Experiments in Art and Technology with Artforum Editor Michelle Kuo

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

So this engineer at Bell gets together with these artists, some of whom are really, you know, prominent at the time, and they are, they've there have been, they've sort of met each other through some just really almost chance social circles, but also through some art world friends in common. And, you know, Jasper Johns needed a neon, wanted a neon light in the shape of a letter, the letter R, for one of his paintings, and he didn't want a cord running from the painting to an electrical socket. So somehow he got hooked up with Kluever, this engineer from Bell and said can he do this? Well, it turns out it was kind of a complicated problem at the time. How do you make a battery-powered neon light that's small enough to fit behind a painting? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Well, he did it.

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

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

So they had meetings, and again it was very ad hoc, in other words, it was really a word-of-mouth thing. So Kluever would bring in friends from Bell, Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman and other artists would bring in friends from their circle. This happened to include John Cage, David Tudor, Yvonne Rainer, really people that would become extremely well-known afterward but already prominent at the time. So they had freewheeling meetings, actually held them at a high school in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, which was near Perth House. They would go up there, where people who live sort of more upstate. So they would go there and they were just really trying to literally brainstorm to bounce ideas off one another.

And, you know, of course, the artists wanted things like, you know, I want a missile that floats, I want, you know, a light bulb that will explode, I want walkie-talkies, I want remote control, I want sound that will respond to the viewer as they're walking through space in real time. And like any tech person knows, non-tech people think technology can do everything all at once already. So they were really just pie in the sky, and I think the engineers were really shocked, but I also really enthusiastic because they hadn't had experiences like that in large measure before.

So this really created a lot of excitement. It created a lot of tensions. There were a lot of fights, a lot of conflict as well, just a lot of pressure because in the end they, I think they signed up for creating, you know, a very, let's say, ambitious set of performances on a large scale in New York. And at the end of the day, you know, very little was tested or tried out, and there were long delays, nearly 10,000 visitors over the course of these essentially 20 nights.

Yeah, so like just so I understand the timeframe, yeah, they decided like there's just one project with the neon behind the painting with a battery. Ok, this is cool, we should have more of this. They then, like, book the Armory like nine months ago? I'm fast forwarding, but basically, they were, they had proposed they got together let's say maybe 10 of them, ok, but really spearheaded by Rauschenberg and Kluever, and then it kind of built a bit. And again this is just this really almost contingent aspect to it. Kluever was Swedish, there is a Swedish performance festival in Stockholm, and they thought, well let's apply to do something for that. That fell through.

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

So, you know, the Armory was suggested as a venue because they wanted to test out literally physical scale, and in the Armory there are echo times of up to five seconds. So people interested in sound, in remote control, in video, or basically in projection were interested in this very large physical scale already. So they booked it, but again, I guess part of it is that some of these artists were already quite prominent. And so on opening night for this performance series, you have Senator Jacob Javits and his wife Eva, his wife is a prominent arts patron. You have the sort of who's who of the New York art world, but also of the avant-garde demi-monde, and they're all there en masse, and they're all really mad because they're waiting. It's like breaking right, things aren't working.

And so eventually when things did start to work, you know, really extraordinary and interesting things happen. For example, in Rauschenberg's performance piece, to make a long story short, one of the technologies they got and used was infrared, and at the time infrared was classified as a military technology. They ended up getting infrared cameras from a Japanese supplier. And so that one part of the performance was turning all the lights off, and in the dark then training these infrared cameras on hundreds of performers that assembled on the floor of the Armory.

And so you got these very ghostly spectral images of these people for the audience at large. And again, you know, that was an extraordinary thing that happened. It's like as if today you would have an artist that had access to the Pentagon and was spending time, you know, toying around there. So that was really unprecedented. And from there they got momentum even more, they grew to a few hundred people, and then anyone could really become a member. You just signed, you filled out a form and you sent it in. And so at their peak, by around 1970, they had nearly 5,000 members.

What did it mean to be a member? So basically, to be a member you could get access to this. Now in other words, you could fill out what you're interested in, whether you're on whatever field you're in. If you're an artist, you could say I'm interested in new plastics and holograms and also cybernetics. And then if you are an engineer you could say, well this is my disciplinary expertise. I'm also really fascinated by, you know, kinetic sculpture or I really like, you know, dropping acid. Like how are people discovering this is like pre-internet? They're just like, okay I'm into acid, I guess I know how that makes it to your town.

