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Peter Bauman: Hello everyone, and welcome to this Le Random discussion following the recent opening of Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology, E.A.T., at the Getty Center in LA, part of the recently opened PST ART. I'm your host, Peter Bauman, or Monk Antony, the editor in chief at Le Random. We are so fortunate today because joining us is the curator of the show, Dr. Nancy Perloff from the Getty Research Institute, or GRI. Dr. Perloff is curator of modern and contemporary collections at the GRI.
We discuss a fascinating period, really similar to today, where the rapid pace of technological change is outpacing artists' and just society's ability to come to terms with them and wrap their heads around them. So Perloff's show looks at the hugely influential, in digital art history but just in art history, Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., founded in 1966 by the Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver and then artists that include some of the biggest names of the time, like Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Yvonne Rainer. E.A.T. promoted this collaboration between artists and engineers. They were aiming to merge art, technology and science.
They put on two in particular landmark exhibitions. The first event in 1966 was Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York, which showcased collaborations between artists and engineers that included Cage and Rainer but also Lucinda Childs and other artists like Alex and Deborah Hay. And then in 1970, at the Pepsi Pavilion at the Osaka World Expo, E.A.T. continued exploring this fusion of the digitally immersive, multisensory and participative experiences. So this group was hugely ahead of its time and is still just today being recognized. But hopefully this show at PST will be a great opportunity […] And I think that PST ART will help change that. So let's get started.
Nancy Perloff: The Getty Center where I work is technically in a neighborhood called Brentwood. And I work at the Getty Research Institute, which is the library and the archive. And we have an exhibition space. It's not huge, but it's a good size space. And the E.A.T. exhibition that I'm working on right now will be installed in the exhibition galleries. There are two of them at the GRI, as we call it, the Getty Research Institute.
Peter Bauman: I know that the museum itself maybe doesn't always focus on more contemporary or digital work, but I know that the GRI certainly does. And this is indicative. That's what is so exciting about PST this year and the show.
Maybe we can start with some of the curatorial challenges. One of the difficulties, even back then when they were doing the show, there were all these technical challenges, especially for Nine Evenings. So I'm just wondering, the group exhibited such a wide range of digital materiality, and kind of now ancient digital materiality, and also non-material performances. So I'm wondering, what were some of the challenges there?
Nancy Perloff: Yeah. So the challenges actually have not had to do so much with materiality and non-material performance-based work. Most of the work is material in the sense that, whether it be a dance performance where you have costumes, you have props, you have technologies that are being experimented with in any given dance piece, technologies that might affect the way movement becomes sound, just as one example. And I can talk more about that one.
So I would say largely materiality, sound as material, sound as substance with Cage, John Cage, in 1966. He's working with telephones that are connected to lines outside of the Armory Center, which is where they did their big performance in 1966. He's got turtle sounds coming from Terry Riley's aquarium that's based in lower Manhattan. He's got sounds coming from a restaurant they all loved going to. He's got sounds from Merce Cunningham's studio. So that's very material, I think, in many ways.
I think if I were to say anything about non-material, I would say that what was so exceptional, or one thing that was so exceptional about E.A.T., was this idea of a network. And that's a non-material idea. And that's something that we try to discuss in our exhibition. So we show the sound materiality, the dancers, the play with movement and sound, all these various material qualities. But we also try to show how E.A.T. built up a network.
Let's just say several thousand artists and engineers began to join a network. And that network enabled them to write to people like Billy Klüver, the senior engineer and founder of E.A.T., and ask him, I want to use remote control. How do I go about doing it? This is my piece. This is what it consists of. And we're working with a completely analog world at this point. These are typed or handwritten statements that are sent to the head engineers of E.A.T. and are brought into a kind of network of help, of extending help to both engineers and artists who aspire to working more fully with new forms of technology but don't know how.
So on the one hand, you have this very, very specific treatment of material objects. And on the other hand, Robert Rauschenberg does his Open Score, it's called. You've got tennis rackets. You've got people playing tennis on a tennis court in the armory. And every time they hit the ball, there's a sound that goes off because of certain technological implementations. And a light goes off. So you have that kind of material example just in the one Rauschenberg piece. But you also do have this belief in a network, that artists and engineers collaborations will happen more successfully and on a much wider scale if we create networks.
Peter Bauman: So in terms of the presentation, you would maybe, just for example, have one of those tennis rackets out for display, with an explanation of how it was used and maybe a sound of what it sounded like back then in a video. Is that the kind of thing?
