from Klüver to John G. Powers; Folder 18, Box 4, EAT/GRI; the second amount as well as a list of donations made in 1967 comes from 1968 budget documents in EAT/AAA.
28. Grace Glueck, “Hot Off the Drawing Board,” New York Times, February 26, 1967, https://nyti.ms/1kdTJiw.
29. For example, Gloria Bryant’s “What’s Happening! Bell Labs Engineers Go Arty,” Western Electric 19, no. 1 (1967): 14–21.
30. Klüver to IEEE described in Loewen, “Experiments in Art and Technology,” 104–105; membership numbers in E.A.T. News 2, no. 1 (March 18, 1968): 18. Eventually, E.A.T. would report as many as 2,000 artists as members and some 4,000 people overall; E.A.T. Operations and Information 1 (November 1, 1968): 5.
31. January 9, 1967 letter from Neil Nathan to Klüver; Folder 3, Box 3, EAT/GRI.
32. Undated letter, likely March 1967, from Klüver to W. Howard Adams; Folder 18, Box 4, EAT/GRI.
33. Forkner’s application to E.A.T., along with scores of others from engineers and artists, are in Boxes 7 and 8 of EAT/GRI.
34. March 10, 1970 conversation between John Forkner and Barbara Rose; Cassette 42, Box 10, Barbara Rose papers (accession no. 930100), Getty Research Institute (BR/GRI).
35. Quotes in this section are all from Billy Klüver, “Interface: Artist/Engineer” (lecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, April 21, 1967); EAT/AAA.
36. For how this intersected with engineers’ and their education, see Matthew Wisnioski, “‘Liberal Education has Failed’: Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America,” Technology and Culture 50, no. 4 (2009): 753–782.
37. John W. Finney, “Glenn Feels Pilot Can Replace Much of Spaceship Automation,” New York Times, February 23, 1962, https://nyti.ms/1iH4DvZ.
38. While a crude metric, a Google Ngram with “automation” as the keyword shows a rapid rise of mentions in the 1960s with a peak about 1965. Kennedy’s statement about automation comes from a June 7, 1960 address to labor leaders, one of several times he broached the subject on the campaign trail, John F. Kennedy, “Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy” (speech, AFL–CIO convention, Grand Rapids, MI, June 7, 1960), https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKCAMP1960/1030/JFKCAMP1960-1030-036.
39. Quotes and a fuller discussion of the “automation question” are in chapter 8 of Amy Sue Bix, Inventing Ourselves Out of Jobs: America’s Debate over Technological Unemployment, 1929–1981 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
40. Theodore W. Kheel, interview by Calvin Tomkins, interview notes, February 11, 1970; II.B.11, CT/MoMA.
41. September 20, 1967 memo from Max Mathews to Bell Labs staff; Folder 4, Box 10, TK/CU.
42. E.A.T. News 1, no. 2 (June 1, 1967): 4; and Billy Klüver, “Interface: Artist/Engineer”; EAT/AAA.
43. Dominick Dunne’s February 1987 profile in Vanity Fair offers a characteristically salacious take on Rockefeller: Dominick Dunne, “The Rockefeller and the Ballet Boys,” Vanity Fair, September 15, 2008, https://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/1987/02/dunne198702.
44. Tomkins, February 11, 1970 interview notes with Kheel; II.B.11, CT/MoMA; Damon Stetson, “Bargaining Body Planned by Kheel,” New York Times, August 6, 1967, https://nyti.ms/1LBfoeM.
45. Fred Turner, “Romantic Automatism: Art, Technology, and Collaborative Labor in Cold War America.” Journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 1 (2008): 5–26, doi:10.1177/1470412907087201.
46. A. Michael Noll, “Patterns by 7090,” BTL Technical Memorandum MM-62-1234-14 (1962). Noll’s recollections of computer art experiments at Bell Labs are presented in his essay “Early Digital Computer Art at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated,” Leonardo 49, no. 1 (2016): 55–65, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/608590. A fuller discussion of Noll’s activities is in Zabet Patterson, Peripheral Vision: Bell Labs, the S-C 4020, and the Origins of Computer Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). Some materials related to Noll’s experimentation are in his archival collection; AMN/HL.
47. An early recounting of this history is Herbert W. Franke, Computer Graphics, Computer Art (London: Phaidon, 1971).
48. This is noted on Noll’s personal website, where he discusses computer art, http://noll.uscannenberg.org/.
49. Stuart Preston, “Reputations Made and in Making,” New York Times, April 18, 1965, https://nyti.ms/1RCm8JS.
50. John Canaday, “Less Art, More Computer, Please,” New York Times, August 30, 1970, https://nyti.ms/1kxOdYq. For critics’ reaction to computer art in general, Grant D. Taylor, When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).
51. Identified by Klüver and Rauschenberg as their “most important goal” in March 20, 1967 letter to E.A.T.’s board members; Folder 18, Box 4, EAT/GRI.