But part of the whole thing was outreach and they were very, they made a concerted effort obviously not only to reach out to artists but then to go to IEEE, which was the, you know, Engineering Society. They had a booth, had a booth there, manning a booth there, handing out flyers. So again, it's like let's take this to the trade fair, to conferences, they gave talks, they did, you know, almost like not really publicity, but it's a tours of schools. The university was, of course, a whole other connector. And what you see as well is this network of what becomes or was a kind of academic military-industrial complex. All of these people are really in communication.

And so EA T is basically saying, well how can we get the word out? So can you explain the actual Rauschenberg piece at the Armory? Because I thought that was particularly cool. Yeah, so Rauschenberg had decided to, he was very interested again in first of all remote control, this is what he kind of thought of as action at a distance. You know, how can you make something else happen but not be physically tethered to it? He's also interested in sound effects, in sonic sort of annoys as well as, you know, experiments basically in acoustics.

And the other part of it is really almost creating something, let's say poetic out of people's movements. And he was also interested in games and at the time a number of artists had already or were already exploring the sort of structure of the game. It was also very much a conscious reference to game theory even. And so all of these layers are definitely, you know, they're Rauschenberg's piece basically set up in this huge cavernous expanse of the Armory: a tennis match. But it wasn't a regular tennis match. He set up a tennis court, he had the artist Frank Stella who at the time was actually taking tennis lessons from a tennis instructor named Mimi Kanore.

So the tennis instructor and Frank Stella are on the tennis court and they play a game of tennis, but it so happens that the racquets, the tennis racquets are actually hot-wired. So each time you hit the ball, a resounding amplified microphone would pick up an amplified sound that would resonate throughout the Armory and it triggered a huge bank of lights to be turned off. So with every volley, a successive set of lights would be turned off. So by the end of the game, which has no winner or loser, the Armory is in complete darkness. And then that's when these infrared cameras were turned on and a mass of sort of, they're not really performers, they were people that Rauschenberg sent out sort of vague instructions to, but they were just supposed to gather on the floor and do maybe make a motion like pull your ear or touch the person next to you, just these sort of very vague instructions.

So that's what they were doing, assembled on the floor, and the image of them via infrared is then projected above on these huge screens. And then at the end of that, they turned one spotlight on the choreographer Simone Forti, who came out and was being carried and was singing a sort of Italian folk song. So again, this is all, you know, it's not a regular narrative, it doesn't really make any sense. But what it did was really push, it investigated some questions around performance, play, sound, imaging technology, and also the idea that you could have a performance that didn't have to be about a climactic spectacle. It was about some other kind of experience, and a kind of experience that the artist hoped you wouldn't have had before. And that, you know, really that was the case.

Of course, the first night the rackets didn't work so they were, or the lights, the trigger for the lights didn't work so they were actually manually turned off, you know, sort of jerry-rigging or, you know, retroactively, you know, making the piece happen. Later it did, but to, you know, again it was really a test and an experiment in every sense of the word. And at the time, you know, people didn't really, they didn't really sort of understand that that's what it was.

So I've been wondering this the whole time, right? Because it's like so much of this technology was so new at that lake to the extent that you had never even seen an infrared camera. Right? How are people talking about this art and technology overlap? Because I know where I think I imagine how people talk about it now, but how are people talking about it at the time? Well, you have a couple different attitudes. One is, you know, wonder and astonishment. This is amazing, isn't this so incredible and exciting? And part of that is a very futurist strain of language, which is, you know, people basically trying to predict what's going to happen and having fun doing so just like the artists were in a way as well.

But you have a lot of people theorizing about the future of communication, the future of images, the future of human perception. And so there's a lot of literature around that from, you know, every sort of end of the spectrum. And then there are people who are extremely critical and wary. And at the time, you know, this is the height of the anti-Vietnam protests. This is a moment when, you know, well, 10 years or so after the military-industrial complex is coined as a term, it is a concept that begins to really take root and particularly among the avant-garde, among the counterculture, among the very artists that and some of the engineers that are part of EA T.

So they actually came under a lot of flack. I mean, there are articles actually written in art form as well as elsewhere that essentially accused EA T of being complicit with, you know, the military and taking that as far as you might even, yeah, go. So that was also part of why I think EA T had a very conflicted reception at the time and why maybe people haven't heard so much about it since then as well. And you get it really crystallizes both utopian and the dystopian attitudes toward technology at the time and what art's role was to either explore that or in fact critique and negate that.

Mmm, ok. And so this led to the Automation House. But like I have, so what was it exactly? Do you see that part of the video? No, isn’t it crazy? Ok, so what is it actually called? Automated House. It's called... This is like the collaboration between, I think I got this right, American Foundation on Automation and Employment. So basically this argument that they were having at the time, which is exactly like the same thing as today, is like the robots are gonna take your job. And so it's Kluever and he and the people and I forget the guy's name who is the organizer of that, oh Theodore Kheel. You Turkey? Yeah, create this building together. Right?

