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Art and Engineering in the Space Industry

John Cage 9 Evenings Performance

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E.A.T 9 Evenings Performance
In day to day work it is common to be surrounded by teammates of the same kind as you, artists in an art studio, engineers in a large conglomerate. But something beautiful happens when these two worlds collide and are partners to envision and create something never seen before. If the environment is right, when art asks the impossible, engineers make it happen.

Art as a field has to ask the impossible, because few other disciplines are designated purely to demanding the imaginary, and to realizing the mystical and wonderful inner thoughts and emotions of humanity. Art ends up with this role and responsibility. Even the smallest seemingly dismissable art is a vision of someone’s desire and imagination. It could be criticism of the present, an attempt to subvert expectations, to garner a laugh, to invite skepticism, to usher tears, to walk away, somehow change a person’s individual future in experiencing it. And by changing an individual future, a piece of art is already well on its way to changing our collective future. And so it is. Art with a capital A does have the capacity to demand of the future change, and influence the vehicle for that change–our emotions.

Perhaps this is exactly what animated the creation of E.A.T (Experiments in Art and Technology) and motivated engineers Herb Schneider, Roby Robinson, Per Biorn, and Billy Klüver to collaborate with artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Lucinda Childs. The organization was the first of its kind to directly pair top artists and engineers in a 10 month project. Here, the group is pictured engaged in thoughtful examination of their work, the most complex theatrical brain of their time, the TEEM (Theatre Electronic Environmental Modulator) light and sound control system. It is an ambitious invention of wireless amplifiers, encoders, and decoders, all to serve nine peculiar performance art pieces in 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. It is technical rehearsal for the upcoming nights October 13-23, 1966 and the team looks determined but at ease. Surely they must be feeling pride in what seem impossible feats of engineering accomplished before them!

In the left center, the two artists Robert and Lucinda are the most informal and engaged, squatting barefoot on the stage leaning over the wired system and row of incandescent bulbs. Robert leans his weight on one foot, pants rolled up, grasping one of the plugs looking to test it in a new place. Lucinda looks at him smiling knowingly, about to say something. To her right, decoder unit engineer and system coordinator Roby also squats on stage with his arms folded and hand clutching a cigarette. He stares intently at the glowing light emanating from one of the bulbs. A successful sight that must have taken much of his time to accomplish. Leaning forward against the front ledge of the stage is another engineer Per, with one hand on his hip he smiles and questioningly looks up at Robert. Beside him, the founder of E.A.T Bell Lab’s Billy Klüver bookends one side of the group, arms crossed and smiling. On the other side, engineer and project facilitator Herb looks back at the group ready to offer direction when needed.

The men and woman are positioned like a nesting doll, inside the artists who dared to imagine, outside the minds that made it happen. This is a group that has come together to create something impossible from technology that seems primitive only today. From radio amplified tennis racket hits, to remote controlled mobile dance platforms, to oscilloscope music visualization projected for the first time large on the wall, to using light to control sound positioning in the room…the TEEM unit they surround is the brain that controls all the inputs and outputs for the projects that will be on display. Today, using off-the-shelf Arduino sensors to make interactive art is much more accessible, but in 1966 the transistor itself was just coming about! These are all very different people, from a radio operator, to a dancer, to a painter, to a semiconductor or mobile telephone researcher, yet all brought together by a shared vision to make these projects come to life. They are in harmony as a team standing in unison. And from the looks on their faces, there is a special atmosphere of common rebellion against the norm of their day jobs, a volunteer's dedication to something existentially important. Interviews at the time capture the sentiment: “immensely stimulating”, “fun!” The artists get the brains, and the engineers get the spirit.

For artists to be comfortable with asking the impossible, and engineers to be willing to make it happen, E.A.T was a special environment at a special time. They had the time and energy to be volunteers from industry, they were given funds and creative freedom, they had an interesting space in the giant and resonant Armory location in New York. When brought in by Herb Schneider for the project, artists were prompted to ask the engineers for anything they wanted, the most ambitious and interesting project they could think of. Many projects were formulated, and nine selected. But all nine stretched the engineers and their field in new ways. Ways that the engineers would not have had the circumstances to explore on their own.

Claiming that when art asks the impossible, engineers make it happen, we also imply the truth of other statements. That artists rely on engineers to make the impossible happen. And that when art doesn’t ask the impossible, engineers don’t have the impossible to make happen, so they are just left with the possible. And so society churns along making great incremental advancements, yet all within the same realm. Would engineers have been mobilized to land a man on the moon if they had not grown up in a backdrop of aspirational science fiction, and gorgeous imaginative space art?

Art without someone to be inspired and take action merely percollates and tickles the mind, but imagination that can be put into action is far more profound. Art needs engineers as much as engineers need artists. They are a yin to a yang. They are successful alone, sure, but together they accelerate innovation, changing the future much faster with new ideas that are realized. Nearly every comfort we have today was once seen as impossible, imagined by an artist, and executed by an engineer. Granted, it’s also entirely possible for those two types of thinking to exist in one person! Even so, collaboration is critical to challenging individual assumptions. To create the impossible we have to suspend our disbelief, and collaboration with contrasting types of people helps us get out of our usual ways of thinking. Both in the process of making these futuristic performances, and in the audience process of experiencing them, there was suspension of disbelief, they were transported into a world ahead of its time where sound was immersive and changing, where dancers glided on robots, and people could still be seen playing tennis without light.

Of course, hard things never go without a hitch, and the performance experienced setbacks and last minute fixes even on stage, yet the group embraced it, breaking convention and the “possible” of the medium of performance itself. In some, they invited the audience to participate, in others the performance moved around the audience itself. A singer was placed in a sack and carried around the audience for one of the pieces, and mobile audio platforms would change the soundscape of the room in another. The sensibilities of both disciplines made something purposeful and innovative, not just chaotic or random. And they kept pushing to achieve the vision of the artists, collaborating together.

Even the performers had to suspend their disbelief and just go for it. Many of the performances were improvised based on the technical framework. For example, John Cage set up a table with household appliances and contact microphones, each transmitting their sound to the room. The setup was their instrument, creating a novel soundscape the artists would serve to the audience like bartenders at a bar.

During the performance a crew mate walked up to adjust one of the thousand-Watt stage lights that back lit the sound-bar from below. He noticed John’s pants were smoldering at the edges!

“John, your pants are on fire!” he exclaimed.

John Cage, performing, replied: “Well isn’t that marvelous”

and just kept going.

The archival documentary of E.A.T remarks that people who attended that day may have been weirded out, regretting their decision then, strained to suspend disbelief at this impressive display, but now are extremely proud to be part of the select group that witnessed this historic collaboration.Artists are also tasked with asking the impossible, because it is only our imagination that is the conceptual limit of what we can create. Artists are not exclusively, but largely, societies keepers of imagination. On the other hand, engineers are not exclusively, but largely, societies keepers of the applied action necessary to realize these ideas. (Science then being the keepers of knowledge engineers draw upon and the line for artists between realistic and magical). Another way to frame this is labeling the qualities necessary for innovation as “hacker + imagination.” This is a framework we are taught at USC’s Iovine and Young Academy, a modern institution built upon the legacy of organizations like E.A.T.