Presentation
This collection features over 500 documents that explore the activities of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) from 1965 to 1981. Included are reports, project descriptions, technical drawings, correspondence, invitations, exhibition catalogues, periodicals, reprints of articles, and photocopies of press clippings.
Founded in 1966 by Billy Klüver, Fred Waldhauer, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, E.A.T. was a non-profit group active primarily from the 1960s to the 1980s. Its aim: to mobilize the arts, industry and science around projects that involved participants from each field. E.A.T. promoted interdisciplinary collaborations through a program pairing artists and engineers. It also encouraged research into new means of expression at the crossroads of art and such emerging technologies as computer-generated images and sounds, video, synthetic materials and robotics. To complement these projects combining the talents of artists and engineers, E.A.T. organized educational activities to acquaint the public with telecommunication technologies like telewriting and satellite transmission. Other projects emulating international aid programs were devised to give developing countries access to community media. As of the mid-1970s, E.A.T. began opening chapters in the United States, Canada and Japan.
This collection, which Billy Klüver put together in 1981 to preserve E.A.T.'s heritage, is part of a limited edition of similar documentation collections accessible to researchers in documentation centres and specialized libraries in the United States, Canada and Australia. The E.A.T. archives are kept at the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles, California).
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Acquisition Information:
August 2000
Processing:
Vincent Bonin processed and cataloged the collection from January to March 2001. He wrote the biographical text on E.A.T. and the notes about the thematic subdivisions.
E.A.T. website:
On March 7, 2024, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) announced the launch of the E.A.T. website that documents the history of E.A.T. from Billy Klüver’s earliest collaborations with artists, through the organization’s formation and activities in the 1960s and 1970s, culminating with documentation of works by younger arts inspired by its history:
www.experimentsinartandtechnology.org