Yes, yeah, which is like the future of life house. Like, I don't really understand what it's supposed to be. Well, basically what this is, around in 1968-1969 EA T had been moving around, they had a loft, they had various places to sort of meet, and they viewed the physical space as actually an important part of what they were doing because as much as they were actually building what would become a real network that was sprawled globally, they also wanted what they called a place to try things out, you know, a testing ground.

And so they thought various physical spaces like a loft could be that place. Then they got into, again through Rauschenberg in large part, talks with this group, the American Foundation on Automation and Employment. Theodore Kheel was the guy who had started this, was the head of this organization, and he was a labor lawyer. He'd actually become well-known for mediating a massive, I think it was a newspaper workers' strike in the early 60s. So suddenly all of these concerns about collective action about technology and labor come to the fore and everyone is really worried that automation, if the robots will take our jobs.

John F. Kennedy had said, you know, automation is the greatest threat facing humanity today. And so there was alarm at the time; they didn't even know about artificial intelligence. So, you know, it was really a widespread fear. And so this group that the labor lawyer was sort of running was actually trying to literally mediate these concerns. And they thought that they could find solutions to not only accept but embrace technology and recognize that it was a reality that it wasn't going away.

But also then somehow change the fear of labor so that labor that people could still be employed, it's just that what they did would change. And again, this is obviously so it's a very positive utopian view of, oh yes, it's almost very practical. You know, they really wanted to try and solve this problem, but then it dovetailed very nicely with what EA T was trying to do, which was to say, you know, how can we pragmatically understand the force of technology in a way that, you know, I think people were really almost willfully blind? In other words, you reject it and you don't even want to understand it, you can't really understand it, and therefore you're just, you know, gonna condemn it.

So they really wanted to bring people from different knowledge domains, fields of expertise together and try and solve some of these problems. So they decided to build or renovate a townhouse in New York to create a center for job training, for workshops about automation and technology, for art exhibitions, for EA T to have their kind of headquarters there as well for classes. And they got two young architects to essentially retrofit the building with closed-circuit television cameras, video monitors. They had a video workstation there where one of the projects they did was actually convert a bunch of really experimental film pieces to video and then do the first cable broadcast of artist television programming, pretty much of all time, and this was in 1970-71.

Okay, where was it broadcast? It was broadcast on local access cable access in New York. That's pretty cool. Channels, and they published the schedule in the village, but it's like having a few other newspapers or TV Guide. You'll see it like Andy Warhol's, you know, dot dot, it's being screened at 8:00 pm on Tuesday, you know, so that was really quite amazing, and today we're trying to create some kind of studio/laboratory where all these things could happen. But it started to, it again really highlighted how despite all of the tensions and conflicts surrounding their relationships to technology, EA T really did have a social mission, and was extremely political and wanted to, you know, change both social and political aspects of life.

But it just, let's say from a different vantage point than maybe other artists did at the time. Yeah, because it seems very practical, right? Like it was. Yeah, it was. Yeah, because what ended up happening with the house—which is my concern—it basically became, eventually became a gallery. So, you know, again, it was both practical and really impractical because, you know, many of their ideas, again, or many of their plans sort of petered out.

And I would say one of the most amazing and fantastic but then also cataclysmic events for them was when EA T was commissioned to construct and realize the Pepsi Pavilion at the World's Fair in Osaka in 1970. And I think I talked about this, you did. Yeah, but basically that was the biggest single collaborative project they took on. And it was truly global. I mean they worked with Japanese artists, engineers, European artists, engineers, obviously American artists, engineers. They tested it in LA, but they created a 180-degree hemispherical mirror dome, that was inflated, made out of inflated mylar essentially, which was the same technology that was being used for the first telecommunication satellites. It's like they would launch a reflective balloon into space, and you're literally bouncing waves.

Cool, but instead they used that technology or essentially through much trial and error jerry-rigged it so that they could create an inflated mirror dome. And then when you walked inside, you, there were all of these sound effects, different textures, different projections and performances, but the mirror dome itself created essentially three-dimensional near holographic inverted reflections, and you could capture this in photographs. Oh, if they're incredible photographs of this as well.

But basically they took on this massive project and it, you know, by all rights was actually really created unprecedented experiences that were literally giving you both real and virtual images as they called them. But Pepsi, to make a long story short, when the pavilion opened to the public they basically thought this is too weird, it’s also huge—there were also huge budget cost overruns, there was also a fog surrounding the whole, a fog sculpture surrounding the entire pavilion.