Nancy Perloff: Precisely. You hit the nail on the head. Yes, precisely. We have the two rackets, the two tennis rackets that were used. They have been preserved at the Langlois Foundation, which is in Montreal, I believe, and we will have them. It's kind of odd when you think it's a tennis racket, but we will have them in cases on the wall. And nearby you'll be able to watch a segment from Rauschenberg's Open Score, and you'll hear what the sounds were and you'll also see how the lights went off.
We are also showing a circuit diagram. These are challenging, but we want people to understand the relationship between the tennis racket, his racket, his technique, hitting the ball, a transmitter being lodged in the handle of the tennis racket, contact microphones on the top of the tennis racket, amplifying the sound when you hit the ball. We want people to understand that, and so we are including a circuit diagram that shows the movement of electronics from the contact mic, the transmitter in the handle, and out of the space.
Peter Bauman: That's interesting. So the schematics of the work as well.
Nancy Perloff: Exactly.
Peter Bauman: That's really interesting, what you said about networks too, and how in the 70s a lot of those, in the 80s too, a lot of those networks kind of went away. Well, 70s and 80s. And then they kind of came back a bit in the 90s. They kind of came back a bit with net art. But yeah, those have always been really important in this history of digital art.
And what are some of the successes that you're trying to highlight? You said that it aims to deepen our understanding of multimedia in the 60s and 70s. Why choose E.A.T. to make that connection?
Nancy Perloff: We began with a focus on E.A.T. and then pursued the various ways in which E.A.T. furthered experimentation between art, technology, sometimes sound, light. It wasn't really a matter of starting with multimedia art. It was more a matter of trying to make sense out of this nonprofit organization and trying to make sense about what's going on in the world and why it happened when it did. Why 1966? What was going on in New York City, for that matter? And then they moved out to Japan. That made it a fruitful time to explore these new kinds of collaborations.
And it's interesting if you look historically that art and engineering, or let's say art, engineering or technology, were having their experiments in the early 60s. I mean, you can date Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg back to the early 60s, where they were experimenting with ways of using speakers, ways of using photocells. Transistors had already come in, in the late 40s, so they were experimenting a bit with transistors. The early 60s was already very much active in this kind of look.
And multimedia is such a challenging word. In a way it's kind of overused, so people aren't quite sure how precisely it's being defined. Certainly we use that term in our blurbs and in our descriptions of E.A.T. But I guess I would even, I mean, multimedia is right. But if one wants to be maybe more specific, I would say it's this idea of interdisciplinarity. Michelle Kuo, who's a scholar of E.A.T. and did her dissertation on E.A.T. and contributed to our catalog, she has written a lot about this idea of interdisciplinarity. So the idea that you're really bringing together, you're crossing over disciplines. You're taking music. You're taking dance. You're taking theater. And you're bringing them all together so that there isn't even really a distinction anymore. They're all operating kind of fluidly one to another.
Peter Bauman: When you talk about interdisciplinary art too, it reminds me of postmodernism as well. And in that sense, it seems like something that E.A.T. was quite prescient about and anticipated in that interdisciplinary sense, but also in the sense of pushing the role of the artist beyond the traditional art institutions and exploring opportunities for art within the community and cross-cultural communication, like what they did with the pavilion in Osaka. So again, with these initiatives, they were quite ahead of their time. And I'm wondering if you can talk about E.A.T.'s impact on community and cross-cultural communication in particular, or their ability to anticipate some of those elements of postmodernism.
Nancy Perloff: That's a really interesting question. Good question. I think that the idea of community was really important. And this relates to the interdisciplinary. Because what you see here, if you study Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, 1966, first of all, just quickly addressing your point about venues and about different places, institutions in which E.A.T. was active, they created kind of their own spaces. I mean, the 69th Regiment Armory Center in Manhattan, of course, they didn't create it. It existed with Duchamp. It was there in 1913. But they appropriated it. They took it over and turned it into something it had never been. They took advantage of the space, this enormous space where you can install a tennis court, where you can install telephones that link outside, that are assembled and installed on a big table with other found objects.
So Bandoneon ! (a combine), David Tudor's piece called Bandoneon ! (a combine), took advantage of that space to put and install loudspeakers that moved and that had sometimes lights attached. So the venues are very important.
