Art-and-Technology: Recent Efforts in Materials and Media
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This brief essay can render nothing more than some thoughts, ideas, and good examples in a field which already has grown complex and multifaceted: Many components of material, industrial, and systems development have contributed to the dramatic emergence of nontraditional art forms in our century (the traditional ones being painting, sculpture, graphics, etc.). However, a simplifying but helpful division into generations may categorize, first, a mechanical generation (e.g., Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder), then an electric generation (exemplified by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy,4 Thomas Wilfred,5 and successors of "kinetic art"6) and, more recently, a multimedia generation, integrating electronic media and tools, for example, into "combines" (originally Robert Rauschenberg's term) by expressive artists like Stan VanDerBeek (light projections, video, computer graphics) and Nam June Paik8 (altered TV, video sculpture, broadcast art), plus "virtual reality multimedia." Currently, electronic media are popular, industry-supported, and have been introduced in many art schools and new artand-technology institutes.9 Whereas art-and-technology had often been misunderstood to be united only in curatorial service in museums and in archeology up to the fifties, as of 1966 Billy Kliiver10 of Bell Laboratories and the multifaceted painter and performer Robert Rauschenberg,11 formed a national network for methodical collaborations between engineers, scientists, industry, and artists called EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology). It has "chapters" in many U.S. cultural centers, such as New York City, Boston, and San Francisco. In 1967, Gyorgy Kepes,12 painter/photographer, head of the light department at the New Bauhaus in
Chicago (1938-44), and MIT professor since 1946 formed the MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies.13 CAVS is a research institute dedicated to collaboration and search not only toward art-science combinations, but also to asking the big question where and how artistic and intellectual/academic efforts are "interdependant" within a human, global, and a sociopolitical environment. Kepes' foundation was enforced by artist fellows invited for collaboration at CAVS (Otto Piene, Vassilakis Takis,14 Harold Tovish,15 Jack Burnham, Stan VanDerBeek, Wen Ying Tsai et al.16), and also by the intellectual and collaborative support of such MIT scientists as Harold Edgerton,17 Philip Morrison,18 and Cyril Smith,19 to name just a few. Takis' work with MIT mechanical engineering professor Ain Sonin led to the artist's "Homage a Marcel Duchamp," a project for a tidal perpetuum mobile. "Doc" Edgerton's work with stroboscopic phenomena directly influenced Tsai's "Tsaibernetic," vibrating, light-sound, viewer-responsive sculptures and later Chilean fellow Alejandro Sina's highfrequency-discharge, suspended, and rotating neon sculptures (Figure 4). Edgerton also worked with me on my strobed-at-nighttime "Light Satellite" (1972), a suspended optical glass sculpture in the Munich Olympic area. Astrophysicist Philip Morrison ("ID, 2D, 3D -Four"
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