I can't even get into all of these things, people thought the fog was a fire. So they said look, the first day they sent, you know, fire trucks screaming. Anyway, Pepsi kind of thought, well actually this is really weird. And so there was a breakdown, actually there was essentially a legal dispute, and at the end of the day, EA T sort of got kicked out of the pavilion. They were literally smuggling their tapes, like their sort of, you know, 8-track tapes for programs out of the pavilion. And the end result is that Pepsi replaced all of these experimental sort of John Cage slash David Tudor composed soundtracks with It's a Small World, and that was effectively enough to like burn everyone out.

It was traumatic I think for everyone. And I think the whole thing was traumatic. I mean, if they still went on for, you know, a number of years after, let's say that, really I think was tough. And yet, you know, again I would say it was the, it really demonstrated how global they could actually, and how they could construct a global team that would create something of a very ambitious scale. And it just, it also just became an object lesson in all of the difficulties of course surrounding…

Well, 'cause what I've been wondering was that the first thing that got me into this was I was reading the conversations with Robert Irwin, but it was amazing. I love that book, and it's like just like one sentence it talks about him hanging out with Richard Feynman. Do you know much about this? Like, I want to watch that movie, I want that, and it's like so little information online. I don't know if there's footage of it. By Robert Irwin and Richard Serra—I always mispronounce the name— in like an anechoic chamber. They're like, but that's a famous sort of interaction where Robert Irwin was experimenting with basically, would shape his work where he's really interested in shutting out all sensation, and then he goes on to create works that explore the guns felt, or this perceptual limit in the same way that an anechoic chamber does.

But yeah, Richard Feynman was a member of EAT, so was Robert Irwin, so were a lot of physicists. You know, again, was part of this kind of crazy network of people. And what was great was that there were a lot of not a lot, but there were definitely a number of analogous collaboration programs that were like EA T, often modeled after that. One was this program where Irwin was sort of meeting a lot of these people through it. It was for an exhibition at LACMA, the LA County Museum of Art, and it was called, or in technology is all very confusing. But it was basically a for an exhibition. So they were very much inspired by EA T, but this exhibition was sort of like the endpoint. So, in other words, you would commission all these collaborations that they paired, but it was this very corporate thing, right?

Like there are all these companies like, yes, EA T was also embroiled with all of these companies as well, like Lockheed Martin, you know, basically the aerospace industrial complex in Southern California, like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. That's where Irwin went. So they did the same thing. They paired artists with engineers, but it was ultimately to end up back in the museum. That's why I find really fascinating. And to me, the difference is that EA T, it took the opposite trajectory. It tried to explode in scale, and it could not be confined by the museum.

It did not fit into any of the traditional institutions. Did everything they build—was it all site-specific? Not necessarily. I mean, you know, what part of what they wanted to do and what they did create was almost even a set of equipment. So for example, you could go check out the weird hybrid control panel that had been invented, essentially, or engineered for this other performance, and now it just exists there. You can go take it, and it's like a library. You can check it out and use it for something else. But, and yet the other thing is that often what they created does not conform to traditional genres of sculpture or painting or drawings.

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

Yeah, I mean even I don't know the history of it nearly like you do, but the like Tinguely stuff, the things that break themselves are amazing. Yeah, but they, like, the museum kind of takes the fun out of it because they'll be like a red button that you can hit like once an hour and then all like this thing will just dance. And so they—yes, yeah—and they’re many. It's funny, there are a lot of exhibitions even nowadays where those things still don't, aren't working, or like the technicians, the conservators have to come and, you know, sort of they’re always panicked.

But Tinguely actually was really one of the first works that Kluever, the EA T engineer, they collaborated on a piece that was basically a kinetic sculpture that destroyed itself in the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden in 1960. And of course, it didn't really, it sort of just short-circuited, so it was again supposed to be, I think kind of spectacular, and in the end it just kind of fizzled out. But that was one of Kluever's first collaborations with an artist.

But yes, so the idea of incorporating new technologies and new materials or even unorthodox materials and unorthodox technologies, you know, that is a really interesting problem for the production of art, especially starting around the 1950s, 60s, 70s and even more so now, of course, with, you know, God knows what, you know, an artist is using Bitcoin. I have no idea what they're going to do in the future. You wouldn't believe the actions you got on Twitter, by the way, like people are sending in stuff. It's very practically Wikipedia.