And then you look at who's actually working, and how. And the community aspect of that is that the artists, dancers, composers were generally the ones who initiated the project. So Rauschenberg, to go with Open Score. Or Lucinda Childs, to talk about her dance piece called Vehicle. And I've mentioned this already, the idea of transforming movement into sound, which was her goal. So she approached the engineers who were recommended to her. And this then became really a community effort. The engineer then would say, okay, we're going to use a Doppler sonar machine. And that's going to be our way of translating movement into sound. You will have these buckets, Lucinda. And the buckets will contain lights inside of them. And you will choreograph those buckets so that they intersect with a sound beam that's coming out of the Doppler sonar machine.
So you have the artist, dancer, composer initiating these projects with an engineer who's been recommended to them. And then it becomes really a very close collaboration. But usually it was several engineers, because it was a complicated request. And maybe one engineer specialized in one aspect and another in another aspect.
But if you just imagine the Nine Evenings presentation, there were ten performances. So for every Lucinda Childs requesting something that became the Doppler sonar machine, there was Deborah Hay, another dancer, requesting remote controlled platforms. How do we make those? How do we make them work? How do we operate them? How do they not hit a dancer? And how does the dancer know when to get on top of the platform? So she worked with probably more than one engineer.
And it built up, performance by performance. You ended up with this community. Another way in which it was a community is they all drew upon an electronic theater system that allowed them to control the sound in the armory. This was really a way of guiding and making possible the various goals that the artists had for projection, for sound, for light, whatever it might have been. So it did really become a community, and they're working hard against a deadline when they're going to present the whole thing.
And then they were a community in the ways that it didn't work. There were failures. Some performances worked better than others. There was also an audience community. There was a huge turnout. Something like 10,000 people showed up at the armory to see Nine Evenings. So there was the audience community as well. Everything was on site and everyone was there witnessing it.
Peter Bauman: How do you think that relationship that they built, and especially that collaboration and the community between the artists and engineers, how did it contribute to shifting attitudes towards the relationship between art and technology and society at the time? What are some of maybe the lessons we can glean from E.A.T.'s approach to this interdisciplinarity?
Nancy Perloff: One thing that is really important to emphasize, and this may also relate to this postmodern notion as well, is the fact that at this time, in the 60s, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer, these are people who are related to or coming out of Judson Church, Merce Cunningham. And the aesthetic of all of this, and this, as I say, may be a connection to postmodern, which we can flesh out more, but so that none of these artists, and I say artists just kind of in quotes, none of them were only visual artists or only dancers or only composers.
I mean, Rauschenberg played an astonishing role inventing his own technologies. There's a piece by him called Oracle, which involved radio, AM and FM. And he worked with engineers, but he initiated a lot of the ideas about the technology. John Cage was not just a composer. He was also interested in visual art. He was interested in found objects, in sound as sound. So I would really emphasize, and then Lucinda Childs, she becomes a dancer who invents or initiates new forms of technology that will help her with her goals in her dance pieces.
So I think it's a very special moment where you don't just say Rauschenberg, the painter. You don't just say Lucinda Childs, the dancer. You have a situation where people are kind of working themselves across boundaries and across divisions of discipline. And that, I think, is something very special about what art and technology were doing then. I think later on, not so much postmodern. I have to kind of think through. I'm thinking more about architecture. I'm thinking more about postmodern and appropriation and some of the important things we think about when we think about postmodern, and maybe less of that kind of appropriation with E.A.T.
Also, clearly, society at this time, this is something you asked, was interested in a huge range, and critical and cultural taste was changing. If you think 66 […] go to Nine Evenings and then show up in 1970 for a completely different presentation.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting too that you saw that taste. Part of that was just the space race and the moon landing. And a lot of that Osaka aesthetic, a lot of the art and technology aesthetic, kind of became dominated with space. And even the Osaka Pavilion, I think it was designed after telecommunications, like a balloon or satellite. And so that kind of interest in that element of technology really shines through there in the 70s.
“You have a situation where people are kind of working themselves across boundaries and across divisions of discipline.” — Nancy Perloff 21:19
And when you're talking about interdisciplinary groups too, of course, right around this time is also Fluxus. And so I'm wondering, how was E.A.T. connected to Fluxus? Was there some deeper connection besides membership overlap, which there was some, Cage and Paik? Besides this kind of membership and conceptual overlap, was there any kind of deeper connection?
Nancy Perloff: Yeah, that's a really good question. On one level, it seems like Fluxus and E.A.T. had connections in the sense that they were both interested in ideas of performance. Of course, Pepsi was less a performance, but complicated. There are ways you could argue it certainly was.
