The Experiments in Art and Technology Datascape

Résumé 0

The Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) organization was set up in 1966 by the artistsRobert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, in association with the engineers Billy Klüver and FredWaldhauer. Its purpose was to facilitate collaboration between artists, engineers, and scientists byproducing art systems and projects outside the art sphere in a strictly defined sense. Between 1966 and1970, E.A.T. was thus at the root of more than 600 joint projects1 in the United States and abroad, most ofwhich, rightly or wrongly, are largely unknown.Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, the organization’s last two directors, undertook the task ofarchiving their activities in a particularly conscientious way, classifying and preserving a collection ofdocuments related to the production of projects that were the organization’s brainchildren. They alsoworked toward developing these records, in particular through the making from the 1990s onward, ofdocumentary films using hitherto unpublished archival documents. This work was undoubtedly affectedby the emergence of a certain critical recognition by the art world, as gauged by the increase, in the2000s, of works made and exhibitions held by exhibition curators, researchers, and art critics.2Yet the partial use made of these archives makes it impossible to take the full measure of theorganization. In fact, it inadequately reflects both the diversity and the proliferation of the structure’sactivities, including its systems and methods, its exhibitions and shows, its lectures and, not least, itspublications—in other words, its complexity. The collaborative dimension of E.A.T.’s activities (oftenreduced to technical assistance schemes), of which the creation of systems is just the tip of the iceberg,adds to the problem. Elaborating a response to the seemingly simple question “What is E.A.T.?” thereforecalls for the availability and collective use of a great deal of information related to the organization’smany activities. Examined in this way, E.A.T. emerges as an exemplary case study for the burgeoningfields of digital humanities and design alike. Based on this case, it is actually possible to identify, withinareas of aesthetics, of art history and social art history, new, practical ways of making use of archives notonly by providing access to digitized resources, but also—especially—by focusing on the organization ofthese resources so as to provide answers to issues raised by the scholars engaged in these differentdisciplines and in the areas where they overlap.