But again, but just to sort of finish that thought, I think what was really amazing specifically about some of what EA T made, and this is present in, for example, a number, a lot of Rauschenberg's own collaborative artworks from the time that he made with Kluever under the auspices of EA T, is that Rauschenberg said, look, I'm making this thing with a transistor radio right now. And, you know, they've done all these complex things to it to make, you know, sort of the effects they want at the time in the 60s, transistor radio was not a mass technology. It had just come on to the market, was very new thing.

Fast forward to the 90s, this piece, which is a sort of sculptor that has these radios embedded in it, is acquired by the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Well it's not, the Pompidou is a very funny building. Again, to make a long story short, it's a very weird piece of architecture, but it acts like a Faraday cage. So it was blocking all signal. Also, at the time that they had constructed the piece in the 60s, in the mid-sixties, a.m. was like FM and FM was like a.m. in terms of programming. So a.m. had more pop music, etc. FM had more sort of news, blah, blah, blah. Rauschenberg wanted us, I think at the time, it was FM, and then so they wanted to switch it to a.m. as well.

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

Well, it's particularly interesting when you like take the modern eye and bring it into these exhibits where like things that are supposed to represent the future now look like this kit retro. Like there's the, I forget what it's called, but it does it at the Tate, that big tower of TVs. Yeah, yeah, and you look like cool. I go in very 1984-esque, but I don't think it's intended or was intended that way. It wasn't, but some, so many artists again, it's a sliding scale. Many artists at the time are actually interested in obsolete technologies and in exploring those at the same time. There are other artists who are interested in the, you know, the newest, latest thing and that's what they want to question.

I often ask artists that are alive still is, you know, if you could do it all over again, would you use a different technology to achieve the effect that you wanted back then? And some say yes. I've even heard an artist say yes, I actually want to take back my works that are in the museum and change them and put them back, which museums really don't want. It points up this crazy contradiction or this conundrum that people are facing. Some artists say no, I wouldn't change a thing, I want it to reflect that medium, that sort of form of the, and that was—that's something I want to preserve. So it just depends on what, you know, you were trying to do and what questions you are trying to ask.

Okay, do you have thoughts? And so Kat and I both went to Venice this year. I, we know, yeah, I'll be clear. Like it was the first one of those, I've never been to anything, you know, okay? It only happens every two years, so until you went, right? Because you wrote a review, yeah, we had a whole, yeah, series of pieces. And there's a distinct lack of technology at this one, right? That's an interesting question. I wouldn't, you know, that again, I think points to what maybe has changed between, let's say, the mid-60s and now, which is that of course consumer technology has expanded to the extent that everyone has a computer in their pocket. So it's so ubiquitous that in a way I wouldn't say that the the biennial for example was devoid of technology. I think it was everywhere in a lot of different ways, but this exhibition in particular was focusing on, let's say, an investigation of ideas about primitivism, about indigenous cultures, about nature, about spirituality. And those are definitely things that, you know, in a way that explains why you saw a lot of, let's say, more traditional craft or form in the show.

So you're totally right. It's just that I would say we often don't notice it as much because it's not for grounded as the raison d'être of an artwork; it's just there. Right? And on the flip side, yes, it might. I would say that people are interested right now in exploring the flip side of the acceleration of technology and its omnipresence. They're interested in also slowing things down, in other kinds of perception or in even countering some of the kinds of media saturation. I did, I did love sharpening a MacBook. There was it, the snow monkeys. Remember snow? I just was thinking about actually was one of my favorite pieces or two pieces in the show and, yeah, exactly. So again, such a simple idea with the snow monkeys, but of course that's video. But then with the sharpening the MacBook Air, again a very simple idea but very extremely sharp.

So, infinite n. Yeah, and thinking about like the legacy of VIT, who do you think is doing some of the most interesting work within that, you know, kind of intersection of art and technology? You know, again, I would say what's exciting in a sense is that so many artists have so much more access to advanced technology, simply because of the proliferation of these advanced technologies in everyday life. On the flip side, you know, I would say the cloisters in which technology is actually being sort of produced or created now are still in many ways as walled off to, you know, the guy on the street as they were before.

So some of the artists that I think are really either pushing the boundaries of what art and technology can do together but also of really looking at technologies or making it a point to try and engage technologies that most ordinary people are artists wouldn't really have access to. One of them is Trevor Paglen, who for example, he—well he's kind of a crazy guy—he has a series of incredible photographs that are basically taken from remote sites and with very special camera technology of drone planes. So they're these beautiful photographs, often of a incredibly brilliant night sky, and then there's a tiny speck and it's a drone.

