Billy Klüver and Experiments in Art and Technology at the New York Hall of Science

In the 1960s, while working as a research scientist at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, Billy Klüver came to collaborate with artists on works of art incorporating new technology, including Jasper Johns, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage and Andy Warhol.  His first major collaboration was with the artist Jean Tinguely on Homage to New York, the machine that destroyed itself in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1960. 

In 1966, along with Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, and Fred Waldhauer, he co-founded an organization called Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a groundbreaking not-for-profit service program enabling the interaction and collaboration of artists, scientists and engineers.

The exhibition chronicles Klüver's work with individual artists in the 1960s, including the pioneering Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström, and showcases the many joint projects of Experiments in Art and Technology, as well as more recent collaborations with contemporary artists. A combination of personal memories and historical facts, the exhibition creates a visual memoir of E.A.T.'s efforts to promote creative synergies between artists and engineers and to enable these groups to play a more active role in different areas of society.

The Story of E.A.T.
Experiments in Art and Technology 1960-2002
The New York Hall of Science
47-01 111th Street, Queens, New York
May 23 - September 4, 2005

For tickets, directions and venue information: www.nyhallsci.org

Photo: Billy Klüver at work on the technical elements in Robert Rauschenberg's sound sculpture, Oracle, 1965.  Courtesy of Experiments in Art and Technology