Sensing the Future

In 1966, Billy Kluver and Fred Waldhauer, engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, teamed up with artists Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman to form a nonprofit organization, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.). E.A.T.'s debut event, 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, integrated art, theater, and groundbreaking technology in a series of performances at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan. Its second major event, the 1970 Pepsi Pavilion in Osaka, Japan, presented a complex, multisensory environment for the first world exposition held in Asia. At these events, and in the hundreds of collaborations E.A.T. facilitated in between, its members-including John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and David Tudor-imagined innovative ways for art and science to intersect and enrich society. Sensing the Future tells the story of how this unique organization brought artists and engineers together to pioneer technology-based artworks and performances. Through the examination of films, photographs, diagrams, and ephemera from the archives of the Getty Research Institute, this volume provides a new perspective on multimedia art in the 1960s and 70s and highlights the ways E.A.T. pushed the role of the artist beyond the traditional art world.


EXHIBITION
J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center
September 10, 2024-February 23, 2025

Clear-eyed and clear-eared insights by scholars at the very top of their topics, and beautifully designed and illustrated with archival treasures from the Getty Research Institute, Sensing the Future is an indispensable document on Experiments in Art and Technology, and on key events of the period in art, music, dance, performance, and everything in-between.

- Douglas Kahn, author of Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts


This book presents multifaceted scholarly investigations of an organization that was committed to collaborations among artists, engineers, and scientists, but it was also an organization that continued to reinvent itself as it seized new opportunities to change society and the future. - Julie Martin

Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology explores a
largely ignored conceptual and material transformation of the arts in the
1960s. Framed by nine performances at the New York Armory in October 1966 and
the Pepsi Pavilion at Osaka's Expo '70, it focuses on the imaginative
collaborations of engineers, especially Bell Labs's visionary Billy Kluever,
with artists, composers, and dancers-among them Tinguely and Rauschenberg, Cage
and Tudor, Hay and Rainer. Through the examination of works that grew out of
technological innovations and engaged the senses, editors Nancy Perloff and
Michelle Kuo conclude that these experiences suggested the "future of modern
society" as "contingent, shifting, and open-ended." - Jann Pasler,
Distinguished Professor, University of California, San Diego