So he has to do all of these things to get that sort of picture. And what he's doing in many different ways, in lots of other projects as well, is to try and render visible or sensible to us things that are absolutely not visible to us normally or even physically. So for example, he is really interested in all of these automated technologies that are post vision, so to speak, literally things that we cannot visualize because they don't take place in an optical realm. So how do you start to even talk about it or engage it or make someone somehow perceive, get some sense of what those processes are? And he's really someone who I think has done that.

Yeah, I mean, I was just about to jump into some of these questions from Twitter, but I mean this is a, it's a new experience for us too. I should re-type some of these questions because it makes me sound like I can't read, although I have like a fourth grade reading level project. Okay, so there's this Anna Sophia Almagro—I also butcher everyone's name—she asked the question about blockchain. Are you at it?

Yeah, I don't mean to be patronizing, like what's your level in the know? We actually published a piece about Bitcoin and the blockchain, it was a media study. It was by a media studies person and I will say I relied on a lot of help because my, as I literally just by coincidence, my partner is a technologist and actually the rest of my family are all scientists as well, which is explain something I guess, but I, we had to do a lot of research to make sure we were accurately characterizing the technology. And yeah, I learned a lot obviously when we worked on that piece.

Okay, so you're on board then, I have a crazy. Yeah, although, you know, this is like a year now, two years ago, so—but you can test my recall. It's a well cabinet can jump in at any point. So is blockchain being used to track authenticity in art? So meaning, digital art? Wow, not to my knowledge yet, not to my knowledge, yes. I don't think I've heard of one, one project.

Yeah, cause you get the idea, right? So it's tracking authenticity and that is, my interpretation is that it's incredibly difficult to create valuable digital art if it's a, like, you know, falling apart because like, you know, your browser is no longer compatible, but also you know, if you like Photoshop paint something, you can just duplicate it infinitely, right? So you have the signature on this, the original, okay. So maybe, maybe not. I mean it, to me I, not to my knowledge yet, but I haven't really looked into it in this way and I guess again, what I would say is that it's an incredibly, well it's a very intuitive but it's also a perverse idea because I think a lot of artists right now who are exploring something like the blockchain are interested in disrupting—well that's a terrible word to use—scratched in, in going against sort of orthodox valuation in the first place.

So, but yeah, I mean, so they might not care as much about authenticity or of like a regional piece or yeah, they actively want to subvert authenticity. Yeah, and that's been something that again actually you could say almost the entire history of Modern Art is about challenging authenticity and authorship. And so we've been through, in our sort of realm, many different iterations of people trying to test this in different ways and so in technology is one of them, right? It's like saying that it's removing, to use a technological system is often to remove you as a human single individual and your whatever imprimatur that may be on something. It's to replace that with a system that's determined in advance or might use a chance operation.

So these are all legacies in art that again are really informing, I think, people's attitudes toward even the newest technology. Okay, so I'm sure people are, you know, everyone's always interested in valuation outside of the artists themselves. Well, it's tricky, alright, but it's all made up. Yeah, I mean I don't know... Oh, okay, I don't know if... Are you about Damien Hirst, found objects? Hot or not? Are you allowed to comment on this?

Alright, next question. Is it still art if a machine creates it? Yes, and for the reasons that I just enumerated, I think that this becomes a philosophical question. But at the end of the day, in most cases up to now at our point in history, someone, a human, still has to trigger that process, let's say go, even if then everything else is determined by an algorithm or by, you know, program. And yet artists are interested in challenging, they were interested in using machines precisely to challenge this traditional notion of authorship, which they associated with an outmoded model of being basically, and to challenge systems really of not only of capitalism but also of basically Western philosophy that often privileges the author, and it's the author as a white male.

So these are all things that get challenged at different periods in history and they, people are using machines to do that. The weird thing now is, again, I would point to the work of someone like Trevor Paglen or another artist, Haroun Farroqi, where as Paglen himself is kind of characterized these artists are confronting the both amazing and terrifying prospect of totally automated, completely automated systems that don't need the human just to set off that go button and that are, you know, acting or using deep learning or using all of these different processes that do not entail humans.

And again, yeah, I think, you know, artists and art viewers will still be interested in someone who somehow finds a way to investigate that art. Well, so this is the—so we had Doug. Oh yeah, do you know this, the name? I don't know him personally, I just know about him. But actually again, this is nothing in the video, but like my partner, because he's in music technology, he again was like, oh, I was like oh so I was weeding up about him as well. But yeah, so he was on the podcast before which is great.

Okay, yeah, so he's awesome and his whole thing is, right, like this is just a tool, and he often, he cited a Brian Eno quote, which is basically saying like the style is defined by the glitch of it, you know, like the electric guitar with Jimi Hendrix was the distortion, you know, like vinyl or tapes or whatever. And he had been talking about how when photography came out, people were criticizing, "I was like this isn't art, like this is just a reproduction." Yeah. Do you think the same thing is just gonna be happening with us?

Like machine learning comes into art creation or 3D printing, or basically my question is, is this a constant in the art world? Yes, I'll probably never live to see the day when someone doesn't say my kid could do that. So that is a question, and but again it's, you know, to me the real question is what does it mean to introduce a glitch into something? What does it mean to explore the perfection of a mechanical or a computational system? What does it mean to try and basically challenge the legacy of virtuosic skill?

In other words, the reason photography created a crisis for art was that it said, you know, if the if one of the stated aims of painting was to somehow reproduce the world in the most wonderful way possible, now you have a machine that just does it automatically. And so what, how do you, how can you possibly try to understand a different way of creating that is not mimetic, that is not about reproduction? And how can you try and understand a mode of construction that might even challenge or critique those systems of reproduction? And that's when you get into the 20th century and, you know, Steve Reich, you know saying I have the simplest pattern but then in realization or in its realization, you get an incredibly singular, you know, amazing sonic experience, but, you know, people are playing precisely with pulling the subject out completely, the author out completely, but then also, you know, the realization that you can never quite fully do that.

So there's always these, you know, this tension between sort of total chance, total system, and total control. Gotcha. Okay, so we just have a couple questions left. This is a, yeah, this has been great. I mean, it's a big topic, but it's, I would say also the funny thing is regardless of a tool, a lot of bad art has been made. You know, look, it's— that's what I mean about it's not just, of course, about the tool; it's about what you do with the tool, but also maybe you're creating a new tool in the first place, and that's what I think artists have really pushed the limits of what, you know, what sensation is, what perception is, right? Material is, what we've adapted.

Yeah, yeah. And so when you're—or even predict—I mean they might be the forecasters in a way of what comes to pass as well, seems like it in some cases. Yeah, in some cases, to great chagrin. What are that, what, oh yeah, what happened in like Automation House that didn't come to life or that did come to life, like that they called that?

Well, so one project was they had a series of projects they called projects outside art, which again gives you some idea of what they're trying to do. And one of the things that really, very funny, is a project that was called Children and Communication. So the artist Robert Whitman kind of spearheaded this project. And again, part of this is about with these new tools of communication, how can we explore democratizing communication and networks of communication? So they had this idea to set up multiple stations around the city where different schoolchildren of different socio-economic brackets, like in different places, could go and have access to teletype machines, basically primitive faxes, and telex machines.

And so they could then, there are sessions just like go and why don't you communicate with these other—this led to a al chat and mass comm generally, you know? But anyway, so the children wrote to each other and of course there are all these like funny jokes that then weirdly it kind of went off the rails and kids were using profanity to each other, like it was a very interesting funny sort of experiment. And even I would say as a testament to how architectural and formal experience was still really important to these artists and engineers, the sites in which the children were playing with these machines were specifically devised as these kind of low light tents that for whatever reason they thought this would be an interesting environment, an intimate environment.

I don't know, but it was really, you know, something where then they explored telex communication with they set up telex stations for adults on the occasion of another project in a meadow in Stockholm, in Tokyo, in New York, in L.A. And they were having people ask questions about what they thought the future would be like. So again it's this very, you know, in a way idealistic vision of how people might exchange information across a global network, but also with questions that were very much geared toward, you know, fear of what the future might bring.

Yeah, what, um, will you make a future prediction about like how these art and technology communities can work together? Because I agree with you that both of them seem kind of in the same way like accessible and completely inaccessible if you're not like part of the club or whatever. What's your future prediction on their relationship? Well, they're both highly specialized, and that's part of why I think you see this isolation. And that's precisely those were precisely the terms that EA T was using back in the 60s as well. How can we bring these fields together that are developing in isolation in a dangerous, potentially dangerous way?

But again, I think part of it is on the one hand, art actually has a track record of creating public institutions or that there are public institutions that have been created for viewing and experiencing art. Theoretically, one wishes they were more, even more public or more accessible, but they're there. And I think the same thing I would hope might be created or really be augmented for technology, which is to say really creating a public institution or a public sphere for technological knowledge and experience in the same way that a museum is in an ideal scenario a civic institution that's really for an audience of anyone who wants to go. In reality, of course, we know that's not always the case, but you know, that's the aim.

