#41 - Experiments in Art and Technology with Artforum Editor Michelle Kuo

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's guests are Michelle Kuo, Editor-in-Chief of Artforum, and Kat Mañalac, a partner of YC. Michelle came in to chat with us about art and technology, and in particular, a group called Experiments in Art and Technology. As always, if you want to read the transcript or watch the video, those are both at blog.ycombinator.com.
All right, here we go.

**Michelle Kuo** (0:22)
So I'll just start by saying Experiments in Art and Technology was a group that was founded in 1966 by the artist Robert Rauschenberg, by an engineer named Billy Kluver, who was a research scientist at Bell Labs.
At that time, literally the heyday or basically it was the heyday of Bell Labs, which was the ground zero for sort of everything as we know it. None of what we're doing right now would be possible without the invention of the transistor, for example. All of these breakthrough inventions happened at Bell Labs, and it was really the center of the telecommunications revolution. So this engineer at Bell gets together with these artists, some of whom are really prominent at the time.
And they've sort of met each other through some just really almost chanced social circles, but also through some art world friends in common.
And Jasper Johns wanted a neon light in the shape of a letter, the letter R, for one of his paintings. And he didn't want a cord running from the painting to an electrical socket. So somehow he got hooked up with Kluver, this engineer from Bell, and said, can you do this? Well, it turns out it was kind of a complicated problem at the time. How do you make a battery powered neon light that's small enough to fit behind a painting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Well, he did it. So they had these various collaborations. But then Rauschenberg and Kluver, the artists and the engineers thought, why can't we bring this to everyone? Why can't every artist who's curious about making something float have access to an engineer who works on pneumatic technology? So how could you create these collaborations? And then how could you even scale them or grow them so that this becomes a mass phenomenon? So they set about trying to basically start to get the word out, to get artists and engineers together. The first real project they did, that they undertook, was probably one of the largest endeavors at the time. It involved over 40 engineers and artists, and it was this performance series that took place in New York at the Armory, which was a huge cavernous space.
And basically, to make the performance, what became the performance pieces, they paired artists, choreographers, musicians, composers, with engineers, most of them from Bell, just because that's...

**Kat Mañalac** (3:19)
What was that process of pairing them like?

**Michelle Kuo** (3:21)
Well, it was very tumultuous. So they had meetings. And again, it was very ad hoc. In other words, it was really a word of mouth thing. So Kluver would bring in friends from Bell, Rauschenberg, and Robert Whitman, another artist, would bring in friends from their circle. This happened to include John Cage, David Tudor, Yvonne Rayner, really people that would become extremely well known afterward, but were already prominent at the time. So they had freewheeling meetings. They actually held them at a high school in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, which was near the Kluver's house. They would go up. There were people who lived sort of more upstate, so they would go there. And they were just really trying to literally brainstorm, to bounce ideas off one another. And of course, the artists wanted things like, I want a missile that floats.
I want a light bulb that will explode. I want walkie talkies. I want remote control. I want sound that will respond to the viewer as they're walking through space in real time. And like any tech person knows, non-tech people think technology can do everything all at once already. So they were really just pie in the sky. And I think the engineers were really shocked, but also really enthusiastic because they hadn't had experiences like that in large measure before. So this really created a lot of excitement. It created a lot of tension. There were a lot of fights, a lot of conflict as well.
Just a lot of pressure because in the end, I think they signed up for creating a very, let's say, ambitious set of performances on a large scale in New York.
And at the end of the day, very little was tested or tried out.
And there were long delays, nearly 10,000 visitors over the course of these essentially 20 nights.