52. April 20 and May 18, 1967 letters from Klüver to Marian Javits; Folder 4, Box 122, EAT/GRI.
53. June 12 and July 6, 1967 letters from Waldhauer and Klüver to Piore; Folder 18, Box 4, EAT/GRI.
54. December 1, 1967 letter from Klüver to Javits; BK/JM; “Report on E.A.T.,” January 10, 1968 report; EAT/AAA.
55. Dated September 9, 1967; Folder 2, Box 128, EAT/GRI.
56. E.A.T. News 1, no. 3 (November 1, 1967): 1.
57. For example, “E.A.T. Meeting Minutes,” March 6, 1967; Folder 5, Box 128, EAT/GRI.
58. December 26, 1967 letter from Klüver to John de Ménil; Folder 5, Box 122, EAT/GRI.
59. “Proposal for Structuring an Environmental Safety Program for Use by Galleries, Museums, Exhibitions, and Artist/Engineer-Scientist Collaborations,” March 15, 1968; EAT/AAA. The larger safety initiative is described in Loewen, “Experiments in Art and Technology,” 223–227.
60. Henry R. Lieberman, “Art and Science Proclaim Alliance in Avant-Garde Loft,” New York Times, October 11, 1967, https://nyti.ms/1QJwffz. Also, “Science for Art’s Sake,” Business Week, October 21, 1967, 56.
61. Jack Mallon, “Art in Our Factories Put on an Even Kheel,” Sunday News, October 15, 1967; Cathy Aldridge, “Art-Automation Merger, an Historic Experience,” N.Y. Amsterdam News, October 28, 1967; both in Folder 47, Box 1, TK/CU.
62. John J. O’Connor, “Art & Technology Make It Official,” Wall Street Journal, October 11, 1967.
63. E.A.T. News 1, no. 3 (November 1, 1967): 8–9.
64. This accompanied a short article: “Labor, Industry Encourage Merger of Art, Technology,” AFL-CIO News, October 21, 1967, 2; copy in October 10, 1967 press release materials; EAT/AAA.
65. Quotes and supporting material come from the October 10, 1967 press release materials; EAT/AAA.
66. Morris’s comments are included in the October 10, 1967 press release materials; EAT/AAA. Caroline Jones explores this transformation in her book The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
67. Lieberman, “Art and Science Proclaim Alliance in Avant-Garde Loft.”
68. These goals appear in several places, including E.A.T. News 1, no. 3 (November 1, 1967): 5, and press materials prepared for the October 1967 gathering; EAT/AAA. Rauschenberg and Klüver also added the wish to offer “original forethought” about technology “instead of a compromise in aftermath.” Decades later, some technology policy experts would refer to this as “anticipatory governance”; David H. Guston, “Understanding ‘Anticipatory Governance,’” Social Studies of Science 44, no. 2 (2014): 218–242, doi:10.1177/0306312713508669.
69. Undated letter, likely March 1967, from Klüver to W. Howard Adams; Folder 18, Box 4, EAT/GRI.
70. The show’s catalog, with an introduction by Frank Popper, is Lumière et Mouvement: Art Cinétique a Paris (Paris: Musée d’Art Moderne, 1967).
71. Ironically, CBS does not seem to have donated much, if any, money to E.A.T. Instead, Stanton announced his company would support two artist-in-industry positions, an initiative Klüver vainly hoped E.A.T. would be asked to manage; December 1, 1967 letter from Klüver to Marian Javits; BK/JM.
72. “Minutes of Meeting at Loft,” November 28, 1967; Folder 10, Box 128, EAT/GRI.
73. Ibid.
74. Lawrence Alloway, “Technology and Art Schools,” Studio International 175 (April 1968): 184–186.
75. The schedule of lectures as well as transcripts of the actual lectures are collected in Box 28, EAT/GRI.
76. Richard F. Shephard, “‘Venice Biennale’ Weds Local No. 1,” New York Times, February 16, 1968, https://nyti.ms/1H9Dnwr; also, February 2, 1968 press package from E.AT.; EAT/AAA.
77. Davis’s take as well as interviews with practitioners like Klüver appeared in the journal’s January/February 1968 issue.
78. Jack W. Burnham, “Art and Technology,” in Britannica Yearbook of Science and the Future (Chicago: William Benton, 1973), 344–359.
79. Douglas M. Davis, “Art and Technology: Toward Play,” Art in America 56, no. 1 (1968): 46–47.
80. Examples include Stanley Klein, “Technology Invades the Arts,” Machine Design 40, no. 5 (February 29, 1968): 37–46 and A. J. Parisi, “The Kinetic Movement: Technology Paces the Arts,” Product Engineering, December 2, 1968, 27–35.
81. Info on E.AT. comes from various newsletters and reports, ca. 1967–1968, in the EAT/AAA collection as well as Loewen, “Experiments in Art and Technology.”
82. September 25, 1969 letter from Klüver to Julius A. Stratton; Folder 1, Box 42, EAT/GRI.
83. The group was profiled in the September 11, 1967 issue of Life magazine; also, Luis Aponte-Parés, “Lessons from El Barrio—The East Harlem Real Great Society/Urban Planning Studio: A Puerto Rican Chapter in the Fight for Urban Self-Determination,” New Political Science 20, no. 4 (1998): 399–420, doi:10.1080/07393149808429838.