The other connection, and there could be multiple more, but it is this idea of bringing together sound, visual, a kind of theatrical presentation, a kind of relationship to the audience. Although I think Fluxus was intentionally provocative and intentionally ready to provoke, to move in directions that the audience didn't expect, and to also incorporate a kind of humor.
So with Fluxus it's so tricky, because if you see stagings of Fluxus today, like restagings of work that was done in the 60s and 70s, I can always tell that the original intention was humor. Fluxus was very much about humor. And whether it was George Maciunas's top hat, or the fact that Emmett Williams was standing in front of a group, and he's got a scroll, and he's reading the scroll, and the scroll gets torn up, or something happens to it. Fluxus was not about finished […] Water Yam and be laughing at the humor of his wonderful cards, the performance cards that are kept in the box. And we wouldn't really have to see it performed. We could focus on the language.
So I think that's a really big difference between Fluxus and E.A.T. They're both multidisciplinary, yes. But I think the other emphases I've said from the Fluxus perspective, I think, are really different from E.A.T. I think E.A.T. was much more focused on either performance as a kind of final presentation, or on the sensory, the multisensory, as we've talked about, or begun to talk about, in Pepsi. I don't think of Fluxus as multisensory. It's not, to me, the first word that would come to mind.
Peter Bauman: Even what you said about how Fluxus were interested in provocation, I think using technology with art, or in art, back in the mid-60s was also sort of a big thing. Certainly a provocation, and would have been meant as a provocation.
That kind of leads me to how E.A.T. was perceived by the public in those active years. Because we do hear those numbers of 10,000 visitors and 5,000 collaborators or members at its peak. I think I've heard the number 5,000. So there is some level of success, maybe even astonishing levels of success, considering digital art's fate for the next several decades. So how the public perceived E.A.T. during those active years, and then maybe how that's evolved over time, and maybe what were some of the factors that contributed to that change?
Nancy Perloff: First of all, that's a really interesting point, that technology and art is a provocation. And it's a different kind of provocation from what Fluxus did, because I think Fluxus was deliberately unpolished. It also could be performed multiple ways. Somebody could do one performance, and then there could be a different interpretation. I think that was part of what was kind of improvisatory. And I guess with E.A.T., I think there was a sense of a goal, that this is how we want this to be.
However, the reception, and this has now become a famous part of E.A.T.'s history, both in Nine Evenings and in Pepsi, but let's start with Nine Evenings, was people were astonished by the failures, by how much didn't work. So the artists and engineers had installed themselves in the armory. They had a relatively little amount of time to get their piece ready. In some instances, like Grass Field, which was Alex Hay's piece, and Alex Hay was a dancer, they were not able to wire up the backpack and the electrodes and all the things that were supposed to animate and project his bodily sounds. Literally an hour before the performance, something like that, they finally got him wired up. I mean, it looked like the whole thing was just not going to happen.
Open Score was also a fiasco, the first performance. Fortunately, they did two performances of things, because they couldn't get the lights to go off. It just didn't work.
So there were a lot of failures and a lot of critics who kind of were, I won't say disappointed, were surprised, were even shocked that the use of technology was not as polished as it could have been. I think that was kind of in the nature of the beast. They called themselves Experiments in Art and Technology. And I think people don't give enough credit for the use of that word. They were experimenting. They'd never done any of this before. A lot of the technologies, like infrared light or infrared camera for Rauschenberg and Open Score, this was brand new. So they were experimenting.
And I think the audience didn't always see it that way. They saw it as, this is John Cage, this is Rauschenberg, this is Yvonne Rainer. These are famous artists, David Tudor. This should be fluid. This should not be falling apart or cracking or simply not functioning in the way it was supposed to. And so there was a lot of impatience and distress. And I think later on people looked back, even by the 70s, and thought, well, they actually accomplished quite a bit. And the whole notion of collaboration worked, even if the technology didn't always work.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, and I'm sure you're fully aware of this too, but still today it can be a big challenge to put on specific technical shows.
“They called themselves Experiments in Art and Technology. And I think people don't give enough credit for the use of that word. They were experimenting. They'd never done any of this before.” — Nancy Perloff 30:30
I'm also interested, related to this last question, about just how E.A.T. seemed to arise during this period where it was okay, it was accepted by sort of the mainstream or the traditional art world, to make art with computers. And Nine Evenings kind of kicked that off with 66. And 66, I mean, that was so soon after just the very first, some of the very first digital graphics produced, and then Cybernetic Serendipity, and then there's Software and The Machine, not all in chronological order. But that kind of five-year period between maybe 66 and 70 or 71, there was quite a large amount of mainstream and traditional art world acceptance that digital art would basically never experience again. Or maybe not never, but maybe hasn't since experienced the level of acceptance as it did back then. So I'm wondering, what do you think caused that period of acceptance? And do you think it was that E.A.T. was legitimized by those connections to Cage and Rauschenberg, or was it something else?
Nancy Perloff: The fact that Cage and Rauschenberg were prominent in E.A.T., I think that impresses people today. I think if I say I'm working on Experiments in Art and Technology, and they say, oh well, who? And I say, well, John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg and Yvonne Rainer and Lucinda Childs, people are immediately excited and interested. So I certainly think today the acceptance of E.A.T. and Nine Evenings comes through those artists.
And I'm just thinking of Pepsi a minute, who was also really important. Robert Breer, not such a big name, but Fujiko Nakaya has become quite a big name, and she did the fog for Pepsi.
The 60s was just such an amazing time. And you've brought up Fluxus. And then the other thing I was going to mention with Fluxus, but maybe less with E.A.T. but important, is the beginnings of conceptual art, and the fact that very much with Fluxus, Fluxus to me is conceptual art. As I was saying earlier, you and I don't really need to go see a performance of George Brecht's Water Yam. Yeah, maybe it'd be fun, but there are other ways, because it is a kind of conceptual art. Now, E.A.T. was not conceptual art, nor was Nine Evenings or Pepsi.
And well, let me first of all just backtrack a minute. When you say acceptance, do you mean acceptance of technology, or just acceptance of E.A.T., in the 60s or in the early 70s?
Peter Bauman: I guess acceptance in the sense that these institutions were even having these exhibitions in the first place, like MoMA's The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age and Information and Software. So that these major institutions were giving space to these artists and to this technology that they would pretty quickly stop giving space to for quite a while.
Nancy Perloff: I think part of the acceptance, and this actually would apply to Fluxus as well, but let's focus on E.A.T., is there was a participatory role. And by that I mean, number one, audiences who came to Nine Evenings or went to the Pepsi Pavilion, in each case, were enveloped in a whole new environment, an environment of technology, of light, of sound, of music, whatever it might be.
If you look at photographs of Rauschenberg's Open Score, or if you look at the film of Open Score, if you look at the film of the John Cage piece for Nine Evenings, you'll see that the audience has approached the tennis court, and there are actually people standing around the net. And in Cage's piece, by the second performance of Variations VII, there are people all around the tables. Some of them are sitting down. They're looking at the photocells. So I think there was a notion of participation, and that's absolutely true of Pepsi.
The point of Pepsi is what kind of multisensory experience? Fog, floats that are motorized, a 90-foot hemispherical mirror dome that gives you reflections of yourself you've never seen, sound activation through the floor. So this crucial thing about E.A.T., in my mind, is this idea of participation. And I would go so far as to argue that, particularly with Pepsi, that was kind of a first.
And in our exhibition, one of my real principal goals is I want our audience, our visitors, to understand how immersive and participatory E.A.T. really was. How did that operate? How did it work? And I think, to me, that's a really important extension of the way we understand and accept what E.A.T. was doing.
“So this crucial thing about E.A.T., in my mind, is this idea of participation. And I would go so far as to argue that, particularly with Pepsi, that was kind of a first.” — Nancy Perloff 37:22
Peter Bauman: We didn't get to talk too much about Pepsi. I'm really interested. It kind of was an indication of maybe the group's willingness to over-collaborate, in a way, by agreeing to this sort of corporate collaboration. I think some questioned their artistic integrity a bit. So I'm wondering, what's your take on that controversy, and how this has been described by author Grant Taylor in his book When the Machine Made Art as the beginning of the end for E.A.T. due to the collaboration with Pepsi? So I'm wondering, yeah, what's your take on that, and how do you see the controversy?
Nancy Perloff: Yeah. So it's very sad to read about it. Calvin Tomkins has a great essay in the book called Pavilion, which has contributions by a host of people, Barbara Rose, Lucy Lippard, Billy Klüver, etc. And Calvin Tomkins talks at length about the whole falling apart. The budget was unreasonable. I mean, E.A.T. had a budget which Pepsi said was completely unreasonable, could never be met.
I don't know if there were miscommunications or misunderstandings, because clearly E.A.T. was operating in what it thought was good faith, and it was creating the pavilion according to the way Pepsi wanted it. And if you read Tomkins, there were a lot of Pepsi representatives who were over there in Osaka experiencing what E.A.T. was doing there. The mirror, particularly, people were just blown away. I mean, there'd never been a mirror this size created. It was really mind-boggling. The sound system was mind-boggling. The fog, nobody had ever pursued anything to that extent.
