BILLY KLÜVER, PART II (III)

"I mean there is nothing mysterious about this whole process of matching artists and engineers."

HUO: Did Experiments in Art and Technology have a board of directors, or a team of artists and scientists acting as advisers?

BK: Of course, we had to have a board of directors. Rauschenberg was Chairman of the Board and I was president. And we assembled what we called a Council of Agents, individuals from industry, labor, politics, the technical community and the art community who would help us in our projects and activities.

HUO: How did you concretely proceed in order to have these hybrid teams of artists and engineers collaborating on projects?

BK: I mean there is nothing mysterious about this whole process of matching artists and engineers. There are some things we avoided with E.A.T. We never codified the artist- engineer collaboration in a building or in a separate laboratory environment. That might have helped industry and engineers understand what we were talking about, it could help to educate them. On the other hand when you codify a process like this you turn away artists and turn away creativity. We decided to concentrate on the collaboration between individuals. The artists would work with engineers who were full time in their profession and the industry support would come for these collaborations.

We did not focus exclusively on placing artists in industry. Of course for E.A.T. the backing of the industry was very important. The engineers themselves chose to work on projects with artists that interested them but also we needed recognition from the companies they worked for. And that recognition comes easier today. When we worked with Sennheiser to use their wireless microphones in the upgrade of Oracle this year, the company immediately wrote it up in their newsletter.

As for matchings, we decided that E.A.T. would help everybody. But of course, some projects are more serious than others. Nowadays when people call me it's very easy to separate out the serious artists by a couple of questions. First I ask them "How big is it?" and then they say "well maybe it can be big or it can be small". So I say "is it inside or outside?" And they say "well it can be inside or it can be outside", and then I say "How many people are going to see it, two people or two hundred?" "Well, any number of people can see it..." Then I know that the person doesn't know what they're thinking about, and although I give them technical advice on what to do, I know the project will just slide.

"If I had been really involved in the philosophy, I wouldn't have been able to understand that an engineer had to be an engineer and the artist had to be an artist."

HUO: Are such collaborations between an artist and a scientist predictable?

BK: Of course not; it's totally unpredictable. You never know.

HUO: Everything can happen because nothing has to happen.....

BK: One thing that is predictable is when you are doing something that is new or different, you have to wait: wait for the artist to decide something, wait for a piece of equipment to be built, wait in line to buy a part. You have to ready for this kind of waiting. Then something will happen.

HUO: I have observed that there have been lots of discussion panels and conferences recently in Europe about Art and Science and the outcome has never been really fruitful. And people don't really exchange, everybody just has his or her discourse. We have organized this Art and Brain conference, everything was meticulously planned to not have the conference. The event consisted of coffee breaks.

BK: At Bell laboratories everybody always said that the things happened by meeting somebody in the hallway or at ten o'clock at night somewhere.

"Just listening to Bob Rauschenberg talking about or responding to some of these philosophical ideas, I realized how stupid they were, how ridiculous. It did not have anything to do with what he was doing."

JM (Julie Martin): John Cage summed up the operating idea of E.A.T. when he said, "It's not about artists and engineers talking; it's about hands on, working together".

BK: Yes, the whole philosophy is hands on. It is not about talking. I mean everybody goes out afterwards to have a beer, but first you have to work. As far as the philosophy behind art and science I've gone through it, but it never interested me deeply. If I had been really involved in the philosophy, I wouldn't have been able to understand that an engineer had to be an engineer and the artist had to be an artist. Just listening to Bob Rauschenberg talking about or responding to some of these philosophical ideas, I realized how stupid they were, how ridiculous. It did not have anything to do with what he was doing.

HUO: Could you tell me about the Nehru Foundation project in the late 1960's? The projects in India.

BK: In the late 1960's we got interested in multidisciplinary porjects where the artists could work on a broader social level, outside of purely making art.

In late 1968, Pepsi-Cola asked E.A.T. to design and program a Pavilion for Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan. The original four artists who began the collaborative design of the pavilion were Robert Breer, Robert Whitman, Frosty Myers and David Tudor. As the design of the Pavilion developed, engineers and other artists were added to the project and given responsibility to develop specific elements. All in all 63 engineers, artists and scientists in the United States and Japan contributed to the design of the Pavilion.

So for almost two years we were going back and forth to Japan and had to stop somewhere, so we ended up stopping in India. And, way back in Sweden before I came to the USA I was interested in instructional television, and actually made a film on the Motion of Electrons. The United States was putting an experimental satellite over India, ATS-6, which would be used for educational purposes, so that there could be instructional television programming broadcast direct to the thousands of villages in the countryside. And we met Vikram Sarabhai, who was head of the Indian Atomic Energy Commission, which was responsible for the satellite project. He invited E.A.T. to organize a group of people to make a proposal on how to generate instructional programming for the satellite system. And that is how we ended up in Delhi and Bombay proposing what is now known as the SITE project.

Our group included educational specialists, engineers and an artist, and the subject in this case was about women who owned the milk producing buffaloes at Anand dairy cooperative in Baroda, in Gujurat state. The buffaloes die because they were underfed or the lactation was wrong, or something else would go wrong. The women had to understand the basics so that the buffaloes would survive and provide the maximum milk and wouldn't be slaughtered and sold to Bombay.

We proposed to use half-inch video tape to record what the women actually did with the buffaloes, then take that material and go back to the studio, make a program and then take it back to the villages for testing. This sort of feedback and local involvement with the technology was possible with the new video technology. The people in Bombay and Delhi said "you can't do that" because in those days they had two-inch tape and big air-conditioned studios in Bombay and Delhi and that's where everything was supposed to happen. And nobody learns anything.

The professional television people in Delhi did not think that you could give a camera to a peasant. We knew it was essential in order to find out what they were actually doing with the buffaloes and what the visual clues were that can feed into educational programs. How can somebody who comes from Delhi know about a village thousands of miles away? What we did was to introduce the notion of local aspects of production.

We met the same attitudes in El Salvador where we were invited to devise ways of recording indigenous culture for the educational channels there. These half-inch Sony cameras had recently come on the market. They were heavy, but still you could go out in field with them.

"Whitman describes it perfectly that the artist is the professional who carries with him the least cultural baggage or preconceptions. And this is the kind of openness and responsiveness you want if you end up in that small village in India."

HUO: In how far was this linked to artists?

BK: It was the artist's idea to make full use of 1/2 inch video technology to make what we called "visual research notes" and build educational programming up from local input in the process.

JM: Robert Whitman was part of the team. The whole idea was that artist can be active in projects outside art, in other areas of society.

HUO: Art as an applicable model?

BK: No. Artists as thinkers, as a brain. Whitman describes it perfectly that the artist is the professional who carries with him the least cultural baggage or preconceptions. And this is the kind of openness and responsiveness you want if you end up in that small village in India. That's the whole point. It had nothing to do with any kind of artistic endeavor. In the non-art projects that E.A.T. undertook, at least one artist was part of the interdisciplinary team and we put a high value on the expertise the artist brought to the project.