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• 1 2022-05-10T00:01:50-07:00 Engineer Artists of the E.A.T Era 27 plain 2023-08-07T17:20:28-07:00

  To show how the space industy in particular was a catalyst for the arts and technology movement, look no further than the examples of Frank Malina and Frederick Eversley in the era of E.A.T - Experiments In Art and Technology. E.A.T, founded by Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver was a mass scale collaborative organization that brought together artist with engineers and industry. Exposing artists to new technology and engineers to something interesting beyond thier day to day jobs. Thier mantra was that the experiment and founding purpose was to investigate the process of artist-engineer collaborations and had nothing to about making "good" art. The group is famous for the creation of 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering as well as the Pespi Pavillion for the Word's Fair. Around this growing non-profit, although not nessesarity participating in, emerged many major players in embodying Art and Technology, specifically participating from the aerospace industry, which I will continue to expand upon. For now, I will mention Frank Malina and Frederick Eversley. 

  Frank Malina - Rocket Engineer Turned Artist

  “Creativeness in art does not appear . . . to differ in kind from creativeness in science or any other human activity”
  —Frank Malina

  "In February 1953, when Frank Malina sat down to write his parents, there were many things he could have told them. The American-born rocket engineer could have mentioned the frustration he felt because the US State Department—acting on evidence the FBI had collected after more than a decade of surveillance—refused to renew his passport. Or the forty-one-year-old research engineer might have lamented how the American government’s harassment had provoked his resignation as the scientific director of a United Nations-sponsored humanitarian organization. Maybe he could have written about his fears that the rocket technologies he helped invent were launching the Cold War arms race into dangerous new territory. But Frank Malina discussed none of this in the letter he mailed off to his hometown in rural Texas. Instead, he announced that he was going to become an artist." - Making Art Work: How Cold War Artists and Engineers Forged a New Creative Culture by Patrick McCray

  
  
  Frank Malina was born on October 2, 1912, in Brenham, Texas to Czech immigrants. His contributions to rocketry were as or even more significant than that likes of Robert Goddard (who has a whole NASA building named after him) or the controversial ex-Nazi Wernher von Braun, but "like a missile disappearing from view, Malina himself soon vanished from the world of practical rocketry and, almost, from histories of space exploration" (McCray).
  
  Early on, Malina's musician parents pushed him towards a career in music, however he instead pursued mechanical engineering at Texas A&M and then studying aeronatics at Cal Tech in Pasadena. Malina was mentored by Hungarian research engineer Theodore von Karman (who's last name now defines the edge of space--Karman Line). Malina was a confident intellectual specializing his doctoral studies on rocket engineering. He wrote on his dislike of capitalism, even joining Pasadena's Communist Party which placed him under the eye of the FBI and later in life got him stuck in Paris for answering "no" to if he was ever a member of such a party. Malina had a very successful career, he became the first director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and worked on Jet Assisted Take-off (JATO) engines. In 1942, he and a fellow engineers started Aerojet (today modern Aerojet Rockedyne) proving rockets were "practical and profitable." He continued working on rockets without sacrificing any moral integrity, putting a hard stop to any military applications by instead flying scientific instruments. In 1946-47 Malina was cemented as "the foremost expert on rocketry in the United States." As a founder, Malina made a life fortune from the stock which put him in a financially stable position his whole life. After the FBI raided his house, Malina moved to Paris and became director at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to "promote science and technology as an instrument for improving the material conditions of people around the world and reducing economic and industrial inequality so that future conflicts might prove less tempting." 
  
  Malina was engaged early on in trying to understand art's context in science. He used to debate his friend and graphic designer Alvin Lustig. 

  [Malina] noted how he and Lustic were “struggling with the basic ideas of art and science” before finding some “common ground for both activities.” As Malina described it to Liljan, this common ground centered on “the individual judgment of ‘inherent rightness’ for pioneering steps taken in the direction of undiscovered reality.” In art as well as science, breaking new creative ground, they concluded, required courage, which came primarily from a sense of intuition honed by experience. (McCray)

  After quitting UNESCO, Malina leaned into his interest in art with his particular flavor of engineering. He played with abstract forms and experimented with color and line. Malina perfed the term “non-figurative” musing that “these abstract things are of use to an artist from a technical point of view, the way mathematics is to an engineer.” 
  
  While experimenting with moire patterns with layers of wire mesh, he was frustrated that his experiments had not yielded anything particularly novel. Then, a literal lightbulb turned on as he placed light behind these meshes, and by shifting and turning the meshes was able to create a kinetic light show. 

  “[I] saw a new world,” [Malina] told one art writer, and experienced the “ecstasy that one experiences when making a personal discovery.”
  
