Block 1 of The Story of E.A.T. (pp.1-30) (Q24635)

THE STORY OF E.A.T.  
 EXPERIMENTS IN ART AND TECHNOLOGY 1960 – 2001  
 BY  
 BILLY KLÜVER  
 INTRODUCTION 
 I was born in Monaco and grew up in Sweden. After graduating from the Royal  Technical University in Stockholm, I came to the US, received a PhD in Electrical  Engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, and joined the Communications  Research Department at Bell Laboratories in 1958 doing theoretical and experimental  work on free electron beams and lasers. As a student in Sweden, I had been interested in  film, and I soon began to meet artists and filmmakers in New York.  I was concerned about the social implications of science and technology, and I came to  believe that a meeting of art and science could only take place on a practical, physical  level.  
 I began to work with artists in New York in the early 1960s on works that used sound,  light, movement and new technical materials. I developed the idea that one-to-one  collaborations between an artist and an engineer or scientist could satisfy the artists’  desire to work with the new technology and produce works of art that could not be  realized any other way. And the collaboration could also work both ways. Artists'  projects could stimulate the engineer in new ways of looking at technology and influence  technical development in the future.  
 These social concerns and the importance of providing the artist with access to new  technology led artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, and engineer Fred  Waldhauer and myself to found Experiments in Art and Technology, a not-for-profit  
 service organization whose goal was to promote collaborations between artists, engineers  and scientists.  
   The Story of E.A.T.,  covers this history from my first collaboration with Jean  Tinguely on Homage to New York in 1960, through 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering  in 1966 and the founding of Experiments in Art and Technology the same year, and then  presents E.A.T.’s activities and projects from 1966 to the present. It chronicles the birth  and early years of what has come to be called the art and technology movement, which  has grown and developed in many directions, involving thousands of artists, engineers  and scientists in all fields, producing works that reach and inspire an ever-growing  audience.  
 Billy Klüver