BILLY KLüVER, PART III (III)

HUO: There were a number of American artists who had a grant to go to India.

BK: E.A.T.'s project of sending artists to India was to expand their vision. We did that with a dozen or so artists, like Trisha Brown, Jed Bark, Yvonne Rainer, Jeffrey Lew, LaMonte Young and Marian Zazeela. We had a grant from the JDR III Fund to ship them there, let them travel and do what they wanted, and then ship them back.

HUO: What did the artists do there?

BK: I have no idea (laughs). The idea wasn't to see what they did. Maybe they were sitting and drinking, I don't know. The point was not to create something. This was the inverse of the buffalo project.

"Bob Rauschenberg and I always said that if E.A.T. was successful it would automatically disappear, because once everybody understands the idea of artists and engineers working together there is no reason for E.A.T. to exist."

HUO: Another project we've not yet spoken about is the Automation House.

BK: Automation House was a building on East 68th street. Theodore Keel, a labor mediator who was involved of the impact of automation on workers, was on the Board of E.A.T. He invited us to have our office there. We held events and exhibitions there, but mainly we used it as office space.

HUO: So it was more like a platform from which you organized the activities.

BK: Yes.

HUO: Could one say that Experiments in Art and Technology acts as a trigger? A catalyst? Because a catalyst catalyzes something and then disappears, only to reappear to catalyze something else.

BK: Bob Rauschenberg and I always said that if E.A.T. was successful it would automatically disappear, because once everybody understands the idea of artists and engineers working together there is no reason for E.A.T. to exist.

JM: We did the Telex project from Automation House.

BK: That was in 1971. We did "Telex: Q and A" together with Pontus Hulten, who had an exhibition at Moderna Museet on the anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871, called "Utopia and Visions," and we had telex machines at the museum in Stockholm, at Automation House, at the Design Institute in Ahmedabad India, and at a large public center in Tokyo organized by Fujiko Nakaya for E.A.T.-Tokyo.

People in all four places could telex questions to all other places about what the world would look like in 1981. We gathered answers from both experts and the general public to all the questions and telexed the answers back. Everyone in all four places around the world answered the same questions, and anybody could ask a question to anybody else. And we got the answers to everybody else. This material has not been analyzed.

HUO: So that's a book to be done.

BK: For somebody.

HUO: What were the answers like?

BK: All different. The Indians were very theoretical. The Japanese were extremely positive.

HUO: Where did you send the telexes from?

Julie: We had a telex machine at Automation House. But heavy rains flooded the switching boxes. The only telex office that stayed open at night was on the ground floor of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, so we would we would go there at midnight and send telexes.

"For me personally, I believed that artists could have an influence on television and that it was a medium which artists could use. Not just as experimental television or video, but commercial television."

HUO: Can you tell me about the early projects of Artists and Television? In seems almost incredible that in the history of television there were so few projects accomplished where artists can do TV. Usually TV broadcasts about art but there are very few TV exhibitions. In Germany there is Gary Schume in the late 60s early 70s.

BK: For me personally, I believed that artists could have an influence on television and that it was a medium which artists could use. Not just as experimental television or video, but commercial television. I wanted artists to be involved with broadcast television and with the realities of broadcast television. And when cable television came to New York in the eary 1970s, it seemed to make this a possibility.

BK: I even testified before the FCC on the importance of artists having access to cable channels. Then we did have a headend at Automation House to originate programming for cable and that was the most interesting part. You could actually feed programs onto the cable public access channels and the idea of Artists and Television was for artists generate programming and feed it into cable. We would have our own television network. As a beginning, we showed video tapes that artists had already made, Les Levine, Lucas Samaras, Richard Serra.

JM:One of the things E.A.T. did was to ask artists to make proposals to produce video tapes for broadcast on cable.

BK: Yes, we actually proposed producing artists' programs to the NEA directly but they turned it down. The idea is that there were great possibilities, and I think the reason a lot of it didn't happen is that anything like that has to somehow get the interest of enough people to become self-sustaining. I really don't know. Maybe the interest from the artist wasn't enough to carry it. I tend to believe that; an idea like that sounds terrific, but maybe the artists really don't want to get involved with television. Anyway, you try to open the door, and if they don't want to take advantage of the open door there is nothing you can do about it.

"We wanted to go one step farther by using simple technical equipment together with artists to record and make programs about culture that was being lost."

HUO: Another question about television: very early, in the late 1960's, you had ideas about cheaper, more flexible ways of producing television programs. It was in the context of the United Nations when you proposed that super-8 could be used for television. That seems like an incredibly interesting idea in today's context where this becomes reality with digital cameras and very cheap TV can be produced. Can you tell me about this pioneering idea of "do-it- yourself" television?

BK: It came from our experience in India and the "buffalo" project I talked about earlier. In El Salvador it had to do with preserving the culture. In 1972 the Division of Culture of The Ministry of Education in El Salvador, invited us to develop mobile broadcast television production equipment to travel around the country and record the culture and make programs for the educational channels. The idea is that you use inexpensive recording devices to preserve the local and indigenous culture which is disappearing all over the world. Culture programming is a matter of recording, hearing stories or what have you. We also worked in Guatemala.

We also proposed a project for the celebration of bicentennial of the United States in 1976, called U.S.A. PRESENTS, combining Super -8 production with satellite broadcasting capability in which we would provide Super-8 cameras to individuals and groups all over the United States who would make short 3 minute films of their life and activities which would then be sent to satellite uplink centers and be broadcast to dedicated VHF, UHF or cable channels on a 24-hour basis all year long.

Dr. Wilbur Schramm was the great guy at Stanford University who pioneered instructional television in developing countries. We wanted to go one step farther by using simple technical equipment together with artists to record and make programs about culture that was being lost. For example, one project was to record the Bhai women, a group of woman in Benares, India, like Geishas, who were disappearing. We tried to get funding from the Rockefeller Foundation to go there and simply film them, preserve their music and singing. Ideas like that.

HUO: It was really a presentiment of how now new television shows are invented at a very low cost; people like David d Heillys practices show that in the 90s everybody can do his or her own television program basically.

BK: Right. Then you get into more interesting questions which have to do with editing and how do you use television teach people, which is what Wilbur Schramm was involved with at Stanford. How do you actually present the material so that people actually learn from it.

"All these machines were there and the kids could use them any way they wanted -- type or write messages, send photographs or just talk on the telephone -- and make friends without ever meeting or seeing each other."

HUO: What about the children's projects you did? There are two or three of them, I think.

BK: The project was called "Children and Communication." We thought that children from one part of the city should know children from another part of the city without having to travel out of their own neighborhoods. Of course this could happen any two places between any two cultures, or the kids could be of the same culture with the same background. We collaborated with educational specialists from New York University to shape the project; and Robert Whitman built two environments, one at Automation House and one at Sixteenth Street connected with fax machines, telephones, machines that you could write with a pen on, telex machines. All these machines were there and the kids could use them any way they wanted -- type or write messages, send photographs or just talk on the telephone -- and make friends without ever meeting or seeing each other.

HUO: This sounds like a sketch for connected schools ages before the emergence of the internet!!!!! It is another presentiment.

HUO: Was this published somewhere?

BK: No. Very little has been published. There has been one Ph.D. thesis in the 1970s and now Susan Hillman is working on a thesis on E.A.T.

"I have always thought that museums should have an engineer as a technical curator in charge of pieces with technology, on the level of the other curators."

HUO: I would also like to ask about your relationship to museums. Throughout the 60s you have been very strongly involved with the Moderna Museet in Stockholm...if you could tell me about this and also about your relationship to American museums. It seems that museums are more and more embracing the technological concepts in art, but I can imagine that in the sixties or seventies there was some resistance to these concepts or forms.

BK: There probably isn't a museum in any city I have been in where I haven't been in the cellar or somewhere in the storage place crawling around on the floor. I find it very easy to work in museums; I never find any problem. You have to get the work done. The opening happens and when it happens you have to be ready and everything has to be clean and the labels have to be on the wall. There are always people who are willing to help you if you need it.

There has always been some difficulty doing technical work in a non-technical environment, like a museum. In a museum there is always time pressure and the curtain is going up, the show is going to open. And the works that incorporate technology often fall outside the expertiese of many curators. I have heard this from many artists -- that the curators would be up in arms against technological works because they can't handle them -- it's too complicated, too difficult.

A new generation of curators has to learn how to deal with these works, and that's going to be a challenge, because curators can't really be engineers. At Beaubourg Paris, for instance, they have very good technical guy, Alain Peron, who works freelance with the museum. The Menil Collection in Houston also has an excellent person. I have always thought that museums should have an engineer as a technical curator in charge of pieces with technology, on the level of the other curators. Or perhaps museums you will develop people from the outside who can consult so to speak.

"I don't see the museum as a producer of pieces. But they have a responsibility to show, maintain and conserve work that incorporates new technology."

HUO: Besides the Moderna Museet, have you worked with American museums in the production of works or have they been a place where the completed pieces have been exhibited. Can the museum be a producer of such things?

BK: I don't see the museum as a producer of pieces. But they have a responsibility to show, maintain and conserve work that incorporates new technology.

August 3, 1998