84. Billy Klüver, “The Ghetto and the Technical Community: An Opportunity for Challenge,” undated, but likely from sometime in the summer of 1968; EAT/AAA. Klüver’s proposal, titled “Technology and the Individual” (copy in BK/JM) reflected the larger interest in “humanizing engineers” as described in Matthew Wisnioski, Engineers for Change: Competing Visions of Technology in 1960s America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012)..
85. Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).
86. August 27, 1967 letter from Klüver to J. A. Hutcheson; BK/JM.
87. Billy Klüver, “Technology and the Individual: A Proposal for a Research Program,” July 10, 1968; BK/JM; also, Carroll Pursell, “The Rise and Fall of the Appropriate Technology Movement in the United States, 1965–1985,” Technology and Culture 34, no. 3 (1993): 629–637.
88. Douglas M. Davis, “Billy Klüver: The Engineer as a Work of Art,” Art in America 56, no. 1 (1968): 40.
1. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 7.
2. There is an extensive literature on the revolts of 1968, broadly speaking; two global perspectives are David Caute, The Year of Barricades: A Journey through 1968 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); as well as Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), doi:10.1017/CBO9781139052658.
3. November 7 and November 30, 1966 letters between Gyorgy Kepes and Frank Malina; Folder 8, Box 41, FM/LOC.
4. Douglas M. Davis, “Conversations with Gyorgy Kepes, Billy Klüver, and James Seawright,” Art in America 56, no. 1 (1968): 38–45.
5. Armin Medosch, New Tendencies: Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961–1978) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016).
6. Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Ronald R. Kline, The Cybernetic Moment: Or Why We Call Our Age the Information Age (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).
7. Background on Maxwell comes from several sources including his November 6, 1991 obituary in the New York Times, Richard Goldstein, “Robert Maxwell, World War II Hero Who Fell on a Grenade, Dies at 98,” New York Times, May 13, 2019, https://nyti.ms/30kRwaW; and Brian Cox, “The Pergamon Phenomenon, 1951–1991: Robert Maxwell and Scientific Publishing,” Learned Publishing 15, no. 4 (2002): 273–278, doi:10.1087/095315102760319233.
8. May 3, 1965 letter from Malina to Maxwell; Folder 1, Box 23, FM/LOC.
9. For example Bronowski’s “The Creative Process,” Scientific American, September 1958, 58–65.
10. Quotes from Oppenheimer’s original proposal, prepared in 1967 and accompanying history of the venture; Box 5, E/UCB, as well as Frank Oppenheimer, “The Palace of Arts and Science: An Exploratorium at San Francisco, California, U.S.A.,” Leonardo 5, no. 4 (1972): 343–346, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/597074.
11. Stephen Petersen, “Innovation and the Rhetoric of Plagiarism: The Klein/Takis Rivalry,” Visual Resources 16, no. 2 (2000): 155–168, doi:10.1080/01973762.2000.9658546.
12. April 2, 1974 letter from Malina to Richard Land and November 23, 1972 letter from Malina to Richard K. Hillis; Folder 18, Box 37 and Folder 8, Box 26, FM/LOC.
13. Billy Klüver, “Theatre and Engineering: An Experiment—2. Notes by an Engineer,” Artforum 5, no. 6 (1967): 31.
14. Published as Frank J. Malina, “Some Reflections on the Differences between Science and Art,” draft essay from late 1964; later published in DATA: Directions in Art, Theory, and Aesthetics, ed. Anthony Hill (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1969), 134–149.
15. Ibid., 136.
16. For example, Ellen Winner, How Art Works: A Psychological Exploration (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); also Tom Mashberg, “Did You Like that Sketch? Science Wants to Know Why,” New York Times, July 10, 2018, https://nyti.ms/2KV8Xa9 (appeared online July 8, 2018 as “Do You Like ‘Dogs Playing Poker’? Science Would Like to Know Why”). For quantification, Samuel P. Fraiberger, et al., “Quantifying Reputation and Success in Art,” Science 362, no. 6416 (2018): 825–829.
17. Malina, “Some Reflections on the Differences between Science and Art,” 139–140.
18. Brian O’Doherty, “‘The Method’: Overdocumentation of Modern Art by Misapplied Scholarship,” New York Times, November 24, 1963, https://nyti.ms/1RBgkR7; Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1975).
19. Quotes from July 20, 1965 memorandum from Malina to Pergamon Press Art Journal Study Group; Folder 1, Box 23 and August 12, 1967 letter from Malina to Alcopley (Alfred L. Copley); Folder 3, Box 23; FM/LOC.
20. Figures from November 1968 memo to Pergamon Press; Folder 13, Box 23, FM/LOC.
21. March 13, 1968 letter; Folder 6, Box 23, FM/LOC.
22. February 2, 1968 letter from Malina to Leon Golub, April 22, 1968 letter from Malina to Alcopley (Alfred L. Copley), September 20, 1968 note; Folders 6 and 7, Box 23, FM/LOC. Wolfe, The Painted Word.