So when you read about it, it seems like it happened very suddenly, that programming had been planned by E.A.T., programming inside the dome. And that the budget, whether it was the budget for the programming, I think that was a large part of it, but they tried to negotiate with Pepsi-Cola. And in a matter of what seems like hardly any time at all, they were simply told, this budget doesn't work. We can't possibly meet your demands. And you therefore need to vacate the premises.
You know, the fact that it started with a corporate collaboration, the money was the way they were able to do it, right? So there are great descriptions of how the sculptor Robert Breer, he was the one who made the floats in front of Pepsi that are so great that we hope to borrow from MoMA, he lived nearby one of the key Pepsi representatives. And this Pepsi representative was very interested in what was going on and the plans, which were already underway, for the mirror, for the fog, for all the different components. And they visited. I mean, there was a kind of collaboration, you could say, not just between artists and engineers and composers at Pepsi, but also with Pepsi. And they were able to get the money from Pepsi-Cola.
I don't really know how to place any particular blame on any party. I think the best I can understand from what I've read is big misunderstanding and a terrible fiasco at the end. So that they were not even able to stay. And other people took over the programming. And within the context of the production, there was no […] work in the 70s.
This is a really interesting project called Island Eye Island Ear. It was conceived by the pianist and composer, electronic composer, David Tudor. And in a nutshell, it was this idea, very utopian. They're going to find an island, and on this island they're going to record the sounds of the island. And they're going to incorporate those sounds into these parabolic antennae, which would then be installed throughout the island, so that you would walk around the island and you would hear sounds of the island coming out of these parabolic antennae. In addition, there would be fog by Fujiko Nakaya. In addition, there would be kites by Jackie Matisse. And Margaretha Åsberg would create mirrors, and the mirrors would reflect.
They worked on this like nothing you've ever seen. The archive, our archive, boxes, descriptions, photographs, charts, all the different components. They tried island after island after island. Every single community on those islands screamed. They didn't just say no. They said no, never, never. You are not doing this on our island. This is our island.
It never worked. It never came to fruition until today. And today, the widow of Billy Klüver, this amazing scholar of David Tudor named You, Y-O-U, You Nakai, they're recreating Island Eye Island Ear. They're using new technology. Somehow today they are successfully creating and completing what absolutely did not work from the 70s on up.
Peter Bauman: Really interesting. I mean, really, really interesting. And I learned a lot more. And I love E.A.T. And we didn't even get a chance to talk about Bell Labs. But it's such a fascinating other kind of part of the story, like other sides of the coin. So yeah, thank you so much just for nerding out and answering my ridiculous questions. And I really appreciate it.
Nancy Perloff: No, I so much appreciate your questions. They really made me think. I'm very appreciative because they were thought provoking and they were totally applicable to the different issues, I think, raised by E.A.T.
One question I haven't really been able to successfully answer is, why is E.A.T. so little known? If you talk to an art historian colleague, for example, or I talk to a musicologist, or I talk to a dance historian, and they say, what are you working on? And I say, I'm actually working on E.A.T. E-A-T? What's E-A-T? Never heard of it, never heard of Billy Klüver, Bell Labs. So glad you brought that in. I hope that can be in there somewhere. But Bell Labs was fundamental, foundational. It could never have happened without Bell Labs. So I don't know why the actual bandwidth or whatever is so short for E.A.T.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, I mean, that's what's exciting about this exhibition and the show that's bringing it to life. I was really excited when I saw that PST was highlighting E.A.T. in particular. And I know a handful of current artists who are quite inspired by it. But I think other than that, it's quite obscure, I suppose, even to people who maybe are quite knowledgeable about art history or even digital art history.
But like you were talking about at the very beginning, what are these groups that were using all these new technologies that were arising, and using them and creating these new technologies […] the way that the world is now is really changing in a lot of creative ways. And maybe just because they were so new, that's why they got that initial acceptance. But yeah, it seems like there was a steep decline, kind of like what happened in Osaka.
Yeah, it was really great to meet you, Doctor.
Nancy Perloff: Yes, likewise. Thank you so much for the helpful questions.
Peter Bauman: Yeah, thanks. And thank you for your time.
Nancy Perloff: Sure. My pleasure. Bye bye.
Peter Bauman: Bye. Take care.
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