Network Forums and Trading Zones:

How Two Experimental, Collaborative Art and Engineering Subcultures Spawned the “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” and E.A.T.

By Robin Oppenheimer

“Science and art are inevitably separated. Any attempt to ‘bring the two together’ should be looked at with suspicion. Science deals with reality in rational, single-valued terms which are constantly related to a language that is uniquely understood. Art deals with reality in irrational and poetic terms. Art allows for discontinuities that science cannot tolerate. History must have provided us with the separateness of art and science for a reason.” [1]

In 1960, when Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver helped his friend, artist Jean Tinguely, create a self-destructing machine called “Homage to New York” in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, Robert Rauschenberg was there and later asked for his help. That began a life-long friendship and initiated the then-unheard-of concept of artists and engineers collaborating to make art together using new communications technologies being developed by places like Bell Telephone Laboratories. It also symbolized a larger technocultural convergence of the worlds of research-based applied sciences and experimental arts taking place in the early 1960s exemplified by the landmark 1966 “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” event and subsequent formation of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).

The “9 Evenings” performances represent the world’s first large-scale collaboration between artists and engineers and serve as historical case studies of the origins of techno-centric artistic collaborations that have since multiplied exponentially. They took place on October 13-23, 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City, as a series of ten performances that were presented over a nine-day festival to an audience totaling more than ten thousand people. The key artists involved in the “9 Evenings” event included John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Öyvind Fahlström, Alex Hay, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, David Tudor and Robert Whitman. Their ten-month collaboration with 30 engineers and scientists from Bell Labs was focused on the goal of adapting and developing new communications technologies to be used as integral components of the artists’ performances.

I am interested in exploring how the “two cultures” as initially defined by C.P. Snow in the late 1950s, which are represented by the Bell Labs engineers and American avant-garde artists, were able to communicate and collaborate. Can we discover any common ground between them, and begin to describe and define the elements of their collaborative processes to better understand how the artists and engineers were actually able to communicate and work together to create and present their performances?

Postwar Revolutions in Art and Science

It is well known that the center of the international art world in the early 1960s was located in Greenwich Village, a maze-like neighborhood in New York City where the new American avant-garde emerged out of the alienated Beat Generation of the Cold War era. It included now-famous artists such as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Nam June Paik, and Allan Kaprow, among many others, who were creating and defining the new art movements of the day, including Pop Art, Happenings, Performance Art, New Music, Fluxus, and Postmodern Dance. Through their revolutionary approaches to thinking about and making art, they instigated a breaking down of boundaries between different arts disciplines, where musicians were performing with dancers, painters were making theatre, and media recording technologies such as film and audiotape were becoming more accessible and incorporated into their creative processes.

What isn’t as well known is that World War II had triggered a transformational approach to technology-based scientific research that encouraged interdisciplinary collaboration and experimentation among the worlds of the natural and social sciences that was equally revolutionary. Faced with the urgency of saving the Free World, scientists and academics had come together during the war to develop technologies ranging from radar to the atomic bomb. The development of those wartime technologies also included a new worldview grounded in a theory of connected systems of people, technology, and information based on Norbert Wiener’s concept of cybernetics.

Based largely on the 1963 Greenwich Village art world research of dance historian Sally Banes and the recent Stewart Brand book called “From Counterculture to Cyberculture” by communications historian Fred Turner, I propose that both the “9 Evenings” artists and engineers shared an emerging set of values and experimental, collaborative work practices that have since proliferated. Their shared values included an open, egalitarian approach to experimentation; discipline boundary-crossing and collaboration; respect for technology as a tool; concern about proliferating inhumane uses of technology; and a project-based cybernetics approach to creative experimental production. These shared values emerged out of their two very different worlds, and I believe they were a unifying factor that enabled the “9 Evenings” artists and engineers to bond early through their mutual concern for the future of a world quickly being controlled by technology, and their enthusiasm for experimentation and creative collaboration. How, then, did these two different groups proceed to collaborate and communicate from their distinctive “two cultures” defined initially by C. P. Snow as Science, with its empirical search for absolute truths; and The Humanities, which were more subjective and focused on emotions and speculations? [2]

Two Subcultures Meet

“…Collaboration enables the artist to obtain practical knowledge otherwise unavailable. He becomes familiar with his material. He discovers precisely what an audio circuit or a computer can do, when taken out of its original functional context. More often than not, he exploits what he knows far beyond the initial collaboration. He liberates the machine in spite of himself. He also liberates the engineer, to the point where the split between artist, engineer, and even machine ultimately disappears.” [3]

Through Rauschenberg, Billy Kluver was introduced to some of Greenwich Village’s multi-talented artists, musicians, and dancers that included Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and the collective known as the Judson Dance Theater. These artists were a subset of a larger eclectic community of musicians, dancers, artists, and poets who lived in Greenwich Village, and who, as described by Banes in her book, had, in such close working and living proximity, already developed a strong work ethic of democratic collaboration and collective, experimental art making.[4]

Banes contends that the bohemian artists, including those who participated in the “9 Evenings,” were inventing collaborative processes based on cooperative ventures of shared power and authority. Their core beliefs, rooted in democratic equality and freedom, emphasized the qualities of no hierarchies and focused on power that comes from expertise and ability rather than role or title. These were artists who were open to experimentation and new ideas, and who routinely came together socially and professionally to share and create something bigger and more interesting than could be done alone in the studio. Some of them had attended Black Mountain College, which had emphasized the underlying connections among education, creativity, and daily life. They understood Marshall McLuhan’s recently-published media theories that discussed the role media plays in shaping our consciousness and creating a global village. John Cage, a composer and son of an engineer, connected the worldview of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics theories to Zen-like artmaking practices involving ego-less chance processes that influenced a generation of artists. The artists were also starting to use media technologies such as radio and film as tools for their creative expression in multi-media dance performances and happenings. So when Billy Klüver came into their midst, with his interest in bringing artists and engineers together to create new, more humane uses for technologies, the artists were more than ready.

The engineers were also ready. The AT&T research think tank Bell Telephone Laboratories was founded in 1925 in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Not far from New York City, an interdisciplinary group of scientists and engineers were encouraged to transform technologies developed for World War II defense purposes into new technologies for society. World War II radar research had attracted scientists from universities all over the country to Bell Labs to work in an open environment of cross-disciplinary experimentation. Spurred in part by the Cold War nuclear threat and the space race to the moon, this research focus was maintained throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s. Claude Shannon, a student of Norbert Wiener, invented the mathematical Information Theory while working at Bell Labs in 1948. Thanks in part to the celebrated Macy’s Conferences and Wiener’s popular book The Human Use of Human Beings, cybernetics theory was widely adopted by engineers and others in the social and applied sciences as a way of seeing the world as networks of information that circulate between human and machine systems.

As a result, Bell Labs was a free-wheeling place where, for instance, engineers invited experimental musicians in the 1950s to work with them to explore acoustics. One product from this interdisciplinary approach to technology research was the first computer music program written by Bell Labs Director of Acoustic and Behavioral Research Max Mathews in 1957. James Tenney, an avant-garde composer who lived in the Village, was an artist-in-residence at Bell Labs in the early ‘60s.

Creating a Culture of Collaboration: Boundary Objects and Trading Zones

“Because artists and engineers had no common ground in these early discussions, communication was difficult. The engineers rejected many if not most of the artists’ proposals as unfeasible. Artists, on the other hand, found it difficult to work within a situation with such distinct parameters. As a solution, Rauschenberg suggested collaboration on a one-to-one basis, each artist and engineer having an equal responsibility. During the summer of 1966, this one-to-one collaboration was adopted as a working principle….Perhaps the most important function of ‘9 Evenings’ was to define the nature and basis of a collaboration, and to acquaint artists and engineers with new ways of thinking; involving areas in which the practical and the creative would interact. ‘9 Evenings,’ in other words, defined the problems rather than providing any solutions…Above all, it illustrated the enormous complexity of integrating diverse kinds of specialized thinking.” [5]

The artists and engineers involved in the “9 Evenings” event were clear from the start that they wanted to make the collaborative process their mode of operation. Both groups knew the importance of sharing and bringing together different views and talents from the experimental nature of their work in both the arts and applied sciences. Thus, they already shared a common culture of creative collaboration in their willingness to work with people who had very different skills, interests, and points of view, and in their cooperative approach to problem-solving and decision-making.

How did their collaborations actually work? It is possible to trace their collaborative trajectory through the series of meetings and conversations beginning at Rauschenberg’s studio on January 14th, 1966 to the October event. Some key realizations during that time period reveal aspects of the collaboration that can be isolated and defined. For example, at the initial meeting, Klüver wrote that, like shy teenagers at a dance, “everyone seemed to be scared of everyone else. Nobody knew quite what to say until one of the engineers suggested to another: ‘Let’s tell them about something they can use.’…and the ice was broken.” [6] He later wrote “the minute it came down to the hardware, it was working. It’s like a triangle between the scientists and the artists and the hardware. The main thing is to establish a working relationship and the hardware is the basis for this.” [1]

In Fred Turner’s book about Stewart Brand, where he traces the history of scientific collaboration in WWII, he references a 1989 study of Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology by science sociologists Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer. In it, they describe how people from different subcultures in the museum (patrons, scientists, students, etc.) were able to collaborate and yet “retain their individual allegiances to their fields of origin in part through the creation and circulation of ‘boundary objects.’” [7] They defined boundary objects as “…those scientific objects which both inhabit several intersecting social worlds and satisfy the informational requirements of each.… They have different meanings in different social worlds but their structure is common enough to more than one world to make them recognizable means of translation. The creation and management of boundary objects is key in developing and maintaining coherence across intersecting social worlds.” [8]

“Boundary objects” represent the technologies such as wireless sensors or infrared video that helped the engineers and artists get past their initial shyness and inability to communicate. Thus, the technological “boundary objects” enabled the artists and engineers to begin to “break the ice” between their two worlds of art and science. As pieces of hardware, they were understandable to both groups but meant different things. To the artists, they were strange devices that helped generate ideas; to the engineers, they were familiar tools they had created.

Through the subsequent collaborations between each paired artist and engineer, the artists also began to learn more about the underlying processes and physical limitations behind the technologies, and they also got to know the engineers. The engineers, in turn, learned how artists think and they discovered new ways of working and new applications for their tools they never imagined. “9 Evenings” dancer Alex Hay is quoted in Norma Loewen’s 1975 Ph.D. dissertation about E.A.T as saying, “Talking to the engineers about what was available, feeling responsible not only to oneself but now also to the engineers, one began to think about it in almost engineering terms, the ideas having to be concrete before any equipment could be started.” [9] Boundary objects enabled both subcultures to translate and communicate ideas as well as develop a shared empathy for each other’s worlds.

Another example of a boundary object is Bell Labs engineer Herb Schneider’s use of schematic diagrams to visualize the technological systems underlying each performance. Schneider was called into the project just a month before the performances, when the artists and engineers were having trouble communicating and getting things to work. As he explained in a recent interview, “there were problems instigating an overall system of organizing and aligning the technical and artistic aspects.” He immediately realized “we needed a standardized approach to each of the pieces, consequently the most important aspect of my role became talking to the artists in order to pin down their ideas from the technical end; to put their ideas in a form the engineers could use to realize those ideas. It was essential to get a feeling for what they wanted to present and to be able to describe it in technical detail.” [10] Schneider was then able to translate the artist’s ideas into a symbolic language understood by the engineers.

E.A.T. historian Clarisse Bardiot also describes these “boundary objects” (without using the term) in her recent “9 Evenings” research published on the Langlois Foundation website: “The diagrams made it possible…not only to work out the details of each artist’s project, but also to communicate effectively with the engineers to ensure a better coordination of the technical aspects….The diagrams were the tool that enabled both the artists and the engineers to articulate their ideas, the bridge half-way between their respective worlds. This explains why they are not precise technical drawings: the electronic components are shown with little or no details, there is no mention of the type of electrical current used, and so on. They represent, in fact, an assembly of small, attached black boxes…” [11]

Using technological devices and diagrams as boundary objects to build a bridge of understanding and empathy between the artists and engineers enabled the two groups to work and communicate in a new way that reached beyond written language or spoken conversation. They were working in what science historian Peter Galison calls a “Trading Zone”, a space, as Turner defines it in his book, “where representatives of multiple disciplines come together to work and, as they do, establish contact languages for purposes of collaboration.” [7] As in physics, the “9 Evenings” artists and engineers had different identities and practices, yet they managed to work together in their trading zone once they had developed their boundary objects that served as symbolic translation mechanisms for transforming ideas into action.

E.A.T. as Network Forum

“Engineers are becoming aware of their crucial role in changing the human environment. Engineers who have become involved with artist’s projects have perceived how the artist’s insight can influence his directions and give human scale to his work. The artist in turn desires to create within the technological world in order to satisfy the traditional involvement of the artist with the relevant forces shaping society. The collaboration of artist and engineer emerges as a revolutionary contemporary sociological process. Initially, a successful working relationship between artists and engineers will require that each operate freely within his own environment. The function of E.A.T. is to create an intersection of these environments.” [12]

The “9 Evenings” event was the culmination of an intentional experiment in creative collaboration between ten artists who had been working together for many years and engineers who mostly had never met the artists or seen their work. Although judged a failure by most journalists and art critics at that time, it is now seen as a watershed event that introduced the idea of bringing the worlds of engineering and art together. Avant-garde artists from an insular urban village consciously reached beyond their world to communicate and create something bigger. And engineers working in a rarefied technology research laboratory spent their nights and weekends trying to adapt new technologies to do things like turn off lights in an auditorium when a tennis ball was hit by a racket. They were all driven by a common set of values to create humane uses for new technologies through collaboration, and their brave experiment quickly resonated throughout the international art and engineering worlds via the press and a short film produced and circulated by E.A.T.

Just a month before the “9 Evenings” event, several of the key artists and engineers formed an organization they called Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in order to support the growing need for artists to access technology through collaborations with scientists and engineers. E.A.T. established an office in New York City and began to raise money to take on large collaborative projects such as redesigning the Pepsi Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Osaka, Japan in 1970. Through extensive media coverage and international social networks of artists and engineers, E.A.T. grew quickly into a network of local chapters that spanned the U.S., Canada, and many other countries. By 1969, the group had over 2,000 artist members and 2,000 engineer members willing to work with artists.

The subsequent formation of E.A.T. as a global platform for encouraging communication between artists and engineers exemplifies how new collaborative practices have emerged in the late 20th century. Turner invented the term “Network Forum” for this new kind of collaborative space, describing Stewart Brand’s connecting of countercultural and cybercultural practices as “a place where members of these communities came together, exchanged ideas and legitimacy, and in the process synthesized new intellectual frameworks and new social networks.” As Turner explains, “A network forum displays properties of both the trading zone and the boundary object. Like the boundary object, it can be a media formation such as a catalog … around or within which individuals can gather and collaborate without relinquishing their attachment to their home networks. But like the trading zone, it is also a place within which new networks can be built, not only for social purposes, but for the purpose of accomplishing work…Think tanks, conferences, … can serve as forums in which one or more entrepreneurs gather members of multiple networks, allow them to communicate and collaborate, and so facilitate the formation of both new networks and new contact languages.” [7]

Conclusion

E.A.T. was intentionally established as a catalyst for linking together localized artists’ and engineers’ networks of people and resources that was based on the “9 Evenings” model of bringing two groups of artists and engineers together as a “forum” to accomplish the goal of creating art using new technologies. Turner also reminds us that the “9 Evenings” and E.A.T. occurred during a time of transformational change in both the traditional art world and the scientific community, when age-old categories, ideas and practices were being rejected for new, more holistic and interdisciplinary approaches to creative experimentation and art making. The artworks of the early 1960s, in the forms of multi-media performances, light shows, and happenings, were a new form of group consciousness-raising, uniting the audience and the artists in an immersive environment of light, sound, images and motion that prefigured virtual reality and electronic games. These new forms of collective practices also portend a shifting paradigm in our worldview towards the higher-level consciousness of collective intelligence that can now be facilitated even more ubiquitously by wireless communications technologies. The artists and engineers who founded E.A.T. pioneered and practiced a collaborative process forty years ago that is just now being widely adopted in the worlds of business, education, and the arts in order to succeed in a post-9/11 world of rapid innovation, constant change, and economic uncertainty unprecedented in human history.

1.	Kluver, B. and S.W., E.A.T. Theater and Engineering: An Experiment in Artforum. 1967.

2.	Snow, C.P., The Two Cultures: and A Second Look. 1965, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge at the University Press. 107.

3.	Davis, D., Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration Between Science, Technology and Art. 1973, New York: Praeger Publishers.

4.	Banes, S., Greenwich Village 1963: Avant-Garde Performances and the Effervescent Body. 1993, Durham and London: Duke University Press. 308.

5.	Kluver, B., Julie Martin and Barbara Rose, Pavilion by Experiments in Art and Technology. 1972, New York: E. P. Dutton and Co.

6.	E.A.T., 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering (catalog). 1966.

7.	Turner, F., From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. 2006, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

8.	Star, S.L.and G., James R., Institutional Ecology, "Translations," and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley's Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39, in The Science Studies Reader, M. Biaglioli, Editor. 1999, Routledge: New York and London. p. 505-524.

9.	Loewen, N., Experiments in Art and Technology: A Descriptive History of the Organization. 1975, New York University: New York. p. 417.

10.	Morris, C., 9 Evenings: An Experimental Proposition (Allowing for Discontinuities), in 9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre and Engineering: 1966, C. Morris, Editor. 2006, MIT List Visual Arts Center: Cambridge, MA. p. 9-20.

11.	Bardiotte, C. 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. [website] 2006 [cited 2006; Available from: http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/9evenings/

12.	Kluver, B.and R.R., The Purpose of E.A.T. E.A.T. News, 1967. 1(2): p. 1.