   “My engineering training should have led me to make a search of the literature on the use of electric light,” he later wrote, “but I did nothing of the sort.” Instead, following the “common practice of artists,” Malina “blundered ahead” to “repeat the errors” and “miss the contributions” other artists had made. (McCray)

  
  
  Malina went on to become famous what he patented as "lumidyne" and made dozens in his lifetime. His experience gave him the realization that artists, unlike engineers, do not have a professional journal to share discoveries and contribute to a common body of literature. He founded the journal Leonardo in 1968, which addressed his concern that  "'artists are generally mute' when it comes to describing their own work, this task instead fell to a “separate class of verbalists” (such as art critics) to explain what the artist did and how it was accomplished."
  
  

  Malina remained convinced that art could have utility beyond the personal response it stimulated in viewers. Malina imagined art (and, more broadly, aesthetics) could provide something familiar from his first career as an engineering researcher: predictive power. Might not it be possible, after sufficiently rigorous experimentation, to develop a theory of aesthetics “capable of predicting into the future the effect a work of art will have on people?” Art, in other words, could benefit the research of perceptual psychologists and other professionals. 
   

  Malina visited Albert Michotte, a Belgian experimental psychologist. Malina was surprised to find a machine in Michotte’s lab whose basic principles resembled a lumidyne. Michotte’s simple instrument used a moving piece of paper on which he had drawn designs. This rotated in front of a stationary piece of paper that had designs cut out of it. Michotte used it to study the perceptual reactions of patients as the two parts moved relative to one another. This and other devices Malina learned of where light, motion, color, and even sound were integrated fostered his interest in how art, aesthetics, and psychology might speak to one another. (McCray)

  In 1965 Malina began work on his biggest lumidyne yet, Cosmos, prompted by his idea that 

  The technological advances of the Space Age [...] challenged modern artists to “find some aesthetic significance” in them.

  
  Today, his journal Leonardo still exists, continuing to host articles about art and technology partnerships around the world. Thier website touts:

  Leonardo/ISAST continues to identify new avenues to serve the art, science and technology community. Recognizing that the critical global challenges of the 21st century require the mobilization and cross-fertilization of practitioners in the fields of the arts, sciences and technology, Leonardo/ISAST fosters collaborative explorations, both nationally and internationally, resulting in interdisciplinary projects, meetings and events, while disseminating and documenting the most creative and promising ideas of our time. After 50 years, the organization continues to evolve alongside the work and ideas of the artists, scientists, researchers, scholars and practitioners that together form the Leonardo Network.

  Looking through the journal, one such article in 2004 was titled Art in the Space Age: Exploring the Relationship between Outer Space and Earth Space. Author Takuro Osaka goes over many important fine art projects sent to space and at the end cited an exciting proposal for using Earth viewing as a diplomacy tool.

  The “Uses of the ISS for the Humanities” conference was held at the Kyoto International Institute of Advanced Studies in Japan in 2001 [17]. Scientists and thinkers attended, and artists were invited as observers. At the conference, the following proposal was adopted: 

  Expecting new morals and possible results of peace, the leaders of developing countries, of countries involved in conflicts, and of developed countries may gather in ISS to hold an ISS Universal Peace Summit where the earth is viewed from the outside. If this proposal is realized, it will be the ISS’s great achievement in the sense of a peace-making contribution to humanity. The ISS will be a star of hope that brings peace to humankind.

  This significant proposal has science and technology as its background. Science has explained the mechanism of the world to us; technology has helped us to open the world; art has continued to question how we can live in this opened world. Is it not due to the methods of our actions that we have reached our current position in the world? This also gives great significance to art in the space age.

  While writing on this topic, I thought I would stay away from explorations of fine art, and instead focus solely on design oriented professions. However, it seems that in the greatest contrast can come the most interesting innovations. Fine art doesn't have the same explicit utility as a habitability designer making an astronaut more comfortable and thus better able to perform thier job. Fine art is more akin to the experimentation process in science. You might have a hypothesis of how something might look, you "courageously" try it and see how it turns out. Malina contributed to the art world his perspective as an engineer, recognizing that artists have the untapped potential to speak for themselves and document thier findings just as a scientist/engineers would do. Beyond that, he also searched for utility and "predictive power" in art, finding it in 
   

  Frederick Eversley

  
  
  Another notable space industry engineer with an artistic bent was Frederick Eversley. Born in 1941 he was a senior instrumentation systems project engineer at NASA. He was also a Light and Space artist who became Smithsonian's artist-in-residence in 1977. He was a part of the "finish fetish" movement, a "decorative approach to minimalism" which took cues from the "synthetic materials and mechanized surfaces of hot rods, surfboards, and the aerospace industry"
  
  
  
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  This section drew greatly from the fascinating book Making Art Work: How Cold War Artists and Engineers Forged a New Creative Culture by Patrick McCray. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in the history of Art & Technology collaborations and education in United States. 
  You can view an interview with him where he summarizes some of the points in his book here: