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Tânia Moreira
1 year, 8 months ago
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«(...) (In 1970) one of the world’s most extravagant and expensive multimedia installations officially opened, and the attendees turned to congratulate one another on this collaborative melding of art, science, and technology. Underwritten by PepsiCo, the installation was the beverage company’s signal contribution to Expo ’70, the first international exposition to be held in an Asian country.
(...) Led by Johan Wilhelm “Billy” Klüver, an electrical engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories, E.A.T. at its peak had more than a thousand members and enjoyed generous support from corporate donors and philanthropic foundations. Starting in the mid-1960s and continuing into the ’70s, the group mounted performances and installations that blended electronics, lasers, telecommunications, and computers with artistic interpretations of current events, the natural world, and the human condition.
E.A.T. members saw their activities transcending the making of art. Artist–engineer collaborations were understood as creative experiments that would benefit not just the art world but also industry and academia. For engineers, subject to vociferous attacks about their complicity in the arms race, the Vietnam War, environmental destruction, and other global ills, the art-and-technology movement presented an opportunity to humanize their work.
(...) And that may be the legacy of the pavilion and of E.A.T.: They revealed that engineers and artists could forge a common creative culture. Far from being worlds apart, their communities share values of entrepreneurship, adaptability, and above all, the collective desire to make something beautiful.»
Read the full article, written by W. Patrick McCray, in Spectrum: https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/when-artists-engineers-and-pepsico-collaborated-then-clashed-at-the-1970-worlds-fair
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