Recording Artists: Experiments in Art and Technology
Artists and engineers explore the creative potential of new technologies in this season of Recording Artists
Meeting at Rauschenberg's loft at 809 Broadway, with Bill Hartig demonstrating a standard infrared filter superimposed on video camera to Billy Kluver, Larry Heilos, Robert Rauschenberg, and Harold Hodges, ca. 1966. Getty Research Institute (940003)
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Getty’s award-winning podcast Recording Artists, featuring archival materials from the Getty Research Institute’s collection, is back for a third season.
In season three of Recording Artists: Experiments in Art and Technology artist and futurist Ahmed Best examines the groundbreaking art-science organization Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). Through the stories of E.A.T.’s co-founders, artist Robert Rauschenberg and Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver, as well as artist Fujiko Nakaya, who continues to make technology-inflected artworks.
“Hosting this podcast about E.A.T. was both fascinating and inspiring,” says Ahmed Best. “It solidified the fact that E.A.T. was an organization that few have heard of, but all can be inspired by. These episodes show the power of what happens when people from two seemingly different worlds—art and science—embrace a common goal of building an optimistic future.”
The season begins with Robert Rauschenberg: A Very Small Club, focusing on a less discussed aspect of the artist’s career as one of the key founders of E.A.T. Alongside archival interviews with Rauschenberg, Best talks with MoMA curator and art historian Michelle Kuo and Columbia University cognitive-studies scientist Xiaodong Lin Siegler about how artists and scientists approach experimentation, failure, and perseverance in similar ways. They also discuss a watershed 1966 event, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering.
In episode two, Billy Klüver: Better Than Another Golf Course, we get to know Klüver’s role as a kind of translator and middleman between artists and engineers, and hear about E.A.T.’s partnership with PepsiCo at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka, Japan. Archival lectures by Klüver and commentary from Stanford communications professor Fred Turner and composer and musician Evan Ziporyn, who runs the Center for Art, Science and Technology at MIT, help tell this story.
Ending the season, Fujiko Nakaya: The Most Beautiful Way traces the development of Nakaya’s iconic fog sculpture and explores what it can teach us about environmental and social justice. We also investigate E.A.T.’s relevance and legacy, from the 1960s to Silicon Valley. Archival interviews with Nakaya and commentary from art historian and Pratt Institute professor Eva Díaz and contemporary artist Tomás Saraceno round out the episode.
Recording Artists: Experiments in Art and Technology complements the GRI’s PST exhibition Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technolgy (E.A.T.) on view September 10, 2024 through February 23, 2025.
Listen and subscribe to Recording Artists: Experiments in Art and Technology. Learn more about the Getty Research Institute’s archives and check out additional Getty podcasts and past Recording Artists seasons.