23. October 19, 1971 letter from Malina to David Rosenboom; Folder 13, Box 25, FM/LOC.
24. December 21, 1968 letter from Malina to William R. Sears; Folder 14, Box 23, FM/LOC.
25. October 25, 1971 letter from Malina to J. J. Gibson; Folder 19, Box 35, FM/LOC.
26. April 4, 1967 letter from Malina to Anthony Hill and May 16, 1969 letter from Malina to Frederick Hammersley; Folder 2, Box 23 and Folder 5, Box 24, FM/LOC.
27. May 28, 1969 letter from Malina to Peter Lloyd Jones; Folder 5, Box 24, FM/LOC.
28. December 29, 1971 letter from Malina to Alcopley (Alfred L. Copley); Folder 7, Box 34, FM/LOC.
29. February 21, 1969 letter from Malina to Klüver (emphasis in original); Folder 2, Box 24, FM/LOC.
30. March 1, 1973 letter from Malina to Jacques Mandelbrojt; Folder 12, Box 26, FM/LOC.
31. May 28, 1969 letter from Malina to Peter Lloyd Jones; Folder 5, Box 24, FM/LOC.
32. David Bohm, “On Creativity,” Leonardo 1, no. 2 (1968): 137–149, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/596552; Myron A. Coler, “Creativity in Technology and the Arts,” Leonardo 1, no. 3 (1968): 265–272, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/596574.
33. For example, Hans Wilhelmsson, “Holography: A New Scientific Technique of Possible Use to Artists,” Leonardo 1, no. 2 (1968): 161–169, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/596556.
34. James J. Gibson, “The Information Available in Pictures,” Leonardo 4, no. 1 (1971): 27–35, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/59687. Information about the debate is available online on The Gombrich Archive website, https://gombrich.co.uk/gombrichgibson-dispute/. As of May 2019, according to JSTOR, Gibson’s essay had been cited close to 600 times. Gibson’s personal and professional papers at Cornell (JJG/CU) contain a good record of his correspondence with Malina over the years which I consulted.
35. February 21, 1968 letter from Malina to G. F. Richards; Folder 13, Box 23, FM/LOC.
36. December 29, 1971 letter from Malina to Alcopley (Alfred L. Copley); Folder 7, Box 34, FM/LOC.
37. Eugene Garfield, “Arts and Humanities Journals Differ from Natural and Social Science Journals—But Their Similarities Are Surprising,” Current Comments 47 (November 22, 1982): 5–11, http://www.garfield.library.upenn.edu/essays/v5p761y1981-82.pdf.
38. Frank J. Malina, “Leonardo: The First Decade,” Leonardo, 11, no. 1 (1978): 1–2, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/598831; Roger Malina, in discussion with the author, December 7, 2015; copy in the author’s collection.
39. Malina, “Leonardo.”
40. Douglas M. Davis, “Gyorgy Kepes: Searcher in the New Landscape,” Art in America 56, no. 1 (1968): 38–40. There is a robust amount of scholarship on Kepes’s career. I’m drawing, among others, on two superb sources: Anne Collins Goodyear, “The Relationship of Art to Science and Technology in the United States, 1957–1971: Five Case Studies” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2002), ProQuest (305503573), which has an entire chapter devoted to Kepes, as well as John R. Blakinger’s excellent book Gyorgy Kepes: Undreaming the Bauhaus (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019).
41. Goodyear, “The Relationship of Art to Science and Technology in the United States, 1957–1971,” 162, reflects on this.
42. Gyorgy Kepes, “The Visual Arts and Sciences: A Proposal for Collaboration,” Daedalus 94, no. 1 (1965): 117–134.
43. March 19 and June 9, 1976 letters from Malina to John Holloway; Folder 7, Box 37, FM/LOC.
44. Kepes, “The Visual Arts and Sciences,” 122.
45. Leo L. Beranek, “Poles and Zeros: Should Scientists and Artists Be Rubbed Together?,” Proceedings of the IEEE 53, no. 11 (1965): 1687, doi:10.1109/PROC.1965.4340.
46. November 22, 1966 letter from Cyril S. Smith to Kepes; CAVS/MIT.
47. June 17 and July 7, 1965 letters between Kepes to Stratton; this and other correspondence are in Folder “Center for Advanced Visual Studies,” Box 29, AC 134, SC/MIT. Also, “Proposal for The Center for Advanced Visual Studies,” December 1965, CAVS/MIT.
48. “Introduction to Humanities Section of Ford Proposal,” undated, but likely 1967; “Committee on the Visual Arts,” Box 6, AC 48, SC/MIT.
49. Gyorgy Kepes, “A Collaborative Approach at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies,” April 1966; Box 193, AC 8, SC/MIT.
50. July 13 ,1967 Press Release; CAVS/MIT.
51. Jane H. Kay, “Art and Science on the Charles,” Art in America 55, no. 5 (1967): 62–67.
52. Grace Marmor Spruch was a faculty member for forty-seven years at Rutgers University. Her obituary in the May 14, 2019 New York Times, noted her longstanding love of art and music.
53. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at the Signing of the Arts and Humanities Bill” (speech, September 29, 1965), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-signing-the-arts-and-humanities-bill.
54. Grace Marmor Spruch, “Two Contributions to the Art and Science Muddle: 2. A Report on a Symposium on Art and Science Held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 20–22, 1968,” Artforum 7, no. 5 (1969): 28–32; a draft of Kepes’s speech is in Box 20, AC 431, SC/MIT.
55. Quotes from Spruch, “Two Contributions to the Art and Science Muddle.”
56. Ibid.
57. Biographical material on Burnham’s career comes from the file of correspondence and other materials CAVS maintained (CAVS/MIT) as well as an anthology of his writings edited by Melissa Ragain, Dissolve into Comprehension: Writings and Interviews, 1964–2004 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
58. “Biographical Data for Jack. W. Burnham,” ca. 1968; CAVS/MIT; Jack Burnham, “System Esthetics,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (1968): 30–35.
59. Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century (New York: George Braziller, 1968); the quote comes from Burnham’s proposal for the book, ca. 1967; CAVS/MIT.
60. All of these references appear on the first page alone of Burnham’s “System Esthetics.”
61. This sequence of events is covered by a number of historians, including Dorothy Nelkin, The University and Military Research: Moral Politics at MIT (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972).
62. Burnham, “System Esthetics,” 31, emphasis in original.
63. Jack Burnham, “Some Thoughts on Systems Methodology Applied to Art,” undated, but likely late 1967; CAVS/MIT.
64. An analysis of Burnham’s thinking is Caroline A. Jones’s essay “System Symptoms,” Artforum 51, no. 1 (2012): 113–116; see also, Edward A. Shanken, ed., Documents of Contemporary Art: Systems (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015).
65. October 18, 1968 letter from Hill to Malina; Folder 5, Box 36, FM/LOC.
66. Bannard’s letter appears on page 4 of the November 1968 issue of Artforum.
67. Louis Vaczek, book review in Technology and Culture 11, no. 4 (1970): 655–659.
68. Emphasis in original; the photograph and the quote appear in Burnham’s essay, “The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems” in On the Future of Art, ed. Edward F. Fry (New York: Viking, 1970): 95–122, which was based on a 1969 lecture he gave at the Guggenheim Museum.
69. Jack Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” Artforum 8, no. 1 (1969): 49–55.
70. John Chandler, “Art in the Electric Age,” Art International 13, no. 2 (1969): 19–25.
71. Burnham, “Real Time Systems,” 55.
72. Douglas M. Davis, “Conversations with Gyorgy Kepes, Billy Klüver, and James Seawright,” Art in America 56, no. 1 (1968): 39. A slightly different version also appeared in Douglas M. Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration between Science, Technology, and Art (New York: Praeger, 1973), 115–119.
73. Jack Burnham, “The Panacea that Failed,” in Myths of Information: Technology and Post-Industrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Madison, WI: Coda Press, 1980), 200–215; emphasis in original.
74. Burnham’s answers to a CAVS questionnaire, ca. 1992; CAVS/MIT.
75. Richard Brautigan, “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace,” in Trout Fishing in America, The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, and In Watermelon Sugar: Three Books in the Manner of Their Original Editions (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin/Seymour Lawrence, 1989), 2:1. Brautigan’s 1967 poem “At the California Institute of Technology,” which he wrote while a poet-in-residence at Caltech, also appears in his 1968 collection The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster.
76. Easily seen via Google Ngram search for “cybernetics,” a crude but indicative metric.
77. For information on the press, see Walter van der Star, Jasia Reichardt, and Nick Wadley, Biography of a Publishing House: Stefan and Franciszka Themerson & Gabberbocchus (Amsterdam: Huis Clos, 2017), while biographical information on Reichardt is from María Fernández, “Detached from HiStory: Jasia Reichardt and Cybernetic Serendipity,” Art Journal 67, no. 3 (2008): 6–23, doi:10.1080/00043249.2008.10791311.
78. Jasia Reichardt, “Gaberbocchus Press and the Common Room,” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 42, no. 1–2 (2017): 30–41, doi:10.1080/03080188.2017.1297161.
79. Brent MacGregor, “Cybernetic Serendipity Revisited,” in White Heat, Cold Logic: British Computer Art, 1960–1980, ed. Paul Brown, Charlie Gere, Nicholas Lambert, and Catherine Mason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 83–93, as well as the catalog associated with the show. This was first published in July 1968, just before the exhibit opened, as special issue of Studio International and then later as a book by Praeger, both with the title Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts.
80. Jasia Reichardt, ed., Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts (New York: Praeger, 1968), 5.
81. Jasia Reichardt, “Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas,” in Cybernetics, Art, and Ideas, ed. Jasia Reichardt (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1971), 11–17; Jasia Reichardt, “‘Cybernetic Serendipity’: Getting Rid of Preconceptions,” Studio International 176, no. 905 (November 1968): 176–178.
82. A good introduction to Tsia’s work is The Cybernetic Sculpture Environment of Tsai Wen-Ying (New York: Center Art and Science Foundation, 1997), printed in both Chinese and English.
83. “Tsai’s Cybernetic Sculptures,” July 1968 information from Howard Wise Gallery; CAVS/MIT; John Canaday, “Art: Less Quiet Stones,” New York Times, May 18, 1968, https://nyti.ms/1kPtqzx; Jonathan Benthall, “The Cybernetic Sculpture of Tsai Wen-Ying,” Studio International 177, no. 909 (March 1969): 126–129.
84. Jane Livingston, “Kansas City,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (1968): 66–67.
85. March 3 or 4, 1934 press release from MoMA, https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_325017.pdf.
86. K. G. Pontus Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968), 3. Also, comments in Henry J. Seldis, “New Age of Technology in N.Y. Museum Show,” Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1968.
87. The competition was announced in several places, including the November 12, 1967 issue of the New York Times and the January 1968 issue of Scientific American; a reprint of this appeared in Hultén, The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 198.
88. Noted in E.A.T. Proceedings, no. 9 (May 1969): 13.
89. Descriptions from Alexander Keneas, “Museum Unites Art and Science,” New York Times, November 12, 1968, https://nyti.ms/1PFAgTH. There was some confusion over Turner and Tsai’s contributions given that they both were engineers and the latter had made several pieces, all titled Cybernetic Sculpture. E.A.T. and MoMA clarified their roles, noting that the two men had split the money; November 27, 1968 press release, https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_326596.pdf.
90. “Some More Beginnings,” Techne 1 no. 1 (April 14, 1969): 1–2; EAT/AAA.
91. Grace Glueck, “Art Comes Clanking from All over into Two Museums,” New York Times, November 28, 1968, https://nyti.ms/1PFzxll; Seldis, “New Age of Technology in N.Y. Museum Show.”
92. January 11, 1960 MoMA press release, https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/press_archives/2603/releases/MOMA_1960_0002_2.pdf.
93. Billy Klüver, “The Artist and Industry” (lecture, December 16, 1968, Museum of Modern Art, New York); EAT/AAA.
1. Barbara Rose, “Vogue’s Spotlight: Art,” Vogue, September 1, 1970, 304.
2. Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on a Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Anchor/Doubleday, 1969), 215.
3. Information about Nowlin comes from several personal conversations with the author as well as a personal retrospective: “@Caltech: Art, Science, and Technology, 1969–1971,” Leonardo 50, no. 5 (2017): 443–447, https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/670950. Information on the Caltech program is in Lukas Van Vuuren, “Two Year Report on the Development of the Workshop and Gallery,” April 19, 1971; Folder 18, Box 4, BAG/AAA.
4. Christy Fox, “Art Amenities at Caltech Think Tank,” Los Angeles Times, April 19, 1970.
5. For surveys of the Los Angeles art scene, see Peter Plagens’s classic Sunshine Muse: Contemporary Art on the West Coast (New York: Praeger, 1974) along with more recent books, including the wonderful edited collection by Rebecca Peabody, et al., Pacific Standard Time: Los Angeles Art, 1945–1980 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2011); Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s (New York: Henry Holt, 2011); and William Hackman’s Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties (New York: Other Press, 2015).
6. Hackman, Out of Sight, 6–7.
7. Max Kozloff, “West Coast Art: The Vital Pathology,” Nation, August 24, 1964, 76.
8. Roy Duncan, “Pasadena, the Old Order Changeth,” Los Angeles (December 1963): 39.
9. “Temple on the Tar Pits,” Time, April 2, 1965, 74; and “Brightness in the Air,” Time, December 18, 1964, 62–72.
10. Charles Champlin, “Los Angeles in a New Image,” Life, June 20, 1960, 89; and Mitchell Wilder, “A Stirring in the Pacific Paint Pot,” Saturday Review, October 20, 1962, 56.
11. Joseph Masheck, “New York: Masterpieces of Fifty Centuries, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Brice Marden, Bykert Gallery; California Color, Pace Gallery; Robert Smithson, Dwan Gallery,” Artforum 9, no. 5 (1971): 72–73.
12. Barbara Rose, “Los Angeles: The Second City,” Art in America 54, no. 1 (1966): 110–115.
13. Quotes from Edward Kienholz, “Maurice Tuchman: Bronx Cowboy & Super Curator,” Los Angeles Times, June 4, 1967. Additional biographical material from William Wilson, “Maurice Tuchman: Still the Enfant Terrible,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1989; and Maurice Tuchman, in discussion with the author, August 20, 2013.
14. Maurice Tuchman, ed., Art and Technology: A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1971), https://archive.org/details/reportonarttechn00losa.
15. Kienholz, “Maurice Tuchman.”
16. In 1967, for example, more than 300,000 people worked in Orange and Los Angeles counties for the aerospace industry. These numbers increased dramatically if one included the regional electronics industry. Allen J. Scott, Technopolis: High-Technology Industry and Regional Development in Southern California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); also, Layne Karafantis and Stuart W. Leslie, “‘Suburban Warriors’: The Blue-Collar and Blue Sky Communities of Southern California’s Aerospace Industry,” Journal of Planning History 18, no. 1 (2019): 3–26, doi:10.1177/1538513217748654.
17. Rachel Rivenc, Made in Los Angeles: Materials, Processes, and the Birth of West Coast Minimalism (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2016).
18. Masheck, “New York.”
19. Information on Brogan is from Margaret M. Honda, “Found Technology: The Art Fabrication Business of Jack Brogan” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1991), ProQuest (303944951); while more technical information is in Rivenc, Made in Los Angeles.
20. Evelyn C. Hankins, ed., Robert Irwin: All the Rules Will Change (New York: DelMonico Books, 2016).
21. Tuchman, Art and Technology, 9.
22. Grace Glueck, “Los Angeles Museum Playing Matchmaker,” New York Times, December 13, 1968, https://nyti.ms/1PFws51.
23. The Long Beach show is discussed in chapter 1 of Christopher R. De Fay, “Art, Enterprise, and Collaboration: Richard Serra, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, and Claes Oldenburg at the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2005), ProQuest (305458789).
24. A fascinating topic in its own right, useful information on the APG is found via John A. Walker, “APG: The Individual and the Organisation,” Studio International 191, no. 980 (March/April 1976): 162–164; Peter Eleey, “The Context is Half the Work,” Frieze, no. 111, November 2007; and, more recently, Steven Duval, “Identity, Rhetoric, and Method in the Collaborations of Experiments in Art and Technology, The Artist Placement Group, and the Art and Technology Program at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,” in Hybrid Practices: Art in Collaboration with Science and Technology in the Long 1960s, ed. David Cateforis, Steven Duval, and Shepherd Steiner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 45–60.
25. June 5, 1967 letter from Marilyn Chandler to Maurice Tuchman; Box 1, Folder 10, AT/LACMA.
26. Ibid.
27. Tuchman, Art and Technology, 10.
28. Maurice Tuchman, in discussion with the author, August 20, 2013.
29. Richard P. Feynman, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman: Adventures of a Curious Character (New York: Norton, 1985), 276–278.
30. Years later, Channa Davis Horwitz recalled that Tuchman included her proposal in the final report/catalog but “did not feel it was appropriate for a woman to discuss an engineering project with the male industrial scientists involved with the show”; Folder 3, Box 3, AT/LACMA.
31. Maurice Tuchman, “Confidential Memorandum” (1967), which also doubled as a party invitation in which guests were asked to bring an object representing the past while coming “dressed as you hope to dress in 1984”; AT/LACMA.
32. In 1980, Jack Burnham said he suspected the total outlay for Tuchman’s project was equivalent to $500,000 to $1 million; “Art and Technology: The Panacea that Failed,” in Myths of Information: Technology and Postindustrial Culture, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Madison, WI: Coda, 1980), 208.
33. Tuchman, Art and Technology, 17; he made a similar comparison in a 1971 radio interview with Clare Loeb (later Clare Spark) that was broadcast on 90.7 KPFK, a Los Angeles public radio station. In the spring of 1971, Loeb did a dozen radio interviews with artists and engineers: Robert Whitman; Claes Oldenburg; John Forkner; Jane Livingston; Ed Wortz; James Lee Byars; Billy Klüver; Robert Irwin; Boyd Mefferd; Newton Harrison; Maurice Tuchman; and Rockne Krebs, individual interviews with Clare Loeb, Art and Technology, Pacifica Radio Archives, radio audio, broadcast between February 7–July 19, 1971, https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org/recording/bb445801-13, transcripts in the author’s possession.
34. Sample artist and sponsor contracts are included in Tuchman, Art and Technology, and pages 12–18 discusses the contracts.
35. Guy Williams, letter in February 1969 issue of Artforum, 4, 6.
36. Tuchman, Art and Technology, 16, emphasis mine.
37. Grace Glueck, “Los Angeles Museum Playing Matchmaker”; also William Wilson, “Corporations Join Creative Art Experiment,” Los Angeles Times, October 22, 1968, ProQuest Historical Newspapers (156120786).
38. Henry J. Seldis, “Artists, Firms Join in Museum Project in L.A.,” Los Angeles Times, December 12, 1968, and “Art, Technology: Aesthetic Entente in the Making” Los Angeles Times, December 29, 1968.
39. Roderick Nordell, “‘We’re Not Interested in Art,’ the Man Said,” Christian Science Monitor, May 13, 1968; Glueck, “Los Angeles Museum Playing Matchmake.”
40. Tuchman, Art and Technology, 9. Related to this are larger changes in the nature of corporate patronage; see Mark W. Rectanus, Culture Incorporated: Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorship (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
41. “Artists Use an Industrial Palette,” Business Week, November 8, 1969, 96–98.
42. De Fay, “Art, Enterprise, and Collaboration,” 44–60.
43. Tuchman, Art and Technology, 11–17, notes that “this nomenclature was never comfortably accepted by us” but that he and his colleagues could come up with nothing better as a moniker.
44. Jane Livingston, “Thoughts on Art and Technology,” in Tuchman, Art and Technology, 43–47.
45. Maurice Tuchman, in discussion with the author, August 20, 2013.
46. For example, Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997); Jack Masey and Conway Lloyd Morgan, Cold War Confrontations: US Exhibitions and Their Role in the Cultural Cold War (Baden: Lars Müller, 2008).
47. William Grimes, “Jack Masey, Whose Exhibitions Showed American Culture to World, Dies at 91,” New York Times, March 21, 2016, https://nyti.ms/22AMIt8; and Jack Masey, in discussion with author, August 26, 2013.
48. Masey’s work is described in Masey and Morgan, Cold War Confrontations. On the vogue for inflatable structures, see Marc Dessauce, ed., The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics and Protest in ’68 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999).
49. April 17, 1968 letter from Jack Masey to USIA; JM/NYC; July 21, 1967 “Typical Invitation Letter” from USIA director to architect Paul Rudolph; Box 7, AC 48, SC/MIT.
50. A point suggested by De Fay, “Art, Enterprise, and Collaboration,” 37.
51. William Wilson, “L.A. ‘Art, Technology’ Prepares for Japan Expo,” Los Angeles Times, August 28, 1969.
52. Kienholz, “Maurice Tuchman.”
53. Biographical information on Garmire comes from a number of sources, including personal correspondence with the author and an essay in Emma Ideal and Rhiannon Meharchand, eds., Blazing the Trail: Essays by Leading Women in Science (Lexington, KY: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013). Garmire’s positive experiences as a physics student contrast with Evelyn Fox Keller’s depiction in “The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics,” in Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work, ed. Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 77–87.
54. For women at Caltech, see chapter 5 of Amy Sue Bix, Girls Coming to Tech! A History of American Engineering Education for Women (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014), from which the quotes are drawn.
55. Elsa M. Garmire, interview by Joan Bromberg, February 4, 1985, https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/4621; as well as personal correspondence with the author.
56. Holly Meyers, “A 50’s Housewife as Performance Art,” Los Angeles Times, September 18, 2011. Garmire’s recollections are from a 1970 interview with Nilo Lindgren; Folder 6, Box 140, EAT/GRI. On Smith see, Kathy Noble, “How a Dissatisfied Housewife Was Saved by Radical Performance (and a Xerox Machine),” Artsy, March 5, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-dissatisfied-housewife-saved-radical-performance-xerox-machine.
57. Elsa Garmire, personal correspondence with the author.
58. July 2, 1968 letter from Garmire to Francis Mason; Folder 14, Box 124, EAT/GRI.
59. Bochner’s residency is described in Grace Glueck, “$75,000 in Grants to Spur Art Test,” New York Times, September 19, 1968, https://nyti.ms/1Y8x0TI. Whitman’s work was discussed in the October 27 issue of Time, 64.
60. A transcript of the entire panel, which took place on December 29, 1968; Folder 14, Box 124, EAT/GRI.
61. Elsa Garmire, personal correspondence with the author.
62. Interest in having a Los Angeles chapter dates back at least to June 1967 as recorded in correspondence between David MacDermott and Klüver; Folder 12, Box 29, EAT/GRI. The activities of E.A.T./L.A. are documented in a collection (2003.M.12) at the GRI as well as materials in Box 29, EAT/GRI.
63. “Cybernetic Moon Landing Celebration,” undated press release, likely July 1969; Folder 13, Box 29, EAT/GRI.
64. Caroline Hinkley, personal correspondence with the author.
65. Steve Lerner, “The Age of Lunacy on a Muddy Meadow,” Village Voice, July 24, 1969.
66. William Wilson, “Lunar Walk Hailed at Art-Science Fete,” Los Angeles Times, July 22, 1969.
67. Elsa Garmire, interview by Nilo Lindgren, 1970; Folder 6, Box 140, EAT/GRI.
68. Elsa Garmire, “Art and Technology—Ruminations of an Engineer,” reprinted in Survey 1, (January 1970): 6.
69. Elsa Garmire, personal correspondence with the author, as well as images and presentations of her work she shared with me.
70. Henry J. Seldis and William Wilson, “Art Walk,” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 1971.
71. “Education Study Gets Gift,” New York Times, November 14, 1968, https://nyti.ms/1N1ehaZ. Pepsi’s statement, dated November 11, 1968, and based on a press conference at MoMA, also noted its intent to “explore new and effective ways to appeal to young people around the world”; SNB/BM.
72. Chapter 5 of Anne Collins Goodyear, “The Relationship of Art to Science and Technology in the United States, 1957–1971: Five Case Studies” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2002), ProQuest (305503573), rightly notes the advance preparation E.AT. had already done. This reluctance can be found in several of Klüver statements including a January 8, 1970 interview with Nilo Lindgren; Folder 8, Box 140, EAT/GRI.
73. “MemCon,” undated but sometime mid-February 1968; Folder 24, Box 49, EAT/GRI.