Dorkbot:9 Time Travel

Robin Oppenheimer, “1960s Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) Histories; Billy Kluver and the “9 Evenings” Artists & Engineers Collaborations”: In the mid-twentieth century, artists of all genres (dancers, painters, sculptors, musicians) worked with many forms of new and “old” communications technologies – film, early video, computers, audio and radio electronics, etc. They found a champion in Billy Kluver, a Bell Labs engineer. His collaborations with Jean Tingley, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg in the early 1960s led to the 1966 “9 Evenings of Theatre and Engineering” event in New York City. Convinced there was a need for an information clearinghouse to make technical information and advice available and a service for arranging individual artist-engineer collaborations, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was then founded by a group of artists and engineers led by Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, Billy Kluver and Fred Waldhauer. With 28 chapters founded by regional artists and engineers across the U.S., E.A.T. represented a new vision in the late 1960s to expand the artist’s role in contemporary society and eliminate the separation of the individual from technological change. Seattle and Portland formed E.A.T. chapters that brought together local visual, media, and performing artists with engineers from Boeing and other regional technology companies in the summer of 1968.

Internationally-recognized, Seattle-based media arts consultant, curator, and historian Robin Oppenheimer will present clips from a video about Billy Kluver’s early work with artists and a documentary of Robert Rauschenberg’s “Open Score” 9 Evenings performance that includes archival footage and recent interviews with the artists and engineers involved. 

Doris Chase: Ms. Chase began her career as a painter and sculptor, then began collaborating with dancers, musicians, and filmmakers during this period. She was the principal E.A.T. artist in Seattle who understood the collaborative process and made the necessary connections to create new works like a dance piece that incorporated her large 3-dimensional sculptures as part of an opera for children (“Mantra”) and a computer-drawn series of circles that was transferred to film and colorized (“Circles”, see still above) by Seattle filmmakers Robert Brown and Frank Olvey, and set to music by Morton Subotnick. To create Circles, engineer William Fetter arranged for Chase to use the computer graphics software/hardware system he had been developing at the Boeing Company. ‘Circles’ was an artistic application of computer graphics programming accomplished with the assistance of Robert Tingley, who worked with Fetter at Boeing.

E.A.T. history websites: 
www.eatreunion.org (based on UW E.A.T. Reunion symposium Oct. 25/26 2002)
www.getty.edu/research/tools/special_collections/eat_m4.html 
www.fondation-langlois.org/e/projets/eat/index.html 
Fargo.itp.tsoa.nyu.edu/~jp685/FinalProject/FP_MainDirectory.html 
www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/timeline/Kluver.html 
www.btgjapan.org/links/003.html 
www.walkerart.org/gallery9/webwalker 
www.zakros.com/projects/eat/index.html 
www.conceptlab.com/interviews/kluver.html 
www.spectrum.ieee.org/select/0798/kluv.html#f3

Otis Fodder: In his first Seattle performance since his return from the Ideal Festival in Nantes, France (where he played with artists from Lydia Lunch to Sigue Sigue Sputnik in the The Bran Flakes), Comfort Stand Recordsfounder and hub of the local, national and international experimental music scenes, Otis Fodder, will dj exclusively-selected 60's rare ecclectica - from Moog to Lounge to soundtrack music and found sounds - from his incredible archives, and all strictly post-December 31st, 1959 and pre-January 1st, 1970. Find out more about the unparalleled Mr. Fodder at http://www.otisfodder.com 
 

Robin Oppenheimer is an internationally-recognized media arts consultant, curator, writer, historian, and educator who has worked in the field since 1980. She was the first Media-Arts-Historian-in-Residence at Bellevue Art Museum (2000-02), and co-produced with UW Art History Professor Patricia Failing an Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.) Reunion symposium at the UW on October 25-26, 2002 (www.eatreunion.org). As Manager of the Seattle Art Museum's Open Studio project (1997-2000), she oversaw Web production and literacy training for almost 60 Seattle artists and arts organizations. She is a former executive director of 911 Media Arts Center in Seattle (1989-95), and IMAGE Film/Video Center in Atlanta (1984-88), where she also directed the Atlanta Film & Video Festival.

Doris Chase: Doris Chase has been a working artist for over forty-five years. A native of Seattle, she studied architecture at the University of Washington, worked as a painter for fifteen years, then as a sculptor for a decade before entering the world of video. She moved to New York City in 1972, and presently works in New York and Seattle. Her sculptural installations and pioneering work in video are world-renown. Of her work in video, the New York Times notes, "Her work is at once delicate and massive...as visual experience, it is ravishing." Chase's newest work in glass and steel has shown at Friesen Gallery in Seattle and Sun Valley, Idaho. She has worked with architects, museum curators, filmmakers, actors, writers and dancers to develop commissioned projects for museums and public agencies. Her prolific career in the visual arts has made her a leading lecturer across the country. http://friesengallery.com/artists/bio/chase_bio.html