How artists and technology collaborated in the genesis of Multimedia
By Colin Roeke
Exploding Machines
In the early sixties many artists found the need to work with new forms of technology, that were starting to emerge, as a new medium. This may have been the first time conceived that art could be blended into technology. The problem was they were snubbed at the chance to work with these new technologies and not provided access to the technical and industrial communities. There was a vast gap between art and engineering.
Bill Kluver Ph.D., an electrical engineer, was working as a scientist on laser systems in the Communications Science Division at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, when he decided to open the door for the artists, as he was an art enthusiast himself. He began to collaborate with the artists in what was the start of the Art and Technology Movement.
His first project began in New York 1960, when Jean Tinguely asked if he would help him build a machine that would destroy itself. With all the resources he needed from Bell Telephone, they built this enormous kinetic sculpture consisting of junkyard rejects. It had sophisticated timing and triggering devices for different ways for it to break apart. With smoke, fire, chemical stinks, flying metal fragments and paint bombs it self-destructed in 27 minutes. Kluver described it as "in one glorious act of mechanical suicide." This new moving art piece was called Homage to New York and was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in front of an invited crowd from the Upper East Side. This inspired artists to imagine the possibilities of art and technology all over the world. ItŐs hard to believe that an exploding machine could have been the root of Multimedia.
Artist Robert Rauschenberg was also a catalyst in the movement, as his imagination was innovative to the merge as well. He asked Kluver to team up with him on some ideas he had for a project. He wanted to create an interactive environment, where lights, sound, smell, and temperature would change as you went through it, but the technology available in the early sixties didnŐt permit it. This was a temporary obstacle.
Five years later and a lot of hard work and development Kluver and Rauschenburg devised Oracle. Oracle consisted of five separate movable parts made from old scrap machinery. In each of four of them a working AM radio was concealed, while the fifth contained a radio scanner and a primitive transmitter. It sent a different program to each of the four receivers and, creating an interactive environment collage. Oracle was Rauschenberg's first fully realized attempt to combine art and technology and is still on tour with him today.
In 1966 Kluver, Robert Rauschenburg, Robert Whitman, and Fred Waldhaur founded Experiments in Art and Technology, a non-profit service organization for artists and engineers. EAT provided artists with technical support by matching them with engineers and scientists to work together on projects with results they couldnŐt achieve alone. Projects include: "Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineer" in Imagine yourself immersed in a visually dynamic world - all you have is the clothes on your back, a linking book and the knowledge of what you are to do. You have just entered the world of the D'ni, the world of Cyan. Anyone who has ever played one of Cyan's games knows that once you have entered into their realm, there is no coming back. One critic writes: "As I pointed-and-clicked my way th1966; Utopia: Q&A, public spaces linked by telex in New York, Ahmedabab, India, Tokyo, and Stockholm, people could ask people in other countries questions about the future, in1971; Children and Communication: a pilot project that uses telephone, telex and fax equipment to have children in different parts of New York City communicate with each other, 1972. You can see how these projects may have had an influence in the evolution of the Internet.
In 1995 Kluver observed "The artists have shaped technology. They have helped make technology more human. They automatically will because they're artists. That's by definition. If they do something it automatically comes out human. There's no way you can come out and say that if art is the driving force in a technological situation that it will come out with destructive ideas. That's not possible. But what happens, of course, is that the artist widens the vision of the engineer." This logic could still be applied today as Computer Engineers and creative artists work together in coming up with conceptual ideas for most of the graphical software used today.
I think Kluver and Rauschenberg made a great contribution to Multimedia by uniting artist and engineer. The artists with the engineers opened up new opportunities for our world to expand from the ho-hum art that needed to break-free from conventional mediums. Who knows, computers may still just be used for computing and calculating instead of the amazing multi mediums it performs today.
About the writer
Colin Roeke is a first year Multimedia student at SAIT, with aspirations to have a successful career in advertising, film or graphic design. His leisure activities include scuba diving, camping, golf, fastball, and hockey.
Sources:
Artists, Engineers and Collaboration; "Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology;" 1994
http://www.artmuseum.net/#
http://www.conceptlab.com/interviews/kluver.html
photo: RUDOLPH BURKHART image taken from www.spectrum.ieee.or
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