And I guess I would say that the effort to make a public institution has to exist because everyone thought the internet was going to be that, you know, democratizing final utopia. And instead we've seen the flip side of that, which is the development of ever specialized, ever atomized, ever more esoteric and inward-looking conversations, or even if you'd call it a conversation, but just nodes. So how do we start to really invert that and instill a sense of what a public sphere could be for both art and technology, and only then, I think with those, I think domains really be able to talk to each other?

Mmm, you had to take down your paywall. I agree. If someone would pay me, I would take down the pay—you pay us all to make this great content, I would definitely take a great with you. You know, it's the, you know, that's the conundrum of yeah, of creating content today, and I would say that it is, you know, again, the conundrum of copyright, copyleft, all of these things, which is I firmly believe that information wants to be free, to quote another, you know, utopian guy, but right now it's—the information, there wouldn't be any information in many ways if the people weren't there who could have a livelihood, and that's the tough sort of paradox of our situation now.

Then, ya know, yes, I get it. My only, my last question—you have any more questions? I might, I'll see what you… okay, yeah, well I always liked it, you know, recommended reading. I gave that to you as like a pre-question so I didn't want to waste it. Well, one book that is, I think, you know, a very great and general sort of argument about some of the historical shifts we've been talking about from the 1960s to the present is a book by Fred Turner called From Counterculture to Cyber Culture, and he really traces the transformation of the ideals of the counterculture, which were to, you know, fight the system, bring it down, into the system of Silicon Valley and how those aspirations and even styles really got incorporated into, you know, the most successful sort of wing of capitalism today. I think that's a really strong book for anyone who wants to understand some of these dynamics.

Another book I'll say is more esoteric, but again I think it's good to just plug this because that's part of my own perverse desire to do this, but the book by this art historian named Maria Gough, and it's called The Artist as Producer, and that's actually about Russian revolutionary art. And it's about a moment in time when in one of the instances that it covers is what's called productivism, and it's when artists as part of wanting to create a new society—which, you know, again failed for all different kinds of reasons—but they wanted to, and they successfully actually went into infiltrated the factory, the laboratory.

They basically became organizers. So they were artists devising new ways of organizing labor and sort of subverting the whole conventional wisdom about Fordist, you know, assembly line production. And so they, it became a social experiment and a technological one and an organizational one, and the artists were literally driving that. So again, it's a weird crazy moment in history, but I think it's also really today, it's absolutely applicable, and I think it's, you know, part of what this is is a history of things that that people thought of but never came to pass.

And I think, you know, in our culture, we're often taught if it wasn't successful then you shouldn't pay attention to it, but actually, I think the opposite is true because then you'll never know what still might be possible in the future. And so you have to explore all of these basically paths not taken, and this was one of them, which I happen to find, you know, really, really fascinating. I would also put in a plug for reading, trying to read, you know, pay for going to see art which still exists IRL.

And well that's why you're here, we should plug in what, seriously plug the show and… oh sorry, yes, well there are a number of really interesting shows on right now. There's a show at CCA WADIS here in San Francisco that's exploring art and technology even. Well, there's a lot of shows, you know, that are going up in the near future. One show at the Museum of Modern on New York was the Rauschenberg exhibition and that covered some of this material.

I would also put in a plea—or not a plea, but just I think it would be exciting for people to try and read art criticism as well, writing about art now. And as I said, I think the best art criticism can really speak to multiple audiences and that people from really different backgrounds or people who aren't specialists can take something away from good writing about art; someone else might take something else away from it. But at its best it can offer that.

And where would you start? Well, with Art Forum, I strive to, you know, we strive to create the best art criticism. Is there like—okay, so do you know who Gaétan Alizé is? A guy who knows all these profiles? Yeah, is there like, you know, someone who could go into the past like just pick a writer, I was like, oh man, this is like iconic, start here? Oh yeah, definitely! I would say Clement Greenberg. He was wrong on a lot about a lot of things, but a he's an amazing writer, and b reading that criticism will tell you a lot about the entire edifice of what art is today.

All the battles that were being fought, the kinds of art that were being made that basically are still the kind of, let's say, foundation against which artists are responding in some degree or trying to, you know, obviously push beyond still. The other thing is he was often writing for journals, even newspapers, and it's very clear and very, it's very much a polemic; it's very much an argument. And that was from a time when the stakes seemed really high in a way that almost seems ridiculous or impossible today. At the time, critics in the 50s and then in the 60s were battling it out. And as one critic put it, they were literally fighting for the soul of Western civilization.

So you, you then you get a sense of what people held, what they were holding art accountable for, and culture accountable for, and I think that's really important.